Day: 29 December 2020

“What we need, is more disrupters, more grumpy people to challenge the Government”, Alex Thomas, the Programme Director, Institute of Government, told Jeremy Hunt’s Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committee recently. Save your breath Alex. The problem is not a shortage of grumpy disrupters. The problem is the disrupters are not being heard – they are not being allowed to challenge Jeremy Hunt’s committee let alone the government. When Covid struck the U.K. in February there was a knowledge and information vacuum, and the global response was based on ‘follow the leader’; the leader was China and the course of lockdown was set. Ten months on there is a daily tsunami of robust Covid data and research papers from around the world for the Government to study and learn from, but they appear to have neither the bandwidth nor the inclination to do so. However, outside of Government there is an army of scientists, clinicians and statisticians in universities, companies, loose affiliations or on their own, who want to be part of the war effort and are working around the clock to see if there are answers in this vast new source of intelligence. If the Government and PHE are the Dunkirk mole then these volunteers are the flotilla of little boats. From the outset initiatives and ...

Gove: Primary School Children and Years 11 and 13 Will Return to School Next Week, But as For the Rest... Michael Gove said on the Today programme yesterday that primary schools, along with Year 11s and Year 13s in secondaries, would return to school in the first week of January, although he stopped short of saying other year groups would return later in the month and stressed that this was the Government's intention, not a cast-iron guarantee. BBC News has more. "It is our intention to make sure we can get children back to school as early as possible," he said.He said that prioritising children's attendance in school was "the right thing to do" but he acknowledged concerns about the new variant, which scientists believe may be more transmissible. "We have a new strain and it is also the case that we have also had, albeit in a very limited way, Christmas mixing, so we do have to remain vigilant," Mr Gove said."We are confident that we will be able to get schools back in good order. Our plan and our timetable is there, and we are working with teachers to deliver it."Mr Gove told BBC Breakfast the safe return to school would be built on an effective testing system, with teachers working "incredibly hard" to implement it. However, it's ...