The UK Government will not enforce the mandation of vaccination against Covid – it is not the kind of things UK Governments – especially Conservative led Governments .
The importance of dealing with the Omnicon problem now is highlighted by Stuart McDonald.
Latest modelling of the Omicron wave by @cmmid_lshtm suggests the following for England:
🦠 21 – 35 million infections
🏥 175 – 492 thousand hospitalisations
💀 25 – 75 thousand deaths https://t.co/tf6vWXn1kE pic.twitter.com/UekX6RBYYC
— stuart mcdonald (@ActuaryByDay) December 11, 2021
The Prime Minister took the rare step of interrupting TV schedules last night to speak to the nation about his plan to boost every adult by the end of the year
I don’t think many regarded Boris Johnson’s “boost-boos- boost” as authorative. But I am quite sure that most of us will be queuing around the block to be boosted for Christmas.
We might not trust Boris Johnson, but we do trust the Vax. Johnson is clinging to the booster like a drowning man to the life-raft.
I am struck by the remarkably calm way we are reacting to what is being presented to us as a crisis. Despite the Sun’s “Omigawd” headline, we seem calm as we face the “tidal wave”.
We are however a long way from full innoculation and there is a hardcore of people who refuse to be vaccinated, who are a risk to themselves and the NHS. How do we get them to listen?
So what of the anti-vaxxers?
So who has and who will influence the UK’s non and under-vaxxed to boost their protection agains Coronavirus (in all its mutationis)?
There is little or no pressure from UK employers to require staff to be vaccinated. This is in sharp contrast to some other OECD countries.
The FT reports that two thirds of American companies are demanding their employees be vaccinated, jumping the gun on Jo Biden’s bid to make vaccination a condition of work (a bid that is currently stalled).
Some Governments take a view that they can require citizens to be jabbed. Austria is the first European country to make vaccination compulsory. This weekend it saw mass protests in Viennna and other major cities. Austria currently ranks low on the leaderboard of European countries vaccination success.
There is a long tail to this chart, Bulgaria has on 49/100 as a vaccine score. The UK has reached this high level of vaccination through voluntary compliance.
We should remember that we are both well vaxxed and getting herd immunised. 11m (getting on for one in six of us) have tested positive for Covid in the UK.
It is a mark of the lack of testing in the earluy months of the pandemic that the chart is so skewed towards the latest months. The chart suggests that many people who have never been tested for Covid have had it – are we reaching herd immunity in the UK?
The concern over the next three month is about hospitalisations and deaths, the view that we can control the impact of the new variant with a boost is defensive but there is another more optamistic view that the way to move on from the pandemic will be for most of us to have been infected but only mildly. I think most people now see vaccination as a means to protect against mortal peril , rather than as a way of sidestepping infection.
And many people see those who are not vaxxed, as a menace.
Covid maturity
We have probably experienced Covid – as thoroughlty as any country in the world. We know the infection, respect it and regard vaccination as a passport to social contact,
Which suggests that the greatest advocates for vaccination, are the British people.
Trusting the science in the UK
Last night I heard Radio 5’s up all nighter Dotun Adebayo say that he would’t be inviting any of his family to his Christmas party unless they were fully vaxed. Will peer or famililal pressure be enough?
I suspect it will. We may not trust our Government but we do trust the science. If anti-vaxxers become social lepars, the pressure is more likely to come from friends and family than from work or Government.
We are proud to have been pioneers in Covid vaccine research and we bestow on the scientists that have created vaccines , a special integrity.
Authority is achieved in the UK, through integrity and we should be very proud of that.