Our citizens get a shot in the arm. In Europe, they are getting shot in the streets

It has just gone one o’clock on Saturday, November 20, and today Stornoway’s Cabarfeidh Hotel has once more been repurposed as a vaccination centre – on this occasion, as a drop-in facility for the over-50s.

So I duly drop in; accept a fresh face mask at the door and, not half a minute later, I am seen by Nurse Eilidh. From a hand-held device she finds my inoculation record in seconds and confides that I was the only John MacLeod born in Scotland on April 15, 1966.

Somehow, I am secretly pleased. I then cast off a couple of layers and am promptly jagged with Pfizer in my left arm and Fluad tetra in my right.

Both are painless. Gracious words are exchanged before I am directed to another room where, with others freshly vaccinated, I must wait 15 minutes before I am allowed to leave, as nurses keep us under observation. For a few days afterwards my left arm feels a little odd – but I have a vivid imagination.

Only two years ago, the world we now live in would not have made it past an agent as a movie treatment. What was so shocking in March 2020 is now normal – hand sanitiser at every shop, bodyswerving folk on pavements, keeping an eye on the daily Covid stats, wincing if you hear a cough.

But at least the most maddening aspects are behind us. We are not now made to queue at supermarkets, forbidden to travel, banned from seeing Granny or denied the services of ‘non-essential’ shops. And, since late last year, vaccines opened a door of hope and have saved untold lives.

Boris Johnson and his ministers did get a great deal wrong, yet they undoubtedly got two things right. One was the Vaccine taskforce – cutting decisively through the lumbering blob that is the NHS – and its decision to make the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab the central workhorse.

the second was the decision to ‘unlock’ in July, restoring the realm to a bearable sort of new normality where travel and socialising and, golly, even children returning to school were permitted.

THE doomsters and gloomsters wailed like Cassandra. the World Health Organisation, no less, damned Britain for ‘moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity’. And Sir Keir Starmer, always readily distinguished from a ray of sunshine, confidently predicted 100,000 cases a day.

Cases did rise – but to a broad plateau well south of 50,000 and the great majority among children and young people. Most of those hospitalised with Covid in recent months have been the unvaccinated. And, critically, most caught it before the onset of winter and when the NHS is, even at the best of times, at its most strained.

You will recall how, early this year, even as the EU’s leaders fought to deny Britain supplies of AstraZeneca – ordered and paid for from plants on the Continent we had funded – they screeched how useless it was. Angela Merkel said she personally would not take it. And how Emmanuel Macron sneered at le vaccine Anglais – that it was but ‘quasi-effective’ in older people.

the result was so to damage confidence in AstraZeneca that nations in Africa and elsewhere would not accept it as a gift and the EU refused to approve it for senior citizens. But no one is laughing now.

Europe lurches into winter with rising infections and deaths, millions of people not vaccinated at all, and mounting disorder and unrest as toiling governments try to impose new restrictions.

We on this island had the sense to pull forward infections before winter and before vaccine efficacy, especially among older people, started to fade.

While countries in Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, tried to eliminate the virus, we had the sense to open up in the summer when the NHS is under less pressure.

More: AstraZeneca has proved extraordinarily effective among older people.

Folk – even experts – are so inclined to focus on antibodies that the Oxford vaccine was thought but the cheap ugly sister of the messenger RNA jabs, Pfizer and Moderna.

‘But these antibodies decline over time. What remains is the t-cell response,’ said Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, last week. ‘this vaccine has been shown to stimulate a t-cell response to a higher degree in older people. We haven’t seen a lot of hospitalisations in the UK. A lot of infections to be sure, but what matters is how ill you are.’

And if Europe faces yet more Covid tragedy on a large scale – Germany has 60,000 new cases a day and climbing, with daily deaths nearing 400 – her rulers will face incredulous questions from an enraged public.

Why did the EU deny all its elderly citizens a dose of AstraZeneca? Why was the British approach so widely mocked? Why did Macron tell the world and his wife – never mind his own countrymen – that AstraZeneca was almost useless?

AND, in all, it is a reminder that we are well shot of an instinctively authoritarian order with leaders already passing laws of vaccine compulsion – and stigmatisation of the unvaccinated – that would be unthinkable in Britain.

Had three anti-vaccine protesters been wounded by live police bullets on the streets of, say, Birmingham on Friday, November 19, everyone from Gina Miller to Ursula von der Leyen would have slammed the ‘brutality’ of Brexit Island.

But police in Rotterdam did just that, and neither the EU nor the United Nations breathed a word of reproach.

Brussels throws a tartan fit if the likes of Poland or Hungary dares to question its LGBt agenda. But shoot your own citizens on the street? Le shrug.

Now there is the Omicron variant, which has again excited voluble panic from the usual suspects and yet more jeremiads against Boris Johnson from those who, for half a decade, have been desperate to witness his ruin.

It will be some sweaty weeks before experts – and Britain has the world’s most sophisticated Covid-19 sequencing system – can answer the obvious questions: is Omicron more infectious, is it more dangerous, and can it infect (and, more importantly, hospitalise and kill) the vaccinated?

Based on early indications, the answers appear to be: perhaps; not necessarily; and probably not to the degree you might think, given AstraZeneca and the t-cell factor.

In all, this has been a time of trial because most people in the UK – the median age is 40 – cannot recall the travails of the relatively recent past.

You have to be well in your eighties, now, to have even the foggiest memory of the Second World War or when your classmates often died of things such as tB, polio or scarlet fever.

But we’re in a far better place now, ahead of Christmas 2021, than we were a year ago. Let us go forward into a New Year, and let us go forward together.