Ross Clark

'Speechless,' was Matt Hancock’s reaction when told about Professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown breaching liaisons on 6 May last year. The Health Secretary added that he thought Ferguson was right to resign from Sage — and that it was a matter for the police whether or not to prosecute the professor.  Will Hancock now be following Ferguson’s example and resigning? It is perhaps just as well that Hancock didn’t come up with any more quotable remarks as they would now certainly be quoted back at him following the publication of photographs of him embracing aide Gina Coladangelo — apparently on 6 May this year.

Covid has doomed the public finances — not just because the cost of mitigating it has been high in itself but because it has normalised high public spending. When you have just allocated £37 billion to Test and Trace and spend £54 billion on the furlough scheme, a £106 billion high-speed railway to Manchester and Leeds looks relatively good value — at least taxpayers will have something lasting for their money. And who would even notice if the budget for that railway quietly crept up by a further £1.7 billion? That is exactly what has happened today. The construction costs of the first phase of the railway, from London to Birmingham, have apparently been increased by social distancing.

The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, isn’t normally given to waffle, which makes his maiden appearance on GB News all the more remarkable. Asked by Andrew Neil who – government or homeowner – would have to pay the estimated £10,000 per household cost of replacing domestic gas boilers with heat pumps to help reach the target of net zero emissions by 2050 Sunak replied:  'So when you say the alternative is the household or the government, the government’s money is the people’s money. And that’s my point when I say ultimately we all pay. The government does have any separate money of its own' As a general point of political philosophy, it was a fair enough statement.

The link between Covid cases and hospitalisations has been broken, we keep being told – vaccination having reduced the severity of infections, especially among more vulnerable older groups. It is a point reinforced this morning by Public Health England which reveals that the number of cases of the delta (formerly Indian) variant have increased from 12,431 to 42,323 in a week, but without a corresponding rise in hospitalisations. But how true is it that what looks like a third wave in new infections will not be accompanied by a large wave of hospitalisations? Previous experience with Covid – using PHE data – suggests there is not a very long lag between cases and hospitalisations.

There are still six days to go before the Prime Minister has to decide whether or not to go ahead with the full reopening of the economy and society on 21 June. But there seems little doubt in which way the government is travelling.  It is reported this morning that, following a pessimistic presentation by Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance the likelihood is that the reopening will be delayed by a fortnight, the lifting of some measures perhaps a little longer than that. Is this yet another shifting of the goalposts? It is true that there has been an increase in cases over the past couple of weeks – not so far accompanied by a rise in hospitalisations and deaths.

Should the NHS be mixing vaccines for better effect, or at least offering people who have had one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine the choice of having the Pfizer vaccine for their second shot?  The question arises because that is exactly the regime which has been followed in Germany since the risk of clotting from the AstraZeneca vaccine became evident. When the German authorities made the decision to administer the Pfizer vaccine in place of a second shot of AstraZeneca there was not much evidence as to whether this would be an effective strategy.  But a study from a group of hospitals in Berlin suggests that a shot of AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer is at least as good as two shots of Pfizer and may even be slightly better at producing immunity.