If three words, uttered in quick succession, were ever as irritating and meaningless it is: ‘successful’; ‘vaccine’; and ‘rollout’. Yet this is the catchphrase of people from politicians of both shades, through the mainstream media and—presumably to keep them on air—repeatedly on talkRADIO. Two of the words hold some water and those are ‘vaccine’ and ‘rollout’. We have a vaccine—in case you had missed the news—and we have a rollout, but by what means can either of these be considered a success? It is reminiscent of the medical joke: ‘the operation was a complete success, but the patient died’. I am struggling to think of other equally successful campaigns. I could successfully drive 150 miles to Berwick-upon-Tweed but my ‘success’ would be undermined if I had intended to go to London.
Viewed from one perspective, of course, the vaccine rollout could be considered a success. Boris Johnson and the Department of ‘Health’ think the vaccine campaign has been a success because we very rapidly appeared to produce a vaccine (“here is one we made earlier”), have allocated over a billion pounds to its development, purchase and to the vaccination programme and then claim success because speed of rollout has been one of the main criteria. But Boris and his crew are like a group of sailors looking for land down the wrong end of a telescope. For those of us at the receiving end, 37.8 million of us, who have had two doses (I do these things so you don’t have to) there are simply no criteria whereby this can be judged to have been successful. We have had the inconvenience of getting vaccinated—my first dose involved a 70 mile round journey—a record number of unpleasant side-effects and deaths and now some doubts about how effective the vaccines are. The vaccine rollout has been such a success that now, due to a statistical artefact, most COVID-19 deaths in the UK are in the vaccinated. We are told not to worry about this, but if the vaccines are the success we are assured they are would the number of deaths among the vaccinated not be none to negligible?
Leaving aside the ‘success’ of the medical aspects of the vaccination programme, there has been precious little evidence of success anywhere else. Some of us, myself included, were conned into taking the vaccine as it promised us a vaccine passport that would enable us to travel out of the country to places that recognised the passport and back in again, unrestricted. Over six months into the vaccine rollout, the vast majority of countries are inaccessible to us because our government does not allow us to visit. And, due to our home grown COVID delta variant doom-mongers, many of the others will not allow us to enter. Even returning to the UK requires us to take a series of expensive tests. We were told that once the at-risk groups were vaccinated, we were out of this. But the goalposts recede into the distance as we head towards vaccinating the whole population. If it were possible to vaccinate babies in the womb, I am sure the government would be considering it (Fact check: unborn babies cannot be vaccinated). And—notwithstanding the eighteen months from hell we have already had—we are on the verge of making one of the biggest ever departures from our concept of freedom in the shape of compulsory vaccinations and the use, within our own shores, of a vaccine passport.
If the UK government are allowed to get away with this grand illusion they will continue to issue this kind of doublespeak. Next up, and you heard it here first, on the basis of the millions we have spent on it and the numbers being processed, we will be hearing about the success of our UK Border Force in deterring illegal immigrants.
Opinions from the Unity News Network (UNN) editorial team & various contributors. | UNN always clearly distinguishes between news and opinion pieces and as an open minded outlet we publish views from a variety of people and organisation that do not necessarily reflect the views of UNN or its writers. Articles published under UNN Opinions are always opinion pieces and if published on behalf of a contributor will contain that authors name at the start of the piece.
