Covid

Is the inflation panic over? Probably not

So, is the post-Covid inflation panic over? That is how it looked last month, when the government’s preferred inflation index, CPIH, fell to 2.1 per cent from 2.4 per cent a month earlier. We will have the latest news on Wednesday morning, but for the moment it appears that consumer prices inflation hasn’t taken off like we feared. It is a similar story in the US, where inflation fell back from 5.6 per cent in July to 5.3 per cent in August. The fact that house prices have risen so strongly throughout the deepest recession in modern times ought to be a warning sign Yet there are good reasons to suspect that the summer

Covid pingdemic takes its toll on Britain’s economic bounce-back

The arrival of ‘freedom day’ on 19 July enabled people to return to concerts, festivals, and ditch social distancing, but these rediscovered freedoms did not revive the economy. The ONS said this morning that growth was just 0.1 per cent in July, far lower than the consensus forecast. It was particularly disappointing given the growth seen in the locked-down months of June (one per cent) and May (0.6 per cent). The Pingdemic – and concerns about the Delta variant – cancelled out any animal spirits around reopening. August’s GDP boost is going to need to be much stronger for the more bullish forecasts to pan out Nightclubs reopened and the entertainment

Why didn’t Tory MPs oppose Boris’s tax hike?

Boris Johnson has just announced his plans to increase National Insurance by 1.25 per cent for both workers and employers to fund extra spending on the NHS and social care. Johnson framed the measure as necessary to deal with the backlog that had built up during Covid. He claimed that without action hospital waiting lists would reach 13 million. He said that he didn’t break his manifesto promise lightly but that a ‘global pandemic was in no one’s manifesto’.  Of course, the problem with this argument is that the tax promise, as well as the commitment that no one would have to sell their house to pay for social care,

Why isn’t the vaccine approved for 12- to 15-year-olds?

This afternoon, the JCVI has essentially passed the buck on vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds. It has declared that the health benefits of a vaccine for this age group are ‘marginally greater’ than the risks of Covid. But it has left the decision on whether to actually vaccinate them to the chief medical officers. It would surely have been better for the committee to have made a decision one way or the other In the past few weeks, tensions between ministers and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation have been rising. Ministers are keen to get on with an autumn booster shots campaign for the elderly and to vaccinate more school children.

Should Britain brace itself for a major flu outbreak this winter?

Could flu be a bigger problem than Covid this winter? Professor Anthony Harnden, the deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, has warned that it might be, suggesting that the low prevalence of flu over recent months could come back to ‘bite us’ as the weather worsens. There are also fears that reduced levels of flu in recent months could make it much harder to develop a successful jab. In a normal year, the route to a flu vaccine is well trodden. The annual flu vaccination programme first began in England in the 1960s, and since 2000, all over 65s have been offered the jab every year. Healthy children have also

Can schools return without disruption?

A lot of people won’t want to take much notice of Mary Bousted, joint-general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), who warns today that schools face significant disruption by the end of September as Covid-prevention measures have to be reintroduced. It was the NEU, after all, which not only opposed the return of schools after the first lockdown, but simultaneously advised its members not to take part in online lessons either. The NEU has often given the impression of being motivated first and foremost by a desire to obstruct the government’s plans. Sir Patrick Vallance’s original verdict on the virus – that it is not possible to stop it

Gavin Mortimer

Afghanistan could fatally undermine Macron’s election strategy

To nobody’s great surprise, France’s Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, announced last week that the Covid Passport may have to be extended beyond 15 November – the initial expiry date of the government’s controversial measure, first introduced in July. I’ll hazard a guess that come April 2022 the French will still have to show their passport to enter cafes, shopping centres, sports clubs and cinemas. April, of course, is the date of the presidential election and Emmanuel Macron is banking on his response to Covid helping him to secure a second term. His belief is that the electorate, particularly the over-50s, will be reluctant to change presidents in the midst of a

The NHS blood tube shortage should concern us

One of the great lessons from the early stages of the pandemic was the need to shorten supply chains and make them more robust. This was especially true for medical supplies. Just-in-time supply chains have been developed over the years to increase efficiency, but had never been tested in a global crisis when demand for certain medical products is high and supply is weak. The government ended up paying huge sums for PPE which, in some cases, was not even suitable for use. The shortage raises eyebrows because a plastic tube is, after all, a plastic tube It seems the lesson has not entirely been learned. There is now a shortage of

Natural immunity is stronger than vaccination, study suggests

At times this summer, the government has been accused of fighting Covid-19 with an undeclared strategy that concentrates on vaccinating the old while allowing the young to build up herd immunity. The effort that the government has put into persuading young people to have the vaccine suggests this is more conspiracy theory than reality. Nevertheless, might it be a good strategy? The preprint of a yet-to-be-published Israeli study comparing the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine with immunity gained through natural infection suggests that the latter may be more effective and longer-lasting. Double-jabbed, previously uninfected people are 13 times as likely to get Covid compared with the naturally immune The team,

Is Japan about to enter a ‘London-style lockdown’?

Just like the Olympics, which ended a fortnight ago, the Paralympics is set to commence amid a drumbeat of doom. Japan appears to be in the middle of a Covid renaissance, with around 5,000 new cases a day in Tokyo. The games will take place, like the Olympics, in a ‘state of emergency’ that now covers 84 per cent of the country. But how serious is the situation, and what exactly does 5,000 daily cases mean? Like much of the vaccinated world, the majority of the afflicted this time round appear to be younger people and overall deaths in Japan remain extremely low. It is at least as much a

Covid has exposed the flaws in the welfare state

Upheavals in welfare policy have historically followed major crises such as wars, civil unrest, recessions and pandemics – the Ministry of Health itself was established in 1919. The experience of the second world war led to the creation of the contemporary welfare state. If a course of action (a furlough scheme, say) is pursued in an emergency, we know it is possible. Keep the measure in place too long and it can swiftly become an accepted norm — and politically awkward to unwind. But those expecting a post-Covid reboot of the welfare system might be disappointed. Shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Reynolds talked a good talk on overhauling universal

Ross Clark

Boris Johnson’s Macron-esque pettiness

How we all hollered with outrage in May when Emmanuel Macron closed France’s borders to people arriving from Britain on the dubious basis that Britons, and Britons alone, were in danger of infecting France with the Indian variant. I believed, and I still believe, that Macron and his government were in part motivated by Brexit — it was part of our ongoing punishment for daring to vote to leave the EU. It certainly wasn’t justified on scientific grounds: if Briton had more recorded Indian variant (or Delta) cases than other European countries at the time it was largely thanks to more samples of Covid being sequenced here. Some countries, France

Five lowlights from Australia’s Covid fight

At the end of last year, Australia was lauded for its success in containing Covid-19. The country’s borders had been quickly closed; interstate travel restricted and resources diverted to tracking down cases. In the deluge of praise that followed, outlets like the Washington Post ran gushing features on the country’s ‘pandemic success story’ ‘putting faith in science’; America’s top doctor Anthony Fauci hailed it as the ‘epitome of success.’ But eight months on and a different picture emerges. Covid has had an unfortunate habit of finding the weaknesses in a country or health system and in Australia the precious time gained last year was largely squandered on a widely-criticised vaccine roll

I’m not ill but I’m not as I was: how Covid takes its toll

If it’s true that the virus finds your weak spot, it has lodged itself like an evil monkey in my head. After departing from every other bit of my body, it was still in my brain. It told me I didn’t need friends any more. So, as I moped about the house ‘self-isolating’, I sent a series of very odd text messages, telling my friends what the monkey thought I thought of them. The monkey also told me his theory that there is no such thing as long Covid. All Covid is long. I would never get over it: ‘Well, have the authorities bothered to conduct any research to find

Giving workers a ‘right to switch off’ could backfire

Millions of workers are ‘never quite switching off’ and are answering emails out of hours, warns Autonomy, a think tank. It suggests that the 1996 Employment Rights Act should be amended to give employees a legal ‘right to disconnect’. Unfortunately for Autonomy, Labour’s new deal for workers, outlined last month, somewhat stole its thunder. Spearheaded by deputy leader Angela Rayner, the party’s radical package of labour market reforms includes a default right to flexible working, new worker status for those in the gig economy and, of course, a French-style law barring employers from contacting workers outside strictly regulated hours. Nonetheless, Autonomy’s suggestion has received fawning coverage. The Guardian headline referring to

Who should get the vaccine doses?

Every now and again, Gordon Brown makes a decent point – as he does today, pointing out that 80 per cent of the jabs have gone to the 20 richest countries. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organisation chief, warned in January that ‘even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots.’ MPs rebel over cutting aid. But send vaccines to overseas pensioners, when they could be heading for the arms of British schoolchildren? Here, they fall silent. Ethically, it’s a far harder question. When Covid vaccines were still a hypothetical, the moral dilemma was clear. Once a

When will exams get back to normal?

It wouldn’t be credible to say that this year’s A-Levels grades are comparable with 2019’s: almost 45 per cent of entries got an A or A* compared to 25 per cent two years ago. But, as I say in the magazine this week, the problem is that you can’t simply snap back to normal next year. Many of those who got their grades this year won’t go to university until next year. This — and the fact that the education of those in the year below has been disrupted too — means it wouldn’t be fair for exams to return to normal next year. That would leave the class of 2022 competing for

How we did the locomotion: A Brief History of Motion, by Tom Standage, reviewed

Audi will make no more fuel engines after 2035. So that’s the end of the Age of Combustion, signalled by a puff of immaculately catalysed smoke from polished chrome exhausts designed by fanatics in Ingolstadt. But some say the age of motion itself will have shuddered to a halt before then. A trope of the New Yorker is a cartoon showing cavemen inventing the wheel, a companion to the other trope of desert island castaways. The adventure promised by the wheel and the limitations of boring stationary solitude are ineffably linked. Since Homo erectus left Africa 1.75 million years ago, without wheels, moving our bodies through space has been a

The problems posed by booster shots

It is already known that there will be a campaign of booster shots in the UK this autumn to boost immunity among the over-50s. But it now looks like the government is planning one for autumn 2022 as well. Steven Swinford reports in the Times today that the UK has ordered 35 million doses from Pfizer for next year. The number of doses ordered suggests that the government wants to have the option in 2022 of giving a booster shot to everyone in clinical groups 1-9: the over-50s. Swinford reports that the government was prompted to act, in part, by the fact that the EU has already placed an order

Can Australia escape its Covid lockdown cycle?

In the early days of the pandemic, Australia was the envy of the world. The country was lauded as a model of how to handle the virus. Australian states recorded few cases; and when there were outbreaks, authorities brought them under control quickly. All that has changed. Now, well into the second half of 2021, Australia is losing its grip on the virus. While other major cities such as New York, London, and Paris, are opening up, Sydney is under lockdown. Even outside the nation’s major cities, travel restrictions are severely limiting movement for Australians within the country. Australia’s politicians have sought to blame the Delta variant of coronavirus. But