Joe Biden promised 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days in office and he’s on target to deliver.
Bungling Boris Johnson has one-third of Britain’s 66 million population vaccinated and hopes to have the pubs open by June.
Micheal Martin has promised there’ll be no end to the lockdown until at least the middle of May.
We must take everything the Taoiseach says with a pinch of salt as just over two weeks ago he promised
that by the end of March, we will have administered 1.25 million doses.
If you subtract 400,000 doses from that you get the real figure.
After a year of being under house arrest, the public have had it up to their eyeballs with the word “virtual” but they never expected it to be applied to vaccines.
For that’s what we have at present. We see pictures of them, we hear all about them on TV and our monitors but they’re not actually there.
They say that to fight any war, be it against an enemy or an organism, you must first win the hearts of your people.
Far from doing that, the current Government has broken the public’s hearts with false promises and driven them out of their minds with penal lockdowns.
Before I go any further I have to declare a possible conflict of interest here. I – like many of you out there – want to stay alive.
I’ve had three prostate operations in the past year and had my heart reset with a defibrillator.
I’ve also been admitted to hospital twice in recent months with heart problems and I’m due to undergo heart surgery in the coming weeks.
If I’m still around by mid summer, I might be lucky enough to get a jab but there’s no guarantee because of the Government’s abominable record when it comes to delivering on its promises.
To get a handle on the scale of the fiasco, the average daily doses administered in the seven days up until March 7 last was 12,284 or 85,986 for the week.
At this average rate, and if four million vaccines are to be administered, it will take 1.7 years to complete the task.
It was exactly one year ago yesterday we marked the first death due to Covid-19 and since then 4,498 people have been added to that grim total.
Back then no one could have envisaged that a year on the country would be in the middle of a five-month lockdown after two previous ones failed to quall the spread of the virus.
While the Taoiseach and Tanaiste have sought to blame everyone but themselves for the situation the nation finds itself in, there is a growing public anger at Government’s incompetence and failure to deliver on promises.
Instead of raising our hopes, all this coalition of chaos has managed to do is raise their blood pressure.
A case in point was the Taoiseach crowing about securing an extra 46,500 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines as if it was some kind of breakthrough when this number is not enough to give a full dose to the population of a town the size of Drogheda.
The European Commission added insult to injury by claiming the extra batch it obtained would be distributed on a pro rata basis.
EU solidarity my arse.
Where was the pro rata when the Irish people were saddled with 42% of Europe’s bank debt a decade ago?
The Government’s deference to Brussels can be compared to former administrations’ subservience to the Church and now, as then, it’s the public who are the losers.
Only now is Mr Martin getting off his ass by requesting a meeting with the AstraZeneca boss and the only reason he’s doing it is because that very ass has been kicked all week by the Shinners.
The reason AstraZeneca has delivered to Britain and the US and torn up contracts with the EU is because of Brussels’ ineptitude and craven compliance of its client states.
There is a real danger now that people will no longer tolerate endless restrictions largely brought about by Government bungling and the EU’s incompetence.
