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?
Readers have been getting in touch to tell us they have been complaining to IPSO about the Sunday Mirror’s false claim that Dominic Cummings made a second visit to Durham. They put the story on their front page apparently based on a single anonymous source. IPSO’s complaint form is here.
Yesterday the Mirror claimed Boris Johnson had a “death plan” to kill school children by forcing them back to school in June. It goes without saying there is no such plan and all the medical research suggests children are thankfully almost immune from this terrible virus. Last month they claimed that 50,000 people were set to die on Easter Sunday. The actual number who sadly died on Easter Sunday was in the hundreds. Not tens of thousands. There is tabloid sensationalism and there is absolutely disgraceful scaremongering.
There is a lot of hand wringing punditry about fake news being spread on social media by the likes of David Icke. Here’s two examples of fake news being spread by the traditional dead tree press…
The Sunday Mirror’s leader column this week took aim at Theresa May’s 10-year NHS plan, however their prescription is probably not what you’d expect from the Labour Party’s required reading: marketisation of the NHS. The paper calls for an end to the NHS being free at the point of use with wealthier patients now being forced to pay for their healthcare. Despite the fact they’ve already paid higher income tax and national insurance towards it…
“Mrs May’s 10-year plan for the health service is another opportunity for fundamental reform. The NHS has only been truly free at the point of use for three of its 70 years. Consideration must be given to the well-off contributing.”
Despite Labour’s perennial claims that the Tories are plotting to privatise the NHS, it’s the leftie Mirror that’s calling for marketisation of the health service first. Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth even had an op-ed of his own in the paper. Surely Labour can’t be plotting to privatise the NHS too…
That’s not to say that it would necessarily end up being a bad thing for the NHS. Charging rich patients to pay for non-vital procedures on the NHS could trigger an explosion of market mechanisms in UK healthcare, forcing the NHS to undergo marked-based reforms to keep up, or even catalysing a wholesale shift towards a more efficient European style social insurance-based system with improved patient outcomes overall. However, this would require broader liberalisation of the healthcare market to ensure genuine competition instead of a rigged and overly-expensive market. Not a caveat likely to make its way into the Mirror any time soon…
Guido hears the Daily Mirror are looking for a new political editor, with incumbent Andy Gregory set to join the Sunday Times as health editor Still the biggest selling left-of-centre paper in Britain, the paper has always been Corbyn sceptic. Could it really jump a generation and to the left with a new pol ed? As ever we bring you your runners and riders…
- Ben Glaze: Tipped by insiders as the early favourite. Is he too well-liked by the Tories to run the red Mirror?
- Keir Mudie: Sunday Mirror man, popular with Team Jezza, should be in with a strong shout.
- Niall Sookoo: Former print and broadcast journalist, currently works in LOTO as an aide to Corbyn, rumoured to have been considering a jump back over the fence.
- Jen Williams: Smashing it at the Manchester Evening News, move to the big time well overdue.
- Kate Devlin: Top Lobby hack and Sunday Express de facto chief. Time for the Mirror to have a female pol-ed?
- Steve Hawkes: Wants a pol ed job and is a former Mirror reporter.
- Matt Chorley: How would he handle the vast increase in readership?
- Steve from Skwawkbox: Surely time for Steve to sell out and join the MSM to exploit his direct line into Corbyn’s office?
Good luck…
The lefty / Remain papers do write some nonsense about their bogeyman Boris, but today’s Mirror splash has to be most tenuous BoJo attack story ever. They are having a pop at the former Foreign Secretary for not having yet moved out of his Carlton Gardens residence. The Mirror copy says their story “is bound to infuriate homeless charities” and hint that Jeremy Hunt is unhappy Boris is still there. Labour say it is “shocking” and “extraordinary”, “taxpayer-funded squatting” and “it’s high time the Government take back control of this property”.
Back in the real world, it has been just 10 days since Boris resigned, it is completely standard practice for an outgoing Foreign Secretary to take a few weeks to leave their official residence, he has permission from the government and Jeremy Hunt to stay there until the end of the month, and Boris is paying all his bills so there is no cost to the taxpayer. So all of the key points of the Mirror and Labour attacks completely fall apart. A front page so “shocking” and “extraordinary” that no one has yet followed it up…
