Vaccination

The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business, rails against the ultra-processed food that Donald Trump likes to eat and wants climate sceptics jailed, RFK Jr sounds like a BBC hero and hardly a natural member of the MAGA tribe. But his criticism of Covid vaccines catapulted him into the arms of Trump. The experts who now bash him should reflect on their

Joy. Family. Love. Lights. Stars. Festivity. And yes, all of those, if you’re lucky, and they are happy words, words that give you that fuzzy glow. Others come fast down the track, of course. War. Disasters. Accidents. Distress. Tears.  I am old now so my most familiar Christmas word is ‘memory’, although I live in the present and ‘fun’ is definitely a Christmas word – but ‘funny’? Yet as I have been sitting by the log fire thinking about Christmases past, funny keeps cropping up.  I said, knife poised, that I hoped it wasn’t the steak pie we were about to eat with our cream or custard One should never laugh

‘Then I got taken hostage in Iran,’ said the lady sitting next to me in the hairdresser’s as she was having her hair crimped. ‘Really?’ said the hairdresser, who had the flat irons on her hair and was making her look like an 1980s pop star. ‘And how was that?’ He was obviously stuck in hairdresser mode, and having not heard what she had said, perhaps, was ploughing on regardless, assuming the chatter was about her holiday. ‘I’m sorry, what do you mean?’ said the lady who had been admiring herself in the mirror as he worked and now turned her head a little to look round at this carefree,

When the vet had finished giving my horses their annual flu boosters, she reminded me the vaccination regime had changed. For the purpose of competing, horses must be vaccinated for flu every six months, which is something that had passed me by. What with worrying about human vaccines, I had not noticed this change in the rules for equestrian jabs. I thought about it for a split second, then decided. ‘Lucky I don’t compete then,’ I told her. Because being a rabid anti-vaxxer, I don’t want my horses pumped more full of vaccine than is absolutely necessary. And this is precisely the sort of irrational and illogical reaction people have

No vax There is nothing new about the anti-vax crowds supporting Novak Djokovic. Organised protest in Britain began with the formation of the Leicester Anti-Vaccination League in 1869. Vaccination of children against smallpox had been compulsory since 1853, but faith in the vaccine plummeted with an epidemic which erupted in the city in spite of vaccination — 314 died from the disease in 1871/72. There was also increasing anger at the jailing of vaccine refuseniks, 61 of whom were imprisoned between 1869 and 1884. Thousands gathered on 23 March 1885 for an anti-vaccination march from the Temperance Hall to the Market Place. In 1898 the law was revised to allow

Gstaad   It is hard to imagine that we have reached the year 2022 and are still imposing completely irrelevant restrictions on each other. By we I mean those of us in the supposedly enlightened West, where silliness, jealousy, cruelty and woke rule the roost. I’ll begin with the Chinese virus that has contrived to dominate the headlines even more than Boris and Meghan put together. I got it following my Christmas party, which was a great success if one is to believe some of the thank-you notes I received. All I can say is that it’s not true that chastity is sexually alluring. If it were, women would go

My pro-vaxxer friends have been a lot nicer to me since they started testing positive for Covid. I’m calling my vaccinated friends ‘pro-vaxxer’, by the way, just so they can see how it feels to have a quirky-sounding label applied to them based on their personal choices about how to withstand a pandemic. Meanwhile, I’m most certainly not going to call myself an anti-vaxxer because I’ve had dozens of vaccines, just not this one. I don’t need a label that’s become a term of abuse and was used by an MP while condemning people who don’t want the vaccine as the sorts of scoundrels who might launch a physical attack

It’s hard to remember a time when politicians have so publicly put pressure on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Even the vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said this week that the booster programme is his ‘absolute priority’ as it will ‘help us to transition the virus from pandemic to endemic status’. So why is the JCVI so against booster jabs in all but the rarest of cases? My understanding is that its thinking has three parts. First, that the UK has not experienced Israel’s waning immunity against infection because we have had a longer gap between doses. Second, the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been widely used here but not

On Saturday, the Health Secretary made his most bullish comments on child vaccination so far. Writing in the Times, Sajid Javid argued that offering all teenagers the jab will ‘solidify our wall of protection,’ offering a stronger defence against Covid and new strains. In doing so, Javid has intensified the debate on whether over-12s ought to be vaccinated. Earlier this month, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised that jabs should be offered to 16 and 17-year olds, bringing the UK into line with countries such as Sweden. The JCVI is now investigating whether the jab could be offered to all 12-15 year olds, as in the US and several other

‘Contact a GP if you’re worried about symptoms four weeks after having Covid.’ That was the NHS quote on the end of a story about Piers Morgan, who was still feeling ill three weeks after getting the lurgy. Me too, Piers. It took the builder boyfriend almost as long to get over it, and his father. We make an interesting control group, don’t we? Piers Morgan and the builder boyfriend’s father are both double-jabbed. The builder boyfriend and I are not vaccinated. And yet here we all are, going through exactly the same thing as we try to get over Covid. Of course, the government wants to argue that the

Lockdowns cannot kill off a virus — they just delay the spread. There was always going to be a new wave of infections as Boris Johnson phased out restrictions. The question was how big it would be and how much protection the vaccines would provide. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, summed up the case for optimism a few months ago, saying that any ‘new surges will meet a wall of vaccinated people’. His theory is now being tested: the fast-spreading Indian (Delta) variant is making its way through the most vaccinated country in Europe. What to do? And how worried should we be? Since the pandemic began, I have