It’s time to drop the fairy tales, First Minister – and deal with a REAL matter of life and death

THERE were supermarket scrambles at the height of the pandemic and there may be more to come in the event of a No Deal Brexit.

One commodity that’s in no danger of running out is rhetoric – tonnes of it – delivered direct from Nicola Sturgeon’s podium at her doom-laden daily briefings.

The tone has turned Churchillian as the First Minister looks towards a brighter future: there was much talk of a light at the end of the tunnel.

Nicola knows best: each day she assures us that if we stick to the rules all will be well – a nurse administering bitter but necessary medicine.

The problem is that when it comes to actual medicine, there’s a gap between the grand promises made on her BBC broadcasts and the reality on the ground.

When the Pfizer/BioNTech. vaccine was given regulatory approval, Miss Sturgeon’s platitudes flowed freely: corners were turned, dark days would be behind us, better times lay ahead.

Now we discover that while many healthy over-80s south of the Border will be able to get the Covid vaccine at their GP surgeries from today (TUES), in Scotland they’ll face a longer wait.

Indeed, it might be February before they’re vaccinated, as part of the second wave of inoculations – which may well take place during a third wave of Covid in the wake of the temporary relaxation of lockdown starting next week.

In Glasgow, NHS text messages have been sent to some patients, warning them their GP is ‘facing unprecedented levels of demand’.

The flu vaccine scheme was a mess in large parts of Scotland, prompting a belated apology from health chiefs in Glasgow, after the young were prioritised over the old.

As a dry run for the Covid jabs, it didn’t bode well, and it meant GP practices, previously excluded from vaccinating for flu as the health boards supposedly took charge, had to be drafted back into action.

So, even if the coronavirus vaccine was technically available through your family doctor in Scotland, it’s possible they’d be too busy sorting out the fallout from the flu debacle to give it to you.

Health Secretary Jeane Freeman, not a figure who inspires much if any confidence, said yesterday that she’s chatting to GPs about how they will start vaccinating – but shouldn’t she have called them before now?

The first care home jabs yesterday were welcome – the death toll among this frail and highly vulnerable population is alarming.

Yet only a tiny fraction of Scotland’s care home residents will get the coronavirus vaccine – the vast majority of Scotland’s 36,000 older people in nursing homes are still in the dark about when the vaccination programme will be extended to them.

Only a few hundred residents over the age of 80 are expected to be vaccinated from the first supply of 65,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab, with most likely to be waiting until well into the new year.

Care home boss Robert Kilgour said none of his 15 homes had been told of any vaccine plan, and he observed that SNP ministers ‘are very good at the soundbite podium promises that we’ve had from the beginning of this and less good at the frontline delivery’.

Yesterday Miss Sturgeon boasted about Scotland being the first part of the UK to take the Covid vaccine into care homes – a nice line, but sadly not true, as it’s also happening in Belfast.

And there’s a real lack of detail about how vaccines will be distributed, with one health board refusing to respond fully to a freedom of information request about its rollout plans.

Edinburgh Airport boss Gordon Dewar, warning the aviation industry was on its knees, spoke of his concern about the vaccine strategy, such as it is, last week.

He said: ‘We’ve looked at the designs that they’re looking at for their vaccine rollouts and they are woefully inadequate.

‘They will not deliver a wide vaccine capability until the back end of next year, as it stands. Put this in context – they’re not even attempting to start vaccines at mass drive-through centres until February.’

It was a damning intervention, and yet Miss Sturgeon dismissed his remarks, saying he wasn’t a public health scientist, and nor was she (mind you, she was Health Secretary for five years, but maybe she’d rather we forgot about that).

(Podium politics: but Sturgeon’s record is more spin than substance)

Not that viewers of U.S. television channel CNN would have picked up on any of these anxieties when, in an interview with Miss Sturgeon, host Christiane Amanpour said Scotland had come close to wiping out Covid, before its resurgence.

The First Minister was praised for ‘leading [Scotland] through a very successful first wave’.

The slick PR about the giant strides made against Covid has travelled across the Atlantic, though inconveniently the data tells a slightly different story.

An investigation last month, using weeks of official statistics, suggested that proportionately more people have been dying of coronavirus in Scotland than in England.

Yet an Ipsos Mori poll of voters in Scotland found that 72 per cent thought the Scottish Government was handling the coronavirus crisis well.

One wonders how many of the SNP’s supporters had second thoughts when they saw Joe FitzPatrick, a low-profile Public Health Minister, giving a stumbling and patchy account of his government’s vaccine plans at Holyrood – as a horrified John Swinney looked on.

Mr FitzPatrick had the air of a man recollecting a nightmare in which he had to address MSPs on a subject about which he was entirely clueless – only to discover it wasn’t a bad dream after all: it was actually happening.

But those rosy opinion polls may change if vaccination becomes an election issue in the run-up to the polls in May – and let’s face it, it’s the only thing most of us now care about.

It’s also an entirely binary matter – get it right, or get it wrong: the buck stops with the SNP, and lives are at stake.

Miss Sturgeon is getting in her excuses early for the failure of the vaccine drive, and no doubt she’ll blame Brexit, frankly whatever the outcome of the trade negotiations.

If it’s a botched job, voters may remind themselves of the SNP’s record on the nuts and bolts of managing the country on health, education and policing.

Negligent doesn’t cover it: the SNP has tried to bury its blunders and incompetence in an avalanche of spin and recrimination, directed at mythical oppressors in London.

These are the same malign Tories who granted the Nationalists’ wish for an independence referendum in 2014; who funded furlough to stave off mass unemployment; who paid for vaccine research and sent precious stocks of it north; and who made it possible for Miss Sturgeon to promise a £500 bonus for NHS staff.

So it’s time for her to live up to the commitments she’s made and stop patronising us from her podium, day after day, with soothing noises about how everything will work out in the end.

Drop the fairy tales, First Minister, and get it right, or lives will be needlessly lost – and you will be judged harshly for your failure.

*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on December 15, 2020.