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Category: Coronavirus

Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

Anti-vaccination culture threatens Covid fightback

Melanie,

Preliminary results published yesterday from early trials of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University suggest that it safely triggers an immune response. Other research teams around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against the virus This may be the only way to return to normal life. Yet there are suggestions that an alarming number of people would refuse to be inoculated. Vaccination has enabled one of the greatest global advances in public health. I have always been strongly in favour of safe and properly tested vaccination…

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Coronavirus Global conflict Israel 

Both hero and zero: Israel’s strategic incoherence

Melanie, , ,

While Israelis are increasingly alarmed by the government’s loss of control over the coronavirus crisis, different events suggest that the country may have pulled off a spectacular advance in the battle against another intractable foe. Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a succession of mysterious explosions in Iran. At the end of last month, there was a major explosion in the Khojir missile factory near Tehran and at a power plant in Shiraz, which plunged the city into darkness. There has also been an explosion at a…

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Britain Coronavirus Global conflict 

We didn’t learn the lessons from Salisbury

Melanie, , ,

The subject of the current BBC three-part series, The Salisbury Poisonings, was always going to unsettle an audience. Against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, its effect is even more frightening. The drama reconstructs the events in 2018 after a Russian double agent for MI6, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok at his house in Salisbury. It’s remarkable that this series was largely made before the Covid pandemic erupted. For the parallels are astonishing. It focuses on Wiltshire’s director of public health,…

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frenzy Britain Coronavirus 

Sanctimonious bullying, double standards and sheer absence of humanity

Melanie, ,

The public hysteria over Dominic Cummings, who held an unprecedented press conference today in the Downing Street garden to explain why he appeared to have broken the spirit if not the letter of the lockdown rules, is far more troubling than anything Boris Johnson’s controversial chief adviser may have done. By Cummings’s own account, several media claims about what he supposedly did in the 14 days at the end of March and in early April, claims which did so much to incite public feeling against him, were false. With his…

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Coronavirus Audio Britain Coronavirus 

How the government and NHS abandoned people to die from Covid-19

Melanie, ,

I took part in a podcast on Sky News for Adam Boulton’s All Out Politics. I was with the editor of politics.co.uk, Ian Dunt, with whom I had appeared earlier that morning on Sky’s review of the newspaper opinion pages, and Sky’s people in politics correspondent, Nick Martin. You can listen to the podcast either by clicking here or below. We were discussing the political aspects of the Covid-19 crisis and the blame game now under way over the dreadful death rate in care homes. Nick Martin, who has been…

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Britain Coronavirus 

Lockdown libertarians take road to tyranny

Melanie, , ,

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court, has said lockdown should be voluntary and the damage it has done to the economy isn’t justified by its “not very impressive” results. Lockdown, he said, should be a matter of free choice. Even potential virus carriers should feel no obligation to restrict their activities; instead, those who were frightened of the virus should stay at home. For him, freedom seems to mean his right to behave as he wishes regardless of the harm he may cause others. Of course there’s…

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Boris Coronavirus 

The terrible cost of ignoring common sense

Melanie, , ,

Common sense is a much underrated value. It is sneered at by the intellectual priesthood, which venerates abstract theorising divorced from reality and how people actually behave. Responses to this pandemic have illuminated the destructive irrelevance of this snobbery. People are fighting over abstractions while victims of Covid-19 are dying around them. Those trying to prove that across the world economies have been wilfully trashed by power-mad politicians and that lockdowns have all been a terrible mistake are seizing as weapons statistical claims about the course of this disease. This…

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Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

Bromides punctuated by gibberish. Bravo no more, Boris

Melanie, ,

Oh dear. Boris Johnson’s much trailed address to the nation this evening has merely deepened the impression that this is a prime minister who is not in control of events at all. In summary, he was saying there will be no substantive change to the lockdown, other than the tweak of permitting more outside activity, at least until June when perhaps some schools may open and July when perhaps some of the hospitality industry and other public places may open too. As I have previously observed, such caution is at…

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virus Coronavirus Global conflict Israel 

Israel still suffers virus of hate even as it saves Arab lives

Melanie

While countries around the world struggle to get on top of the Covid-19 crisis, Israel’s achievement so far has been remarkable. Its mortality rate from the virus has been vastly smaller, in proportion to its population, than the rate in countries such as Britain, Sweden or the United States. That’s largely because it tackled the virus with the kind of bold, strategic approach with which it defends itself against its physical foes. This week, with new cases reduced to a few dozen, it started to lift a wide range of…

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Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

“How has it come to this” indeed. But now Boris must keep his nerve

Melanie, , ,

This week, when Boris Johnson made his first appearance at prime minister’s questions since he nearly died from Covid-19, the new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, got the better of him. It wasn’t just that the absence of the usual braying mobs of backbenchers played to Starmer’s strengths as a calm, relentless and well-briefed advocate. It was that the questions he asked with such deadly and polite quietness were unanswerable. With the UK’s virus death toll then standing at more than 29,000, Starmer asked: “How has it come to this?”…

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