A breach of trust with the British public
Ayear ago this week, the UK became the first country in the world to administer an approved Covid vaccine to a member of the public. Margaret Keenan received a Pfizer jab in a hospital in Coventry, becoming the first of millions of British people to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The country still owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Dame Kate Bingham, the original head of the Government’s vaccines taskforce, who gave us a vital headstart by circumventing public sector bureaucracy to secure doses ahead of our competitors. Britain will be forever grateful, too, to scientists and innovators such as Dame Sarah Gilbert, who defied the pessimists who thought a jab could not be developed and manufactured in such a short period of time.
However, the vaccination programme would have got nowhere without the enthusiasm of the public. For a great many people, having a jab was in their own interests. Even against the new omicron variant, the early evidence suggests that, with a booster, vaccines substantially reduce the risk of being hospitalised or dying from the virus. Others had one because they judged it to be the socially responsible thing to do. Covid poses very little risk to the health of younger age groups, for example, yet vaccination reduces the rate at which the virus spreads throughout the population.
Above all, the jab was our route out of lockdown. Ministers made an explicit contract with the public: get inoculated and your freedoms would return. The planned and “irreversible” reopening of society before the summer was even postponed for a month in order, in part, to ensure that more people could be vaccinated.
This week, they broke that contract. The Government’s decision to implement Plan B of the Covid winter plan – an incoherent and illogical mixture of measures – is not just a disproportionate response to the new variant. It is a breach of the promise made to the public: that if people did the right thing and had the vaccine, life could return to normal.
It is true that a great deal remains unknown about the omicron variant. It may be possible that, as some scientists fear, millions of people could become infected in a short period of time and put unsustainable pressure on the NHS. But such estimates have been shown to be disastrously wrong before. What we do know is that, in South Africa, where the variant was first identified, its effects are said to be “mild” and there have been relatively few hospitalisations.
In any case, a more transmissible new variant was an eventuality that the Government ought to have been prepared for, not least by putting much greater efforts into expanding NHS capacity and radically increasing the speed of the Covid booster programme. Neither was done, with ministers unwilling or incapable of learning anything from Dame Kate’s successes in securing vaccines in the first place.
It cannot be right that, once again, the public is being expected to pay the price for the deficiencies of the state and its agencies. Some will contend that the new restrictions are minor and that they do not matter because they can be quickly withdrawn if fears about the omicron variant prove unfounded. Yet even if the measures are lifted soon after the Christmas holidays, the Government will have conceded a fundamental point: that vaccines did not buy us back our liberties. Our freedoms remain subject to the whims of ministers and their advisers, liable to be withdrawn any time they feel like it.
Considerable attention has been paid this week to the apparent hypocrisy of government aides who seemingly held parties in Downing Street while the rest of the country was banned from socialising last Christmas. This has been described as a catastrophic breach of trust between the people and their rulers, one so serious that it has raised questions about the longevity of the Government itself.
It pales in comparison beside the breach of trust over Covid, however. After countless months of complying with every bizarre rule and making tremendous sacrifices on behalf of the greater good, people were told that the vaccines would give them their lives back. It was a false promise that will not be forgotten.