The story of British children and Covid-19 is a strange one. It’s worth telling not just in its own right but because it feeds into the UK’s overall coronavirus response, and it is emblematic of the dysfunction in our broader politics.
During the summer of this year, you might comfortably have predicted that the UK would vaccinate schoolchildren in line with other developed countries, and in good time before the start of the new academic year. After all, the education and mental health of the next generation had been the subject of much earnest libertarian hand-wringing, and professed concern for our young was one of the more emotive arguments for the abandonment of all caution on “freedom day” (19 July).
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