Christopher Snowdon

Is this the real reason Boris introduced Covid restrictions?

(Photo: Getty)

If a day is a long time in politics, 36 hours is a lifetime with this government. On Tuesday morning, Dominic Raab told the BBC’s Today programme:

‘We don’t think Plan B is required. Why? Because of the success of the vaccine programme.’

It was a reasonable analysis and a sound conclusion. The UK has delivered an incredible 120 million Covid vaccines in the last year, including 21 million booster doses in the last few months. In South Africa, the epicentre of the Omicron outbreak, only 25 per cent of the population has been fully vaccinated and almost no one has had a booster shot. Whatever the situation in southern Africa – and it doesn’t look particularly perilous right now – the UK is better prepared for an Omicron surge than almost any other country in the world.

And yet at 6pm the following day, Boris Johnson was once again on television telling the public to brace themselves for more restrictions on their liberty. What happened in those 36 hours? Did the World Health Organisation release crucial new data showing that Omicron is more deadly than first feared? On the contrary, the WHO’s emergencies director said: ‘We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalisation, and there’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be so’ for the new variant. He noted that Omicron is no more dangerous than previous variants. ‘If anything,’ he said, ‘the direction is towards less severity’.

In 2020, Covid policy was often based on reasonable worst case scenarios. It now seems to be based on insane nightmare scenarios

Did scientists publish new evidence showing that the vaccines are no use against Omicron? Not at all. Instead, we got the first glimpse of a study

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