Good morning,
Worst Public Health Failure - Covid
Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister of the UK seemed to get infected early on in the pandemic. Not by the virus, which in fact he did get and was hospitalized, but more so by his U.S. counterpart President Trump.
Trump saw the Covid virus as an inconvenient political hurdle, best to be played down at every level from masks to social distancing to lockdowns. Politics over public safety.
For Trump and his bizarre die hard Republican loyalists, who seem detached from reality whether it be the benefits of vaccines, to the results of an election, the strategy kind of worked. ‘Kind of’ because he politicized the pandemic for personal gain and continues to do so to this day.
To some, not masking is about freedom, and Trumps followers still trumpet that looney notion helping to spread the virus even to school children who are denied protection in the name of liberty. It’s nuts to any sober person who follows the science of public health in a pandemic, that some people view masking and vaccines as an assault on their democratic freedom.
Back to Boris Johnson. So at the beginning of the pandemic we were all struck by the fact, here in Britain it was business as usual as other Countries in Europe were in lockdown and recording record numbers of sick and mounting Covid deaths.
Johnson and his Cabinet, sought herd immunity preferring to downplay the virus and keep the economy moving. It was a tragic error which will long be remembered in families who lost loved ones. I personally wondered often aloud, why the heck every European Country was banning large gatherings, ordering lockdowns, as hospitals filled with critical cases of Covid, while the UK tried to ignore the whole thing.
Now a report by members of parliament, says the UK’s failure to do do more to stop the spread of covid early on in the pandemic was "one of the most important public health failures the UK has ever experienced".
The findings are detailed in the long-awaited report - Coronavirus: Lessons learned to date - from the Health and Social Care Committee and the Science and Technology Committee, which contain MPs from all parties.
"The veil of ignorance through which the UK viewed the initial weeks of the pandemic was partly self-inflicted," said the report.
At the time of the outbreak, Boris Johnson insisted on shaking hands of Covid patients in hospital despite evidence of contact transmission, and then he refused to wear a mask for many weeks. Much like Trump in America that “veil of ignorance” led one of the worst death tolls, and many of the people who died, were elderly vulnerable patients moved from hospital beds and back to nursing homes.
As we speak, in America the Governor of Texas has banned public and private entities from mandating vaccines, as he wraps his indignation in standing up to “bullying” from the Biden Administration, which has fought for Americans to be vaccinated to save lives.
Governor Abbot has had vaccines himself, and even said he recovered from Covid because of the vaccine, but politics comes first. So he will cash in on the misinformed wave of resistance, for political gain instead of trying to protect people.
We should hold our political leaders to account for how they have led Government through a pandemic which in the U.S. has now claimed more lives than the Spanish Flu of 1918. People should be angry, at the political leaders who failed to act. The cost of weak leadership was so heavy, because the ultimate price paid was with peoples lives.
There was a veil of ignorance, but behind the veil was short sighted political greed, by a few leaders who show reckless disregard for the public good.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58876089
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-governor-orders-ban-on-company-vaccine-mandates-california-death-count-tops-70k-covid-19-updates/ar-AAPpmMs?ocid=uxbndlbing
Have a good day everyone.
Dana