In a sign, if we ever really needed one, that Covid is well and truly over, Jonathan Van Tam has declared he no longer wears a face mask.
“I don’t wear a face covering, no I don’t wear a face covering, but if there were circumstances where I felt it was a really closed environment with very high crowding and very intense social interaction then those are the situations where I might think ‘should I or shouldn’t I’.”
This’ll properly wind up the performative Covid virtue signallers on Twitter…
The Times Red Box has revealed Jonathan Van-Tam – more commonly known as JVT – is to step down as the deputy chief medical officer. Despite the news coming among the Downing Street party crisis, they claim it has nothing to do with it. Instead he’s returning to his role at the University of Nottingham, fromwhich he’s been on repeated secondment from since 2017 – a loan that’s now up. Another sign that smart people believe the pandemic crisis is effectively over…
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.
The Government’s scientific superstar Jonathan Van Tam has been darting from studio to studio this morning in an expert-led drive to convince people of the safety and efficacy of the first approved Covid vaccine. Guido hears we will be seeing lots of JVT and Whitty this festive period, and less of Vallance and Harryies. Oh how the mighty are fallen…
Famous for his virus metaphors – which this morning he revealed are studiously tested out on Mrs Van Tam before making it to air – the BBC took the trouble of providing us with a compilation of JVT’s top hits:
Last week Guido revealed that the army has internally re-named vaccine delivery day from V-Day to D-Day. It’s surely now only a matter of time before we start calling it JVT-Day…
Last week’s Guardian splash – “Government admits millions may miss out on most effective vaccine” – so incensed deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam that he’s written a letter to them slamming the paper’s tone and accuracy, accusing the Guardian of being “both misleading and sensationalist,” and bluntly attributing the error “to a lack of understanding”:
“It is oversimplistic to imply that any vaccines are “superior” or “inferior”. The results we will have initially for any vaccine will pertain to efficacy determined over a relatively short timeframe… Comparing vaccines based on a single interim estimate of effectiveness is therefore a mistake.”
First Peston, now the Guardian: Van-Tam seems to be single-handedly continuing Lee Cain’s no-nonsense approach to the media…
