Covid

Monday

Joanna Rossiter

Why vaccine nationalism won’t end in 2021

After the EU’s behaviour last week, no one can be under any illusion about how nationalistic the pandemic has now become. Even before the EU attempted to halt vaccine supplies destined for Britain, the scrabble to secure enough doses had become reminiscent of the cold war. It wasn’t for nothing that the Russians named their vaccine ‘Sputnik’ – a reference to the satellite they launched in 1957 during the space race. Nor was it by chance that the Scottish government appeared to find it so difficult to say the word ‘Oxford’ when talking about the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. But these sorts of political tiffs are just the beginning. Now that vaccinations are underway across the West, focus is beginning to shift onto future supply.

Patrick O’Flynn

The EU’s vaccine debacle has finally ended the ‘People’s Vote’ myth

Of all the charges made against Brexiteers, the notion that we 'don’t understand the modern world' is the one that some Remainers have most often returned to; their equivalent of the boxer’s stinging jab that relentlessly wears down an opponent. In a global system increasingly dominated by a handful of big players with huge populations and land mass – the US, China, India, Russia – being a medium-sized nation in Europe without the umbrella of the EU was supposed to be a mug’s game. In the European Parliament, that arch-federalist Guy Verhofstadt would often refer to the countries of Europe as 'dwarfs' who needed to band together to compete in such a world.

Steerpike

NYT’s rare praise for Brexit Britain

Hold on to your hats. In recent years, the New York Times has rarely if ever missed an opportunity to bash Brexit Britain. Whether it's spreading false claims over 'mix and match vaccines', identifying Britons as mutton-munchers or simply linking the UK's decision to leave the EU with bad Covid etiquette.  So Mr S must admit he nearly choked on his cornflakes on seeing the latest front page of America's self-styled paper of record. Not only was the subject the UK, but the report was a positive one – with the headline: 'In vaccines, UK has a pandemic win at last'.

Gavin Mortimer

Is this the reason Macron avoided a third Covid lockdown?

In these dreary days one of my few remaining distractions is perusing the readers' comments at the foot of online articles about Covid in French newspapers. It's like being ringside at a ferocious boxing bout. In the blue corner the Millennials, and in the red corner, the Soixante-Huitards, the 68ers, the French term for Baby Boomers. Neither generation is pulling their punches. The Millennials are fed up with their sterile existence in which bars, restaurants, cinemas and theatres have been closed since October. Liberte! they cry. They've seen the stats, that of France's 76,000 Covid deaths, the overwhelming majority are aged 65 or above; only 0.5 per cent are from the 15 to 44 demographic.

Sunday

Daniel French

Vicars like me are struggling in lockdown

A year of living through a pandemic has taken its toll on the best of us. Vicars like me are no exception.  As a healthy and normally upbeat 52-year-old, this feeling of gloom is frighteningly new. Anecdotal stories from clergy friends tell a similar story to my own: the urge is to curl up and mask the misery with binge marathons of Netflix box sets. But this brings only short-term relief. A cursory look at social media posts show that a good number of vicars are struggling to keep it together.  The pressures on vicars come from every quarter. Some vicars have been landed with the impossible task of maintaining empty churches as elderly volunteers withdraw to shield or isolate.

Friday

Robert Peston

The EU is playing a dangerous game with vaccine exports

The EU is arguably playing a self-harming game in potentially restricting vaccine exports to the UK as a tit for tat for the inability of AstraZeneca to supply the 80 million doses it ordered by the end of March. First of all, this looks like unedifying EU sour grapes that the UK, out of the EU, moved earlier to place vaccine contracts and will soon be self-sufficient in vaccines. Second, it risks damaging the reputation of the EU as a place where multinationals can securely invest, because it is blowing up the supply chains of two big American companies with EU operations, Pfizer and Moderna. The UK, desperate for inward investment, will look relatively more attractive as a haven for foreign capital.

Ross Clark

Could this drug offer immediate protection from Covid-19?

When Donald Trump returned to the White House after a brief spell in hospital with Covid-19 last October he made a video attributing his rapid recovery to a drug he called ‘Regeneron’. ‘They call it a therapeutic drug, but to me it wasn’t therapeutic – it made me better,’ he said. ‘I call that a cure.’ Naturally, given that Trump had on a previous occasion appeared to advocate injecting humans with disinfectant, there was an element of scepticism on the part of many viewers. However, the drug he was talking about went on the receive emergency use authorisation in November from the US Food and Drug Administration. We now have interim results from a Phase 3 trial in which the drug was used as a ‘passive vaccine’.

James Forsyth

Covid has proven the benefits of ‘Made in Britain’

Thatcherite Tories have long been suspicious of the idea of an industrial strategy. Their view was that it wasn’t the job of government to pick winners (or, more likely, protect losers). But the pandemic has changed all that, I say in the Times this morning. The old certainties of globalisation have come crashing down. One influential secretary of state’s view is that ‘it proves the error once and for all of the Blair-era assumption that the location of your manufacturing doesn’t matter.’ The last year has shown that even in this globalised age the nation state trumps the market.

Philip Thomas

Why we should be wary of React’s R-number estimate

It seems that Boris Johnson will not begin to think about lifting lockdown restrictions until we have clear evidence that the latest wave of the virus has almost been defeated. So it was not exactly good news yesterday from Imperial College’s React Covid survey, which suggested that even though we are in lockdown, the R number is still almost at 1 in Britain – meaning the epidemic is barely shrinking. As part of React’s ‘viral opinion poll’ swabs were taken from over 160,000 people in England between 6 and 22 January.

Nick Tyrone

The EU vaccine debacle poses a dilemma for Remainers like me

There is no question about it, at least if you want to evaluate things objectively: the UK has handled Covid vaccine rollout well (at least so far) and the EU has dealt with it badly. For a Remainer like me, this raises a difficult question: does this prove that Brexit was a good idea after all? Compared to the EU27, the UK has been able to act nimbly in vaccine negotiations. While Brussels has been held up by various delays and supply issues, these have not affected the UK. This is thanks in large part to the fact that its contract with AstraZeneca was signed three months before the EU vaccine deal. The UK also took a gamble, betting on a vaccine that had not yet passed clinical trials.

Thursday

John Keiger

This pandemic has shown the best and worst of France

France is having a torrid pandemic with a succession of failures, from PPE equipment to vaccine invention, a stalled vaccination programme and now interminable and frustrating hesitation over a third lockdown. But we, and the French, should focus on the many things they do get right. Traducing Mark Antony’s speech to the Romans, it is time to praise France not to bury her. The ninth French-organised Vendée Globe – the world’s most gruelling 80-day, round the world solo yacht race – drew to a close in the small hours last night at Sables d’Olonne in the Vendée in western France. Its competitors, overwhelmingly French, have provided a dazzling example of the best of sport.

Steerpike

‘Sexist’ covid poster scrapped by the government

Another day, another Covid advertising fail for the government. Fresh from discontinuing a radio ad suggesting joggers and dog-walkers are 'highly likely' to have coronavirus, a 'stay home, save lives' poster has been pulled.  The advert, which showed women cleaning and caring for children while a man lounged on a sofa, sparked accusations of sexism. 'It has been withdrawn and removed from the campaign. I will make clear that it does not reflect the government's view on women which is why we have withdrawn it,' Boris Johnson's official spokesperson said today.  Oh dear..

Steerpike

BBC shows its pro-EU bias

It’s pretty clear that the EU has not exactly behaved well in recent weeks, during its row with AstraZeneca over the Oxford vaccine. First the German press pushed out an unsubstantiated claim that the vaccine had extremely low efficacy rates among the elderly. Then the EU threatened to introduce an export ban to prevent other countries receiving their doses. And now the EU is pushing AstraZeneca to divert supplies intended for the UK to Europe – to make up for the fact that the bloc dithered for three months before striking its own deal with the company. Meanwhile the UK, so far at least, has pretty much kept out of the row. So Mr S was surprised to see the UK’s own broadcaster, the BBC, take a ‘both sides are wrong’ approach to the dispute this morning.

Steven Barrett

The vaccine row shows the EU doesn’t understand contract law

The EU rejects 'the logic of first-come first-serve,' said the EU's health commissioner Stella Kyriakides. 'That may work at the neighbourhood butcher's but not in contracts, and not in our advanced purchase agreements'. Contract law is an area of law I know well. And it is not a political comment to say the commissioner is wrong. We don't know precisely what the contract between AstraZeneca and EU member states says. But the EU did publish another vaccine supply contract here. All this makes it very difficult to see what case the EU has In any would-be-case involving this contract, the EU has two massive hurdles to jump. Firstly, contractors undertake to use their 'reasonable best efforts' to manufacture enough supply.

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of my new British passport

‘Anything you want?’ says Catriona on her way out of the house to go to the shop. I’m standing at the hob stirring a first batch of Low Life’s 2021 Pandemic Second Wave green tomato chutney. (My outdoor homegrown tomatoes stopped turning red just before Christmas.) The wooden spoon stops revolving while I google my brain for things I want. No results. Materially, I have everything I need. Too much of everything. What I once looked on as too few clothes now strikes me as insane excess. I’ve got a Honda Jazz that starts first time parked down in the village, lent to me by a friend for as long as I need it. I’ve books, pens, paper, ink, fags, gin, tonics and there’s ice and a lemon in the fridge.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Keir Starmer’s unseemly performance at PMQs

It was a day of awful numbers. And even more gruesome cliches. The Labour leader started it. ‘Yesterday we passed the tragic milestone of 100,000 deaths,’ said Sir Keir Starmer. Then he informed us that, ‘this is not just a statistic.’ He explained that each dead person has connections to other individuals who remain alive. He gave three examples. ‘A mum, a dad, a sister.’ Then he gave four more. ‘A brother, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour.’ Next he premiered a well-crafted denunciation of government failings that relied on the repetition of ‘slow’ at the start of each phrase. ‘Slow, slow, slow’, he boomed, like the tolling of a death-knell o’er a frosty graveyard.

Kate Andrews

Boris’s border crackdown raises some big questions

Throughout the pandemic, Britain has taken a relatively relaxed approach to controlling its borders. Restrictions on travel have come and gone since last March, but, on the whole, Britain has always leaned towards openness. The government has trusted people to make sensible judgements and follow quarantine rules upon return. Now attitudes have shifted. This afternoon, Home Secretary Priti Patel laid out the details of the government’s new, quasi-Australia style quarantine policy. Arrivals from 22 ‘high-risk’ areas will soon be forced to quarantine in a hotel when they arrive in Britain. There will be no exceptions to the rule, and travellers must stay put for ten days, even if they test negative for Covid-19.

Dr Mark Toshner

Controlling borders is a critical step in the fight against Covid

Over the last two months our fight against Covid-19 appears to have changed dramatically. The emergence of novel variants in the UK, South Africa and Brazil has generated plenty of headlines and concern. We shouldn't panic. But one thing is clear: if we don't act now, we could come to regret it. In the UK, for obvious reason we have been most focused on the B.1.1.7 variant. The evidence seems pretty clear that it is more transmissible and potentially more severe. Part of the reason we have such extensive data on virus mutations in the UK is the quite astonishing efforts that have gone into sequencing the viral genomes.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Backbench MPs are doing Labour’s job on school closures

Labour had an urgent question about schools reopening in the Commons this afternoon, but once again it wasn't the Opposition that really increased pressure on the government but Conservative backbenchers. They are getting increasingly agitated by the prospect of classrooms remaining empty for many weeks longer than ministers had originally suggested, and were keen to convey their concerns to schools minister Nick Gibb. Gibb had to field questions about rising mental health problems among young people who've spent the best part of a year trying to learn at home, about parents struggling to work and home-school their children, and about the criteria for reopening.

Isabel Hardman

Did Boris Johnson do ‘everything he could’ to limit Covid deaths?

Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Simon Stevens held a very sombre press conference in Downing Street this evening to mark the awful milestone of more than 100,000 UK deaths in this pandemic. The Prime Minister offered his 'deepest condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one', and promised that 'when we have come through this crisis, we will come together as a nation to remember everyone we lost, and to honour the selfless heroism of all those on the front line who gave their lives to save others'. He also pledged that 'we will make sure that we learn the lessons and reflect and prepare'. This was the closest the Prime Minister came to talking about taking responsibility for the high death toll.