Britain should be so proud of our valiant vaccine programme
IN THE classic 1970s department store sitcom Are You Being Served? “Young” Mr Grace would periodically shuffle onto the shop floor to tell staff: “You’ve all done very well.” It wasn’t always entirely true, but it seemed to disarm the natural cynicism of Mr Humphries, Mrs Slocombe and the rest of the gang. Praise can do that, especially when it is merited.
And it is certainly merited for Britain this week, as we reached and then surged past the landmark of 25 million people having had their first Covid jab.
Boris Johnson seemed to channel the spirit of Young Mr Grace as he observed on social media: “The latest milestone is an incredible achievement… Thank you to the brilliant NHS, scientists, Armed Forces, volunteers and all those who’ve helped our rollout.”
He might have added some thanks too for the great British public, given our take-up rates of well over 90 per cent and our refusal to get drawn into the vaccine hesitancy or ill-founded safety panics unleashed across much of continental Europe.
Latest figures show 38 per cent of the UK population has had a jab – more than half of all adults – compared with just nine per cent of EU residents.
The results can be seen in plummeting death and hospitalisation rates and the Prime Minister’s insistence that Britain can stick to its plan to open up, even as much of the EU is sliding into new lockdowns.
WE DO NOT need to be drawn into a war of words with continental leaders to know this is something we have done really well. Deep down, they know it too, though none has been big enough to admit it.
Neither have many people in our own broadcast media, which has become seemingly addicted to the narrative of Britain performing woefully in this pandemic. Instead of acknowledging what has been achieved, many broadcasters instead hyped-up reports of an impending glitch in vaccine supplies in April.
In fact, we are doing so well we can absorb that setback and still meet our pre-announced deadlines for vaccinating the under-50s as well as administering second doses on time for older people. In any case, the vast majority of the future fatality risk has already been inoculated away via the first dose success among the elderly.
Huge credit is due to Mr Johnson himself and his advisers for deciding not to join the EU’s supply programme but instead to set up a British Vaccines Task Force. It was a courageous decision and had it backfired the PM would be getting flayed alive for it.
Instead, the task force set to work at lightning speed under the inspirational leadership of Kate Bingham, picking winner after winner among vaccine candidates and sewing up supply contracts early.
HEALTH Secretary Matt Hancock, not Britain’s most popular man by a long chalk, also played a blinder by steering Oxford University into a partnership with the UKbased AstraZeneca rather than with a US drugs company. That key early choice massively enhanced our security of supply.
The NHS, supported by logistics experts from the Armed Forces, scaled up the rollout in awesome fashion within unreasonably tight time frames.
And as Mr Johnson – who had his own inoculation yesterday – noted, volunteers came forward in droves to help organise pop-up vaccination centres so clinicians giving out the jabs
could work at maximum speed. Displaying calm common sense and swerving the conspiracy theorists, the vast majority of Britons trusted that, as Mr Johnson put it on Thursday: “The Oxford jab is safe and the Pfizer jab is safe. The thing that isn’t safe is catching Covid.”
We came forward to protect ourselves but also to do our duty to help make others just that little bit safer. After all, the jabs massively reduce the onward transmission of Covid as well as the severity of the disease in inoculated people.
Having my own first injection a week ago proved an oddly moving experience. Everybody was so cheerful and focused and aware of being part of a shared national effort.
I bumped into an old acquaintance and we talked about how our families coped in the Covid storms and how lovely it would be to meet for a drink in the local pub soon.
There are a lot of great things about this country. The ethos of the NHS has been shown yet again to bind us together, expressing our determination to build a good society.
Britain has stood strong, both economically and socially, during the most traumatic and trying year most of us have ever lived through. By and large we really have all done very well.
‘Had his decision backfired, the PM would be getting flayed alive for it’