IF we can’t keep calm and carry on when a new variant of coronavirus emerges, then – to paraphrase Chas and Dave – Covid loopy nuts are we.
Because the jabs work.
Getting vaccinated usually prevents you from becoming seriously sick, keeps you out of hospital and stops catching Covid becoming a death sentence.
And the UK has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.
Even as Covid cases hit a five-month high, deaths and hospital numbers here continue to fall.
Even as the Omicron variant has gloomy Government ministers telling us to do our drunken Christmas party snogging on Zoom, we can see the shining light of freedom ahead.
All thanks to our world-beating vaccination programme.
We should be feeling a warm glow of national pride, rather than vowing to work from home until 2022.
We should be rejoicing rather than cancelling Christmas parties, travel plans and nativity plays.
In Europe, only Malta and Iceland with their itsy-bitsy populations have higher vaccination rates than the UK.
Panicky European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is yakking about making jabs compulsory, although she can’t explain how that would work in free countries.
Because it wouldn’t.
But the British have embraced vaccination as our path to freedom.
Nearly 50million of us are double-jabbed.
Almost 19million have had the booster jab — the vaccination that provides 93 per cent protection against serious disease.
Overwhelmingly, it is the unvaccinated who are at higher risk of dying now.
It’s true we do not yet know everything about the Omicron strain of Covid.
But early indications suggest that all the doom-mongering is premature.
“Nothing I have seen about this new variant warrants the extreme action the UK Government has taken in response to it,” writes Dr Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who alerted the world to the Omicron variant.
Dr Coetzee points out that nobody in South Africa is known to have been seriously ill with Omicron, although their R-rate has lurched from 1 to 3.5 in a matter of weeks.
Yet the UK, US and EU have imposed draconian rules on extended quarantines, mask-wearing and the irresponsibility of snogging under the mistletoe.
SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE
“In South Africa, we have retained a sense of perspective,” says Dr Coetzee.
“We’re waiting to see what the variant actually means.”
Are we going to have a collective panic attack every time a new variant of Covid emerges?
Definitely! Because there are so many vested interests in this never-ending state of emergency.
Bossy politicians who have developed an addiction to levels of social control that would have been unthinkable two years ago.
Bungling organisations, from your local council to your bank, use Covid as a cover for appalling customer service.
Civil servants are using the virus as an excuse to skive from home for ever.
Left-wing teaching unions and devolved governments use Covid as a big stick to beat Boris.
And this Tory Government can blame historic levels of taxation on Covid.
Oh, what a lovely virus!
The horrible, unspoken truth is that a lot of people are absolutely loving it.
The power-mad, the lazy, the incompetent.
And if they have their way, then every time the virus mutates — as it surely will — schools will be shut, offices abandoned, healthy businesses shuttered, planes grounded, operations cancelled, cancer patients told to fend for themselves and youngsters with their hormones raging advised to do their courting on Zoom.
And they are sucking the joy out of what it means to be alive.
SUCKING THE JOY OUT OF LIFE
They are condemning a generation of students to a stunted, tenth-rate education.
They are destroying healthy businesses and condemning hard-working grafters to the dole queue.
And this country is overreacting to the point of madness.
Because our vaccination roll-out has already put the worst of this pandemic in the UK’s rear-view mirror.
Yet Mason Wilby, age four, was isolated from other children at Wigton Infant School because he had a minor cough and a snotty nose — not unknown in four-year-old boys, as I recall.
Mason’s mum Chloe says that when she went to collect Mason, he was being isolated in an outdoor shed.
She later had to call 999 because Mason looked like he had hypothermia.
Is isolating a four-year-old boy with a runny nose in a freezing shed REALLY what we mean by “living with Covid”?
We need to get a grip. We need to stop the covert Covid-lovers from controlling us.
Whatever Omicron, Delta and all other variants of Covid chuck at us, the British are well placed to face it.
Cancelling Christmas parties, imposing harsh travel rules and isolating a four-year-old kid because he has a runny nose is not living with Covid.
It is surrendering to Covid.
Our booster programme is being massively ramped up, with all over-18s to be offered that life-saving, game-changing third jab by the end of next month.
Should we be wary of new variants?
Yes, but we should also stop acting as if mass vaccination has never happened.
History will record that in the war against Covid-19, vaccinations were our generation’s Normandy landings.
It is time to stop waving the white flag of surrender.
And to start living again.
Bias is a BBC bonus
AMOL RAJAN, who presented the BBC documentary The Princes And The Press, is revealed to have a fine collection of rabid republican rants in his closet.
Amol once called Prince Philip a “racist buffoon”, the Diamond Jubilee a “celebration of mediocrity” and Prince Charles “scientifically illiterate”.
I spent the Silver Jubilee on a boat trip with the Sex Pistols sporting a “God Save The Queen” T-shirt from punk shop Sex, and even I gasped with shock.
But none of Rajan’s anti-royalist rants will hamper his career at the BBC.
The BBC does not really do the impartiality thing any more.
I might have a fiver on bling-laden Amol – the man has more jewellery than Ratners – becoming the next Director-General.
