Labour’s latest policy is to reject the scientific priority advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) and allow 6.2 million healthy public sector workers to jump ahead of the critically vulnerable. The policy was interrogated on Politics Live, and shadow health minister Justin Madders shaky argument was met with some justified scepticism. Vaccine supply is not infinite and every healthy young worker in one of the key professions who gets a jab right now comes at the expense of somebody who is vulnerable. Guido has done some extrapolations as what the results could be…

• After the top four most vulnerable groups are vaccinated, 22-25 million people will still remain in the next five vulnerable categories identified by the JCVI.
• Roughly 80% of deaths come from the first four vulnerable categories.
• Roughly 19% of deaths come from the next five vulnerable categories.
• Labour’s public sector queue jumper group comprises 6.2 million people.
• Taking account of the vulnerable within that group already prioritised by the JCVI, the remainder is roughly 4.8 million people.
• At 300,000 vaccinations a day, going through Labour’s group would take 16 days.
• This would delay vaccinating the five vulnerable categories by 16 days.
• As Britain is suffering 1000 deaths a day, Labour’s policy would cost an extra 190 deaths a day.

As the BBC’s Fact Check showed us this afternoon on Politics Live, teacher death rates are not higher than the vulnerable population. The reason why schools were closed in the first place was not because teachers are at risk – it’s because schools act as a vector for more general transmission, mostly asymptomatically among children, which then travels to the vulnerable. The way to open schools isn’t to vaccinate teachers, it’s to vaccinate the vulnerable.

Shadow health minister Justin Madders has been busy undermining any confidence in the Labour Party’s ability to lead on Coronavirus this morning, using Twitter to ask followers whether it is true flu shots can result in positive Covid tests. This conspiracy has been widely debunked over the last few months, with Facebook even labelling images containing the claim as “false information, checked by independent fact-checkers”. Doesn’t instil confidence in Sir Keir’s top team…

The claim was originally made by US anti-vaccine advocate Dr Rashid Buttar and the simplest of Googles – though one would have hoped the shadow health minister wouldn’t need clarification at this stage in the pandemic – would have revealed it to be untrue. In the end, Madders didn’t use Reuters or another fact-checking service, he took the answer from another random Twitter account.

Madders as a hatter…