We need a shot in the arm, not a fresh bid to break up Britain
DID you get Nicola Sturgeon’s letter about vaccination, the one saying thanks for all your sacrifice during the pandemic?
You might have assumed, for a giddy moment, that it was an appointment letter — but if so your hopes would’ve been quickly dashed.
Care home residents and health and social care staff are rightly first in line for inoculation ‘until the vaccine… becomes more widely available’.
The idea of availability is mentioned again in the letter — almost as if the First Minister was getting her excuses for failure in early, with a spot of expectation management.
Her largely pointless missive ends by thanking us for ‘sticking with it’, although it’s not as if you can opt out of lockdown, at least not without risking arrest.
And for now these crippling constraints on everyday life remain in place, to the extent that even having a coffee with a friend in a park is apparently Verboten.
That makes getting this vaccine out of its phials, or fridges, and into as many arms as possible all the more essential — but why on earth is it taking so long?
For weeks now, we’ve seen over-80s in England getting the jab at their GP surgeries — Sir Ian McKellen, 81, who played Gandalf, was among the first to receive a dose.
Even a knight or indeed a wizard would struggle to magic up a drop of vaccine north of the Border for older folk in the community (98 per cent of over-80s have yet to be inoculated).
Dr Andrew Buist of the British Medical Association has warned the vaccine rollout is being hindered by ‘patchy’ supplies, making the goal to give jabs to everyone aged over 80 by early February seem more than a little ambitious.
There are an ‘initial’ 900,000 doses of the vaccine for Scotland in January, according to Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, although only 224,840 people had been vaccinated by January 15, or five per cent of the population (compared with 6.3 per cent in England).
Inevitably, in the best traditions of the public sector, the entire process is mired in red tape — one dentist said he’d given up registering as a vaccinator amid a barrage of paperwork.
Equality and diversity awareness is part of the training, naturally, but it means 15 hours of modules before you can even start the application process.
This kind of nonsense would be a laughing matter in normal times — but when we’re battling a pandemic that has claimed thousands of lives it’s simply unforgivable, and of course avoidable.
Didn’t anyone in the planning stage (assuming there was one) point out that 15 hours of training might be excessive — indeed, for some experienced health professionals, even 15 minutes might be over the top?
In England, dentists can self-certify to vaccinate, but we do things differently here — with the net result that we’re falling far behind the pace, despite Miss Sturgeon’s enthusiasm for ‘healthy competition’.
There are 17 mass vaccination hubs south of the Border and in Scotland we only have the makeshift hospital NHS Louisa Jordan, where health and social care workers got the jab on Saturday.
Thankfully, the cavalry is on the horizon in the form of the Army, with troops drafted in to set up 80 new vaccination centres.
Armed Forces commanders can play a vital role in getting the job done, though shouldn’t they have been drafted in earlier, given that the Pfizer vaccine was given regulatory approval at the start of December?
All adults should be vaccinated — or offered the jab — by September, the UK Government has pledged, while in Scotland there are some caveats — it’s all down to supply, and Miss Sturgeon is only ‘hopeful’ that this target can be met.
She seems a little more ‘hopeful’ about a second independence referendum being held later this year — a good indication of where her real priorities lie.
Miss Sturgeon was rattled yesterday at her daily coronavirus briefing when she was asked about the practicalities of a May election and a Scexit vote in the autumn, saying this wasn’t the forum for ‘independence stuff’ (though in the past it has been).
Yet at the weekend it emerged the SNP had launched an ‘independence taskforce’ to be based in the SNP’s headquarters, and led by a ‘high-profile and experienced Yes campaigner’.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief, then — yes, this is the biggest public health emergency in living memory, but don’t worry, a crack group of experts is on hand — to destroy the very mechanism that is allowing the vaccine rollout to happen, however glacially.
It will publish policy papers making the case for separation, create campaign material as part of ‘door to door activism’ when the pandemic is over, and establish a ‘national information service’ — no doubt a reliable and unjaundiced source of data on this toughest of constitutional questions.
In reality, it’s a no-brainer: the SNP, for purely tactical reasons, has decided it’s pro-EU, so its ambition is to get back into that discredited club at the earliest opportunity.
Yet in the EU vaccination rates are sluggish, stoking a growing political crisis — the UK vaccinated as many people on a single day last week than France has managed in total.
Scotland benefited from the UK Government’s early purchase of 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 100 million of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, even if we’re now doing our level best to make a mess of distribution.
It’s beyond shameful that we have an administration that is spending any of its time — even a nanosecond — in trying to dismantle the partnership that has made mass vaccination and Army involvement possible.
This is a time for cool heads, clever planning and a Stakhanovite work ethic at every level of government and public health bureaucracy.
Whether mass vaccination centres (when we get round to opening them) should operate round the clock shouldn’t be a matter for debate — they must be 24/7, and they should have been up and running by now.
It’s an abdication of the government responsibility that matters most — keeping the country and its citizens safe — for our leaders to be engaged in cooking up independence plots when so many are dying.
Meanwhile, the collateral effects of this lockdown — from shutting schools to the vast majority of children to economic devastation — are becoming more evident by the day.
It’s impossible for Miss Sturgeon and her team to drop the cause that has united them (as the wider party descends into bitter factionalism), even in the middle of this epic struggle with a disease that has turned the world upside down.
With the Covid death toll in Scotland nearing 8,000, what we need is inspirational leadership, logistical nous and a government laser-focused on putting this nightmare behind us.
But what we have is a group of obsessives for whom nothing is more important than their dangerous fantasy of plunging us into another bout of constitutional turmoil.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on January 19, 2021.
