The announcement in November that a vaccine to combat Covid 19 was on the way marked a significant moment in the struggle with the Pandemic. The United Kingdom’s government were in raptures, perhaps because they’d been all over the place in regards to logistics and messaging so that the vaccine might make most of their problems go away.
Yet the fact that there was this new “silver bullet” to halt the Covid 19 virus was always troubling given how this government had managed matters thus far. With great power comes responsibility and they haven’t exactly worn the crown well thus far.
Would they take it for granted? Would they assume this was the end of the Pandemic woes that had made the United Kingdom a poster boy for Covid deaths in such a disproportionate way? Would this potentially be the latest gamble that many had suspected the temporary lean towards “herd immunity” was? A distraction on the horizon that would divert attention away from the here and now?
It certainly didn’t entitle them to a free pass, to take their eyes off the ball. Experience however taught one to fear it would.
The UK government, as it was over Brexit, is being held hostage by puppet masters who aren’t electable for the wider public but can pull the strings of the likes of David Cameron and Boris Johnson. They include the European Research Group (ERG) and the old guard of the Conservative Party, wannabe Thatcherites who, after over a decade of being humiliated by New Labour, want to flex their muscles and have done so since 2016.
These are the people who still nudge the Prime Minister, who put him in power during the leadership election and now make him so poor a decision maker during a Pandemic. More on them later.
Johnson has been utterly inept during this Pandemic. Not putting the nation into lockdown early enough in March and then November shows a man who never learns from what has gone before. He simply acts too late; the court jester who resembles not the ironically named Fool from King Lear but Jof the Clown from The Seventh Seal, watching on blankly as others succumb to the plague or madness.
From a logistical position, the government have been appalling. There’s been no anticipation of what might happen, no counter moves or roadmaps. Rather than tactical thinking or shrewd analysis, we’ve witnessed decision making that has been reactive and heavy handed. When they should be playing Chess, they’re on a Monopoly board, rolling dice and desperately hoping to Pass Go and collect £200 as quickly as possible. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been guilty of this, so keen to provide positive messages that portray the government in a good light only for the words to ring hollow within days or weeks. “Fear not Britons, we have Track and Trace!” There’s a search party still trying to track it down. “Oh I know thousands are dying but we’re trialling it on the Isle of Wight.” Another dead end. “We’ll set ourselves a target of 100,000 a day testing capacity by the end of April!” Just to distract us from the nightmare unfolding in front of us.
I’m paraphrasing but you get the gist.
Now some of this is the fault of those pesky puppet masters. Back benchers and right-wing stalwarts in the Conservative Party who oppose extended lockdowns because of the curb to business and civil liberties. The type of people who are fine as long as everything is going their way then, when it isn’t, they cry blue murder. It appears that they’ve been wagging the dog so that decisions about Tiers and Lockdowns have been erratic and delayed, especially when the Prime Minister is having totally different messages piped into his ears by the scientific advisory group experts.
The vaccine was being rolled out before the festive season was in full socially distanced swing, but the rising infection rate should have had the government planning how to go into 2021 with as few deaths as possible, not using a pin, a calendar and a blindfold to choose when Lockdown 2 or Lockdown 3 should commence https://racingadviser.com/2020/12/23/crocodile-tiers-and-late-lockdowns-the-uk-governments-failure-on-covid-19/
Indeed, this correspondent remembers hearing the Prime Minister’s approach to the Pandemic was mainly aided by a Tombola.
This was why the hubris over the vaccine brought concern. It felt like, to use a football analogy, a porous team buying a marquee striker but doing nothing to stop the high amount of goals being shipped. While the vaccine distribution has been rapid, there’s the feeling that it needed to be done while the foundations were more solid and not quicksand. Instead, we are now in a perilous race against time. It is wonderful we have the vaccine but they have overlooked the simple stuff like planning lockdowns, border controls and being proactive. To the extent that we are in a mess with over a thousand people dying each day. Where was the damage limitation?
And worryingly, the new variant gives the government the ideal opportunity to deflect from their woeful performance in 2020. The Prime Minister has already stated the new strain of the virus is more infectious and will bring a higher mortality rate than the original. There appears to be some political skulduggery here as some scientists have voiced surprise that Johnson said this given the paucity of the data they currently have to hand. If one was feeling suspicious, one might say the Prime Minister is keen on emphasising how bad the new variant is to give it an air of invincibility that no amount of government planning could stop.
That will be what he presumably clings to should he be grilled about the events in the last 3 months and what the government did or did not do.
But this never should have been so binary. Why did logistical planning go completely out of the window once the vaccine was coming? Why couldn’t a cautious approach have been taken, one that was dynamic and did not take it for granted that the vaccine would solve all our woes?
It’s all very well having a silver bullet, but if you’re surrounded by Werewolves and you only have one gun, you’d probably be wishing you’d not let them get so close after all.
Athon 