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Remember “flattening the curve”? Some time back in the dark ages of March this year, politicians and policy-makers accepted the idea that the Chinese virus was out of the lab and here to stay, so the best approach was to keep its progress manageable. Somehow, without any public consultation, that strategy gave way to “psychotically counting cases and never removing restrictions until we have a vaccine”. Improbably, politicians like Jacinda Ardern claimed to have “eradicated” the virus, never mind those cases that just keep on cropping up.
As for those insufficiently cowed citizens who insist on asking such pesky questions as when borders are finally going to reopen and is the government ever going to take their foot off our necks, governments keep dangling a fat, juicy carrot. A vaccine, they insist, is the magic wand just waiting to be waved. Any day, now!
Except that the vaccine, as one scientist has already put it, is “a hope, not a strategy”. Now, another scientist is pouring cold water on the fantasy that a vaccine will magically make the Wuhan plague just go away.
The UK’s Chief Scientist warns that COVID-19 will become endemic like the annual flu, despite the possible availability of vaccines by early next year.
Speaking to a Commons National Security Strategy Committee, Sir Patrick Vallance said the rollout of a successfully trialled vaccine would occur hopefully after the start of the British spring. However, he said these vaccines were unlikely to eradicate the virus.
Obviously, this jumped-up “scientist” hasn’t bothered consulting the Genius of the Age, Jacinda Ardern. But, unlike Ardern, Vallance deals in reality, not fairy-stories.
Vallance said it was important to give the public a “realistic picture” of the efficacy of the vaccine, given the average time of making a vaccine “from scratch” is 10 years.
“I do think we should not over promise,” he said.
“We can’t be certain, but I think it’s unlikely we will end up with a truly sterilising vaccine, something that completely stops infection, and it’s likely this disease will circulate and be endemic.
“And this starts to look more like annual flu than anything else and that may be the direction we end up going.”
Wait, isn’t anyone who compares COVID to the flu just a big ol’ science denier?
But this scientist seems bent on puncturing the bubble of smug enveloping the beehive.
He reminded MPs that there was only one human disease – smallpox – that had truly been eradicated through a vaccine and that it was “a very difficult thing to do.”
“And it never been done before about five years at the very quickest,” he said.
But it’s not just Ardern who’s living in a vaccine fantasy. In Australia, the Morrison government is also pinning much of its recovery plans on a delusional vaccine timeline.
This week the Australian Medical Association warned that it was time to question whether Australia’s roadmap for dealing with the pandemic remained “fit for purpose”.
The AMA is challenging the government’s assumption that a population-wide vaccine would be in place next year, cautioning that medical experts believe that “we could be living with the virus for some considerable period of time”.
Dr Omar Khorshid, the AMA president, said that Australian governments needed to reinforce the need to maintain social distancing rather than allowing life to return to normal because community transmission has been all but eliminated.
Lest this sound like music to the ears of the COVID authoritarians who are addicted to the power-rush of lockdowns, what is being urged here is the sort of sensible measures so many people adopted of their own volition in the early days of the pandemic: good hand hygiene and appropriate social distancing. But, where’s the fun in that for the “public health” little Hitlers who’ve acquired a taste for ruling with an iron jackboot?
A vaccine may or may not be developed in suspiciously record time, but what’s certain is that politicians will ignore warnings like these and continue to exploit the Chinese virus for all the mileage they can get out of it.
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