A shameful milestone has been reached and our government is very much culpable for the shockingly high death toll taken by the pandemic in Britain, which is still rising.
Widening inequality and a chronically underfunded and undermanned NHS combined with economic crisis and laissez-faire free-market fundamentalism have combined to create this horrendous outcome for the British people – and the pandemic is far from over.
We have been forced to put our hopes of an escape in a vaccine, but it didn’t have to happen this way. China’s example shows clearly that basic health measures could have stopped the problem in its tracks before the virus became endemic in our society.
And now we have the unseemly spectacle of vaccine wars between nations in western Europe as they jostle to save themselves before others.
Prime minister Boris Johnson says that now is ‘not the time for questions’, but the case is quite the opposite: we need to reverse course now, while lives can still be saved, not sit back and wait til some far-off day in which we may (or may not) ‘learn lessons for next time’.
