How to approach today’s “news” that Covid19 immunity is still very low (at 5% or thereabouts) and “may not last very long” – and “therefore” two vaccinations a year may be required? (The clue is in my use of inverted commas, if only to accentuate just how inverted this madness is).
You couldn’t make this up? That really takes the biscuit? Can you see it coming yet? Are they ‘avin’ a larf or what?
I think on balance, I’ll stick with a slight re-rendering of Lou Reed’s lyric from his amazing album track Dirty Boulevard:
‘Somewhere, Pharma CEOs are laughing ’til they wet their pants’
You have to hand it to Peter Horby, Emma Walmsley, Neil Ferguson and all the rest of the crew having themselves a ball here: they really don’t mind how far their bare faces are hanging out – no con, however glaring, would ever make them blush. Ferguson was out there waving his buttocks at the media over the weekend with dark forebodings about Christmas; Horby took centre stage a fortnight ago with his claim to have isolated a vaccine that would go straight to testing on human volunteers; and Walsmley (now a Dame, no less) was out and about yet again at the outset of October – explaining to any passing airhead why it is really jolly important for Pharmcos to make aircraft-hangars full of money because of course, their investment costs are so high. There’s a grain of truth in it, but one grain is hard to find in a hanger crammed with million pound notes.
The US public, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, shares my experential cynicism: in a recent study of 25 professions, the Pharmafia came bottom. Lower even than politicians and lawyers, alreadty: you can’t get any lower than that.
But let’s not lose the central point here. Let’s get it up in Dayglo on a barrage balloon until the Sleeple finally say, “Really? Gosh.”. Or words to that effect.
First of all, you lie your head off to tell a bunch of variously dimwitted and utterly bought legisators that the science says Lockown…..we must all hide behind the sofa – after having put a mask on it to further our united war on this global scourge (Dame Emma’s latest desciption) that rages across the world – a veritable fauchage. Or is it a faux charge?
Then you say oh dear, only 5% of people have immunity. How did that happen? And why isn’t anyone at work?
Still, nihil desperandum people – look what Professor Horby has just pulled out of his conjuror’s hat – why, it is a sign – a finding no less: getting immunity doesn’t last because well, hey, it just doesn’t….so now we need more vaccine to get the immunity higher…..and give it to people twice as often.
Noises off as Dame Emma orgasms.
OK, two simple points. First, from where has this outcome emanated? Horby is not exactly squeaky-clean when it comes to findings that do or don’t suit his book. You might be amazed, but there are hacks in both the UK and France who allege that Peter the Piper is something of a slippery eel. “He lied to us,” as one senior Parisian newshound told me three months ago.
I’m leading the charge here for a skilled and less naively gung-ho team of Whoreby’s peers to take a look at his workings out and methods – with no holds barred: it’s time the Virusecrecy was fully investigated before this dystopian commerce turns into the biggest human tragedy in modern history.
Secondly, has anyone in the Fourth Estate considered the somewhat more obvious interpretention of what Horby alleges – viz, that like almost all viruses, it has started to mutate…..not having burned out after the First Wave because Lockdown offered only limited victims?
Boris Johnson is a human kaleidoscope of evasion whose fate in the end will be to collide with the truth and thus find himself reduced to smithereens. I grudgingly supported him on the Brexit issue, but his commitment to it is once again in doubt.
However, such is the nature of contemporary public affairs, as usual it is a case of “first things first”. The Prime Minister has been ruling by decree for far too long, and his ‘strategy’ for Covid19 is fatally flawed. It’s time the Rule of Law was brought to bear on the technocratic class, high time the mass media had something more to offer on this burning issue than “We wonder why” – and well past the time when our survival as an economic State came before an illness that might well kill me (given my age and lifestyle) but not many other people.
BoJo cares not for our survival – merely his own survival in power. I fingered him and Harriet Harman in 2010 as “the two greatest dangers to liberal democracy” in the UK. She wisely left the ring. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Britannia, and behead the leader of the Government Party.
This morning we have 53 Tory MPs writing a letter to the PM condemning damage to the North from Tier 3. What a shower they are: they’re worried about their seats, not the central core of the problem. The degree of principle involved is made clear by the fact that the numbers were reduced to 40 once these lowlife fodder got wind of the leak to the media.
Pretty much everyone (myself included) fears the change we need, because it’s obvious the Party Opposite would simply involve a switch from two-faced Bojo the Clown to Flatscreen-faced Starmer the Hasn’t Been.
We are, as a culture, sinking into a quicksand of self-destruction. I leave you today with last Saturday’s effort here to remind folks of my own solution to the mess.
It’s not exactly what you’d call a quick fix.
The Slog 