For every Covid case we take in, we erode our capacity to treat those with cancer or heart disease, increasing our backlog
You have to hand it to Sajid Javid for sheer, barefaced doublespeak. At the start of the month he wrote an emollient letter to every single one of the NHS’s 1.3 million staff to assure us he felt “a deep affection for the NHS, and the brilliant people who work there”. Even better, the new health secretary insisted: “I want to give you what you need to recover from this difficult period, and make it as easy as possible for you to do your job.”
Well. How we longed just this once to believe our secretary of state. Alas, it took a mere two days for him to go back on his words. Javid wrote an op ed for the Mail on Sunday in which he declared that opening up Britain, even as Covid cases soar stratospherically, would give us a country “that is not just freer, but healthier, too”. Then the prime minister issued the coup de grace, officially announcing his much-trailed new policy of binning all pretence at controlling Covid because if not now, when? I don’t know, we tried to mutter through our broken teeth, maybe when a few more people have been vaccinated?
