JUST occasionally the real world comes up against the ludicrous world we have invented for ourselves.
One of those times is now, with the roll-out of the anti-Covid vaccine.
We’ve already got more than 4.5million doses of at least two different vaccines, and more coming in.
In the real world — the world we used to live in, years ago — these would be administered pronto, and by now a large proportion of the population would have been immunised.
Not a chance, not in our brave new world.
That’s because the people administering the vaccine and overseeing the procedures haven’t been properly trained.
No — nothing to do with the medical side of things.
They haven’t been properly trained in that most crucial issue, racial awareness.
Because that’s the most important thing right now, isn’t it? Making sure nobody is offended as the jab goes in.
Not just that. They haven’t been on an anti-terrorism course, either.
Because that’s bloody important too, isn’t it?
These are just two of the requirements for new staff engaged in rolling out this vaccine. There are many, many more.
Former NHS workers talk in despair about having to fill in a 20-page questionnaire and produce qualifications gained decades ago.
The medical bodies have lobbied for the ridiculous red tape to be reduced.
GET THE JOB DONE
And the Government has given in on the terrorism stuff. But too late, too late.
This is a crisis. It’s a bit like Dunkirk. Can you imagine if, in 1940, we had the same mindset as today?
“Ah, so you’re volunteering to cross the Channel in your little boat to rescue our soldiers. Excellent.
“Can you fix a date to attend a course in gender awareness as soon as possible?
“This is to ensure that if you meet any German soldiers you address them with gender-neutral pronouns. We have a vacancy for the course on November 29. In Preston.”
The main problem is our Civil Service, I think.
Inflexible, cumbersome, hopelessly bureaucratic. People who in the main have never really lived in the real world — and certainly not the commercial world.
They are bound and strangled by red tape. There is no hunger to get the job done, just a commitment to do everything by the rules, no matter how stupid or irrelevant those rules might be.
We saw the same thing with attempts to get our frontline workers equipped with protective clothing last spring.
The whole thing took an age and a half — and in the meantime health workers contracted the virus and some died.
The same bureaucratic incompetence rendered our track-and-trace programme a lamentable failure.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the Army took just a couple of weeks to knock up a whole bunch of enormous hospitals — the Nightingales.
No messing about. Got the job done.
Here’s the deal. If you want something done fast, for Christ’s sake keep the bureaucrats out of it.
Give it to the Army or the private sector. But keep the mandarins away.
Or we’ll still be waiting for our jab in about 2031.
