Out of the darkness we must believe in a brighter future
JUST AS history can catch us out with grim unforeseen events, like the Great Depression or the rise of Hitler, so it can sometimes surprise us on the upside. Who would have thought, for example, after the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities in 1945, that we would get through another 75 years without a nuclear bomb being unleashed in anger?
More topically, who, when medical photographer Janet Parker succumbed to smallpox in a Birmingham hospital in 1978, would have guessed that she would be the last person ever to die of the disease?
For many people – at least those under the age of 80, too young to remember wartime – 2020 will go down as the most miserable year of their lives. Even for those who have been lucky enough to avoid financial hardship it has been a sometimes lonely, joyless year.
Yet, even though 2021 begins under a very dark cloud of rising Covid cases and deaths, there is every reason to hope it might pleasantly surprise us with what it eventually brings.
At the risk of sounding like one of those football managers who responds to a 3- 0 defeat by telling reporters “there’s lot of positives to take out of this”, it is possible to see the foundations of a far better future.
Two months ago we did not know whether any Covid vaccines under development would work well enough to be used for mass inoculation of the public. Now we have two vaccines fully tested for their efficacy and safety and approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. HOPEFULLY,
now that the much cheaper and easier to store AstraZeneca vaccine has been given approval, the Government can speed up the vaccination programme. There is no need to rely on just surgeries and hospitals to carry out the vaccines.
Last spring, 50,000 recently retired doctors and nurses volunteered for a temporary return to work to help with the Covid effort – 30,000 of whom were approved. Yet only 5,000 of them were given jobs.
There is definitely a job for them now. Open up community centres, sports halls and there is no reason why we shouldn’t match what Israel has achieved, vaccinating 5.2 per cent of its population in just nine days.
If we can work at that rate, the Covid crisis could be entering history by the end of March.
The other crisis that threatened us just weeks ago was the threat of a no- deal Brexit. Yet a deal has been done – not perfect but one that allows Britain to make its own regulations and cut its own trade deals while continuing to trade with the EU on more or less the same terms as before.
We have become used to being spun negative stories by think tanks whose economic models kept telling us the UK economy would shrink under any kind of Brexit. Now that reality has arrived, some are changing their tune.
The Centre for Economic and Business Research, which in 2016 predicted the UK economy would be overtaken by France’s in the near- term and would slip from the world’s fifth largest to the eighth largest, this week predicted that, by 2035 Britain’s economy will be 23 per cent larger than France’s.
I’m not sure whether it is just a modern trait or whether it has always been part of human psychology, but we seem to have a predisposition towards doommongering. We are forever seeing in our minds the threat of economic collapse, pestilence, weird weather events, asteroid strikes and the like.
At the same time we under
estimate the ability of human ingenuity to overcome disaster. Covid- 19 is a case in point.
Because vaccines have tended to take a decade to develop we couldn’t imagine it being done in less than a year.
Yet it has. Not only that, the crisis has boosted a novel technology called mRNA – the basis of the Pfizer vaccine – which holds huge possibilities for treating all kinds of diseases.
INFUTURE pandemics – and they will happen – we might be able to develop a vaccine in two weeks, by tweaking a vaccine that has already proved to be safe.
So often in the past, grave crises have led to great breakthroughs in human endeavour.
There are few episodes as miserable as the Second World War, but look what came out of it: the United Nations, Human Rights, jet engines, and vast advances in food production to mention just a few things.
Most of us will be glad to see the back of 2020. Rather fewer, as they wake this morning, may imagine 2021 as the beginning of a golden age. But I am certainly not betting against us seeing it as that in years to come.
‘ So often in the past grave crises have led to great breakthroughs’