Covid

In the early years of his presidency, Emmanuel Macron became known as Monsieur 'En Meme Temps'. The president of France was in the habit of setting out one vision but, 'at the same time', presenting an alternative point of view. He acquired the reputation of a man who was ideologically elusive. What does he stand for? Neither left, neither right, was his campaign slogan in 2017, and four years on he continues to flummox the French. Nowhere is this equivocation more apparent that in Macron's attitude to free speech. Twelve months ago, the French teacher Samuel Paty was brutally slain outside his school because he had shown a caricature of the prophet during a class discussion about freedom of expression.

Tory MPs will not get the chance to force the government into a U-turn on scrapping the £20-a-week Universal Credit uplift this afternoon after the Speaker didn't select their rebel amendment. Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Damian Green had tabled the motion refusing to give a second reading to the bill on the basis that the money saved by breaking the pensions triple lock should have been diverted towards keeping the uplift. The motion would not have reinstated the uplift, but would have blocked the legislation process enabling the government to suspend the triple lock so that the state pension rises in line with inflation or 2.5 per cent, rather than wages. This was an attempt to hold legislation to ransom, which speakers do not like.

After the JCVI recommended against offering vaccines to children aged 12 to 15 on health grounds, the government asked the four chief medical officers to consider the broader case, including the impact on schooling. As we know, the government has now accepted the chief medical officers’ recommendation: that all 12 to 15 year olds should be offered one dose of Pfizer on the grounds that doing so will reduce disruption to education. The government has released details of the modelling that underpins that rationale. The approach was first to estimate the number of infections with and without vaccination under different scenarios of infection spread. Next, they used this to model the number of days of lost education that could be prevented by vaccination.

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, were always going to be incompatible.

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. Yet the JCVI has only approved boosters for those with weaker immune systems.

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 been offered a live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) in school, administered as a nasal spray, for the last eight years.

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.

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 blood tubes – the small plastic tubes which are used for collecting samples of blood.