POLITICIANS CANNOT CLAIM VICTORY FOR PRIVATE SECTOR VACCINATION TRIUMPH

POLITICIANS quickly convert to conmen when the issue arises as to who is responsible for something. If the rain pours down through the bank holiday – nothing to do with them. But if there is a heat wave they personally arranged it. Thus with the blistering triumph of the Covid vaccine. The real sources of success and failure are quite different.

Through 2020 the politicians were wholly in charge at their own insistence. They devolved the counter-measures to officialdom (bureaucracy) and some extremely dubious scientists, always taking the advice of the extremists whose “models” (forecasts) were mainly wrong. Other boffins with less draconian advice which turned out to be right were disregarded.

Result? Cock-up after cock-up. As in the PPE protective clothing which never arrived, the disappearance of almost all non-Covid medical treatment and the horrors inflicted on care homes. Then came the success, hailed and envied worldwide, of the vaccine rollout.

Spot the difference? The latter was entirely down to the private sector. The Politico and Jobsworth had nothing to do with it. The commercial company Oxford AstraZeneca did an incredible job researching, producing and marketing at cost a vaccine in a fraction of the foreseen time.

The Army distributed it in days, the NHS frontline youngsters administered it and 40,000 back-from-retirement volunteers staffed the network of jab centres.

In the case of the CO and I, and it seems everyone else, it worked smooth as butter.