Labour’s key vaccine policy collapsed this morning after Angela Rayner was drawn into a row over their plans to jump the queue for vital vaccines, rejecting the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) scientists’ priority list outright. Appearing on the Today Programme this morning, first Rayner shifted from talking about all key workers to only teachers being moved up the queue over half term. Once ONS data was quoted on teachers not having a statistically significantly raised risk she was back to key workers again. For a party that has constantly harangued the Government to follow the science, Rayner was brazen in her dismissal of both the ONS and the words of Jonathan Van-Tam when put to her this morning…

By claiming that somehow no one would miss out under Labour’s unscientific reorganisation, the party’s Deputy Leader did not seem to understand the concept of a queue. If someone is moved up a queue, another more vulnerable person is necessarily lower down than they otherwise would be. The vulnerable would be vaccinated more slowly if Labour’s queue jumping policy was implemented. Doh.