Day: 16 December 2020

by Neville Hodgkinson No one likes to be a party pooper, but the gung-ho atmosphere surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine rollout calls for some response. Health Secretary Matt Hancock was clearly delighted to announce a UK first, and the mainstream media have given loyal support – perhaps encouraged by the full-page advertisements currently being run in newspapers by HM Government and the NHS (along with Facebook, which claims to be playing its part by distributing “authoritative” COVID-19 information). The NHS exhibited a smiling 90-year-old grandmother as the first patient to receive the “life-saving jab”, telling the world: “If I can have it at 90, then you can have it too." But the following account, by a nurse at a care home in the UK where residents and staff became among the first to receive the vaccine last week, gives pause for thought. The nurse’s First message, to a friend who also happens to be a Lockdown Sceptics reader, said: We received the COVID vaccine today. I have a fever, for which I took paracetamol, and pain and swelling at the site of the injection. One of my staff went home. She was the same as me, shivering and feverish.It is very awful. I am feeling so low. We’ll need to get out of this. I will inform the manager. We have ...

Christmas Cancelled? Blower's cartoon in today's Telegraph As London and Essex wake up to Tier 3 this morning – the end of nights out at your favourite pub or restaurant (or should that be, the end of your favourite pub or restaurant?) – talk has turned to whether the Government will stand by its promise of a Christmas lockdown amnesty, made by Boris Johnson just last week. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has written to the PM urging him to rethink the five-day loosening of restrictions. Sky News has the details. In a letter to Boris Johnson, Sir Keir said that while he understood that people will want to spend time with their loved ones after an "awful year", the situation has "clearly taken a turn for the worse since the decision about Christmas was taken"."It serves no-one for politicians to ignore this fact," the Labour leader said."It is my view that you should now convene COBRA in the next 24 hours to review whether the current relaxation is appropriate given the rising number of cases."It comes after two prominent medical journals said ministers should "follow the more cautious examples of Germany, Italy and the Netherlands" and not ease COVID-19 restrictions over the festive period. The public health establishment also piled in. In a rare joint editorial, the British Medical Journal and ...