Top vaccine scientist and member of the government’s vaccine committee, Adam Finn, has diplomatically condemned the British Medical Association for their anti-scientific scaremongering over the government’s single vaccine dose policy. Responding to last week’s warning by the BMA that the 12-week gap between doses is “difficult to justify”, Finn told the Today programme:

“I must be careful what I say about the BMA but I would, I suppose, say that it would be a good idea to really understand the issues before making public pronouncements.”

His condemnation of fear-mongering also extended to the Mirror Group’s Sunday People for misleading readers over their editorial “Boris Johnson gambles with lives by ignoring vaccine science”:

Nick Robinson: “Over the weekend some newspapers – the People, the Mirror and others – were suggesting that the government was going against the science in this in order to get more first doses into people and make the figures look better, actually in a sense am I rightly understanding you’re saying the opposite; the science is actually what the government seems to be following?”

Finn: “Yes, absolutely, and I think people are being misled in the sense that it’s half the story, this absence of evidence story ignores the fact that there’s absolutely rock-solid evidence that if you give a dose of the vaccine to more people you give them protection and save lives. There’s no real question about that.”

How many times throughout this crisis has the Mirror attacked the government for supposedly not following the science?