Covid criticism fails to include all facts

ONCE again (Letters, Friday) Coun Cath Davis engages in a selective attack on the government, putting forward seemingly plausible criticism through incomplete presentation of the facts to serve as evidence of failure and corruption.

Without doubt there are many aspects of the government’s response to, and management of the pandemic that could be cited as cronyism, failure and dither.

However, the case against them is not served by peddling partial and biased statements to advance a general political view.

Even when constrained by the undoubted success of the vaccination programme Coun Davis tries to suggest that the roll-out is stalling. She should well know that throughout the last three months the rate of vaccination has been restricted only by the production and delivery of vaccine supplies.

The mobilisation of the many elements of the programme has been a credit to all concerned. The United Kingdom has the highest rate of inoculation of larger states by head of adult population.

As for the UK death rate, it has been anecdotally obvious and now supported by research that public health factors (weight and obesity) are major drivers of mortality in Covid victims.

Countries with more than 50% of their population overweight find that Covid mortality is concentrated to the extent that 90% of all deaths are amongst this ‘at risk’ group.

Finally, Mr Hancock has not refused to apologise for ‘breaching his legal obligations by failing to disclose contracts given to his cronies’. What was breached, in certain cases, was a regulatory time scale (by 17 days) to publish statutory statements of contract awards to whomsoever; friends and acquaintances or otherwise. Not quite the same thing.

Alan Fidler, North Shields