“It’s not possible to stop everybody getting it, you can’t do that, and it’s also not desirable because you want immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future”. Not long after Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, spoke these words on 12 March 2020, East Asian countries showed that epidemics could be crushed through strong public health measures.
Our Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (Sage) was “unanimous”, however, that these countries would inevitably face a huge second wave. The impact of the UK’s “living with the virus” policies has included 153,000 excess deaths and £372bn of additional government spending owing to the economic crisis (GDP collapsed by 9.9 per cent in 2020). The debate now is to what extent the UK’s impressive vaccine roll-out has changed the equation of risks and benefits. Were Tory backbenchers and Sajid Javid right to hurry England out of lockdown on 19 July?
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