DEAR SAJID,
Congratulations on your appointment as Health Secretary.
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Some will no doubt see it as a poisoned chalice.
But there is no more important job for anyone to be doing at the moment.
You were quite right yesterday to say that your task is to restore Britain’s economic and cultural life.
The stakes could not be higher.
Many companies have clung on through three lockdowns thanks to emergency loans and the furlough scheme, but it doesn’t take an ex-Chancellor like yourself to know that no business can survive indefinitely without being able to attract customers.
For as long as we are forced to live under Covid restrictions, many will find this difficult.
We can’t, of course, eliminate all risk from our lives, the question is how much risk are we prepared to accept?
You will, of course, have seen yesterday’s figures from the Medical Research Council estimating that just 0.085 per cent of Covid infections now result in death.
Thanks to vaccination, Covid now seems to be less deadly than seasonal flu, which is widely estimated to have an infection fatality rate of 0.1 per cent.
WHAT OF SOCIAL DISTANCING?
Yet we still live under all manner of restrictions that no government has ever tried to impose in order to cope with seasonal flu.
These impose a huge burden on businesses which rely on normal human interaction.
According to your government’s Events Research Programme, 28 per cent of people say they would not want to go to a concert or sporting event if forced to wear a face mask, and 43 per cent say they will not attend if the venue is banned from selling food and drink.
Your predecessor didn’t seem committed to ending the requirement to wear face masks.
Earlier this month, he said it would go on July 19, but in February he suggested that face masks could remain compulsory through next winter (even though he was photographed taking off his own as soon as he entered 10 Downing Street).
One of your advisers on the Sage committee, Susan Michie, even suggested that we should be wearing them “for ever”.
Yet there is little hard evidence that they ever served much purpose, and in the early stages of the pandemic, as you will recall, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries even suggested masks could do more harm than good.
Unless you have some evidence that hasn’t been shared with the rest of us, surely it is time to ditch mandatory masks for good?
Meanwhile, one thing we do know about masks is the damage they do to the environment, with 102million single-use types thrown away in the UK each week.
And what of social distancing?
Our cities, trains, shops and theatres are simply not designed to accommodate people who are spaced two metres, or even one metre, apart.
Urban life will never be able to return to normal unless these requirements are dropped.
You will also, no doubt, be running a close eye over the Test and Trace programme.
As you will know, £37billion has been allocated to this scheme and yet, according to the minutes of one Sage meeting in September, it has made no more than a “marginal” difference to infection numbers.
It is ludicrous that many thousands of people every week — 137,000 in the week to June 16 alone — are still ordered to self-isolate for ten days on the grounds that they may have come into contact with someone who has tested positive.
This tyranny is imposed even on people who have been double vaccinated.
Yesterday, the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force were all “zapped” and confined to barracks for ten days on the grounds they had attended a meeting with Covid-positive Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the Defence Staff.
Whole year groups of school pupils have been sent home after one child tested positive in a lateral flow test, which are notoriously unreliable anyway.
According to a study by Oxford University and Government research lab Porton Down, 0.4 per cent of lateral flow tests performed in the community produce false positive results.
That might sound reassuringly low, yet if everyone in the country was tested twice weekly, as the Government would like, it would mean 500,000 people a week having to self-isolate for no purpose whatsoever.
It might not be your direct responsibility, but I am sure you will also be asking yourself what purpose there is in keeping so many countries on the amber list — travellers from which are required to isolate at home for ten days after arrival.
It is killing the tourist industry and thousands of jobs which go with it.
Outward-bound tourism doesn’t just help other countries’ economies, according to the Centre for Economic and Business Research it adds £12.2billion a year to the UK economy and employs 214,500 people.
The other part of your job will be to get the NHS back to dealing with conditions other than Covid, something your predecessor sadly neglected.
SACRIFICED SO MUCH
According to Cancer Research UK, 45,000 fewer people than normal began cancer treatment in the year to March 2021.
Those “missing” cancer cases must still be out there, and if we don’t act quickly many of them will eventually translate into deaths.
The public has responded with great enthusiasm to the vaccination programme.
Contrary to fears that many would shun the vaccine, more than 95 per cent of the over-70s and more than 90 per cent of the over-50s had had a first jab by May 15.
According to the Office for National Statistics, more than seven in ten of us now have antibodies to Covid-19.
We are no longer the society we were in March 2020, when we had little immunity to the virus.
As you told the House of Commons yesterday: “The restrictions on our freedoms, they must come to an end.
“We owe it to the British people who have sacrificed so much to restore their freedoms as quickly as we possibly can.
“And not to wait a moment longer than we need to.”
Hear hear!
Now it is time to follow up these wise words with action.
We’re waiting, Health Secretary. We’re still waiting.
