A poll of 3,170 Guido readers opened earlier has less than one-in-seven believing the government’s timing of Plan B yesterday was based on epidemiological reasons, and not politics.

Is the timing of the announcement of the introduction of "Plan B" covid restrictions

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) December 9, 2021

Guido can’t say he’s surprised. Sources suggest that while a quad meeting was always scheduled for yesterday afternoon, Plan B was not on the table. During the morning the briefings were coming from Downing Street not DHSC, further suggesting the move was more politically than epidemiologically motivated. As Chris Snowdon writes today:

“If he has introduced these arbitrary, capricious and almost certainly ineffective rules to knock unfavourable stories off the front pages, it is disgraceful, but it would scarcely be any better if he had done it sincerely. SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay and there is every reason to believe that it will continuing mutating. If this is how government is going to react to every new variant that comes along, God help us all.”

It is still the case that despite thousands of cases, so far zero deaths in the UK have been reported as attributable to the Omicron variant …