13th December 2021
At least we have something new in law and policy to talk about.
No doubt as an attempt to protect his personal political position, our current Prime Minister made a rare broadcast last night to announce an ambitious new ‘target’ for take-up of the vaccine booster.
Of course, there had been no consultation with health service providers, still less any preparation.
And this is not a surprise, for our Prime Minister is interested in public policy only when it helps him with his political career.
It is hard, if not impossible, to think of any sincere view on public policy that the Prime Minister holds.
Public policy simply provides Boris Johnson with the means for obtaining and retaining political power – be it Brexit or Covid.
Whatever policy position he can adopt so as to get through the political predicament of the day (or hour).
And so – inevitably – we end up with boosterism about boosters.
******
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.
Comments will not be published if irksome.
“…Of course, there had been no consultation with health service providers, still less any preparation….”
RESULT of Johnson’s self serving target broadcas, a text message from my GP Surgery this morning:
“We are contacting you in an effort to protect our telephone lines which are inundated with calls re covid boosters. Following the PM announcement we are planning how we can deliver the emergency campaign. Please only call us if you have an urgent medical concern. Thank you.”
Johnson’s lack of awareness of others can be guaranteed to make any bad situation worse.
Completely farcical and disgraceful on the part of PM Johnson. Just confirms how unsuited he is to this office.
And – with ministers yelling at us that we have to take lateral flow tests left right and centre, the NHS website & pharmacies have run out. We will soon see long queues at chemists in the same way we did at petrol sessions.
I’m not sure which is worse – Johnson’s gross dishonesty or his whole cabinet’s rank incompetence.
It is notable, is it not, that no-one was prepared or pre-warned, not even the guardians of the computer servers holding the bookings data or the stockist of the LF tests. Or the doctors. But this announcement gives Johnson some glow of action-man and doing things in time for once, or at least promising that the whole staff of the NHS will work their butts off over Christmas giving vaccines or be blamed for not meeting the new target. Shades of a command economy.
The lines were busy on Saturday even before this latest Johnson farce. I was booking mine and offered dates this week. I went away to check my calendar, found my booking had timed out and had to start again. By then this week’s bookings had gone and I was offered one next week or in early January.
I hope the blame will attach to him. For every Drs surgery which needs to send out urgent messages saying that they are doing their best, I hope they say that this was sprung on them with no notice.
Surely this breaks Ministerial code in some way.
Yes, boosters to cover up his lies and incompetence, at a cost of over £2 billion, when their effectiveness right now is very uncertain ( there simply has not been time for research, just Pfizer’s own “small” number studied), and with no debate as to whether this is the best use of money, staff and resources at this particular moment.
It is frightening the way that the public and the media are being swept along unquestioningly.
We should be looking in detail at the situation as it unfolds in South Africa which is a month ahead in real life experience.
Indeed we do, well observed. BUT, look at the queues, never let it be said that Boris is incapable of leading the horses to water, he can even get them to drink. It take a wise/clever man to appreciate the full panoply of his opponents armoury and dis-armoury. Boris is trying to save us all…what’s not to like? Merry Christmas.
If you look at the data for the past 6 months, you can see that the average number of infections has been increasing at the same rate since Nov 7th. The rate of increase (the slope) is far lower than the peak that which started the current wave, between mid June and mid July.
At the same time as infections have been rising, the number of people in hospital has been falling since Nov 1st, although they haven’t fallen for the past week, they have remained at 7300 rather than increasing. The number of patients being admitted every day has increased slightly in the past week so that probably signals the end.
My (belated) point is either we should do nothing now because we did nothing then, or the public health measures we are implementing now, ought to have been implemented 5 months ago.
We have had between 6000 and 9400 beds occupied by covid patients for most of 5 months, beds which could have been used for normal NHS work which has a backlog of some 5 million or so operations on top of being unable to accept patients arriving from ambulances.
The whole thing is a disgrace, practically a carbon copy of the failure to act last year but with the added insult of not learning from the previous experience.