Hugely promising findings in the Oxford University coronavirus vaccine trials raise hopes we might finally be on the cusp of a way to beat the plague.
Deaths top 60,000 – three times above the Government’s “good outcome” target.
It is not only lives at stake but our livelihoods too as we see with Marks & Spencer, the latest household name to slash hundreds of jobs.
Until an effective vaccine is invented, people will die and the economy will be strangled by expensive precautions to slow the spread.
The Government’s order of 100 million doses of a vaccine developed at unprecedented speed is cause for optimism but it is still to be proved a magic bullet.
For our health and wealth we are relying on some of the world’s best scientists to come up with an answer.
Caring public
A National Care Service that runs alongside the National Health Service is no guarantee of perfection but it would almost certainly be an improvement on the current expensive chaos.
Labour’s leader Keir Starmer will craft his own policy agenda but the proposal by former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is worth considering carefully.
Senior figures in Unison, a trade union with intimate knowledge of how private homes operate, also favour nationalisation.
Smaller centres can be homely but profit-hungry corporations are part of the sector’s problem. We need to care about who owns and runs homes to improve care for everyone.
Thin-skin Bojo
The confirmation by England’s chief nurse Ruth May that she was dropped from a No 10 briefing after refusing to back Dominic Cummings’ lockdown trip disproves Downing Street’s denial.
The need for Boris Johnson to have human shields rather than experts who speak their minds is a sign of a thin-skinned Prime Minister behaving like a tinpot tyrant.
