Dear Editor, I’m exhausted by the Covid pandemic. I think we all are. The ongoing worry that every little sniffle I get might be Delta or Omicron and that I might pass it on to my household and elderly relatives; the constant mental weighing up of how many people I should safely meet while cases […]
Matt wrote to us because he is profoundly angry over #partygate. He wondered whether he should take a deep breath and temper his outrage. We don’t think he should. He’s at the sharp end. We need to hear his voice. Johnson needs to hear his voice. We are sure you’ll agree. Ed There’s something that […]
I’m sorry to distract you from the kerfuffle over Downing St Christmas parties, and who paid for the redecoration of Boris Johnson’s flat etc, but there is something else which should concern us all. There is a massive crisis in social care in this country. We should all be aware of the possible implications for […]
Most people seem to think that Dido Harding’s test and trace programme (NHST&T but nothing to do with the NHS) is a disaster. I won’t go into the reasons why; you can read some of it in the House of Commons committee report. Instead, let’s just look at the costs. The government allocated a budget […]
This government has a history of bad timing. During Anti-Bullying Week in 2020, news broke that prime minister Boris Johnson had decided to ignore that his home secretary Priti Patel had been found to bully her staff, and not to sack her. Then during Parliament Week in November 2021 he tried to undermine the very […]
Emma Monk takes a look at the ease with which Covid misinformation is created and spread and at the cognitive dissonance on display. Within days of scientists discovering a new Covid-19 variant, now called ‘Omicron’, the usual anti-science/anti-vax culprits were trying to find ways to cast doubt over it on social media. I made a […]
Dear West Country Voices, At a time when Devon parents were expecting to receive consent forms for their children to receive the nasal flu vaccine in schools this Autumn term, we have instead received a letter from Virgin Care informing us that the flu vaccine schedule has been significantly delayed and our children will not […]
Social care may well prove to be Alexander Boris de Pfeffel’s Johnson’s Waterloo, and deservedly so. Out of the blue, less than a week before parliament was to vote on the matter, Number 10 tabled a new proposal (New Clause 49 to the Health and Care Bill) on the social care cap. It significantly watered […]
Dear Tobias I am now retired, but I worked in the NHS (as a nurse, then a health visitor) for 28 years, then for a further 20 years in an NHS-funded post in a university, in teaching and research. I have, therefore, seen and worked through very many changes and reorganisations in the NHS: often […]
As NHS watchers are only too aware, there’s constant wrangling over NHS finances: it’s a bottomless pit; it’s mismanaged; it’s a huge amount; it’s not enough; will never be enough….Where to start with all of this? Let’s take a look… Does the UK spend on healthcare match that of comparable countries? Well, no. Neither as […]
During a BBC interview on 1 October 2021, Boris Johnson added insult to injury by using the phrase: “Never mind life expectancy or cancer outcomes – look at wage growth.” Clearly, the only metric he was interested in was economic. This is deeply offensive to cancer patients and their families, and shows a total lack […]
Dear Editor, I note, with much concern, that health minister Savid Javid has admitted that the Tory manifesto promise of an additional 6000 GPs, will not be met. It is suggested they had not taken retirements into account! I also note with some scepticism, that he appears to have failed to give any indication as […]
Fellow readers have surely heard about the Immensa scandal by now, which has affected us here in the South West. Their Wolverhampton laboratory was sending false negative Covid test results to people on an alarming scale from September to October. There have been lots of graphs and analyses about this scandal in the press: but […]
Back in July 2020, we ran a story (which you can read by clicking on the image above) in which, Mike Temple explained how Dr Cathy Gardner, from East Devon, a microbiologist with a doctorate in virology, had recently challenged the government in the High Court for not protecting elderly people in care homes, with […]
We appear to be living in strange times, where Covid-19 is running rife in the UK, yet the government and most of the press appear to have moved on from the pandemic! So I was initially pleased to see that the BBC was highlighting the fact that we are the ‘virus hotspot’ of Europe. Then, […]
Just over two months since ‘Freedom Day’ and in many places it feels like Covid-19 is a distant memory. Masks have been abandoned, schools are ‘back to normal’, people are crowding back on tubes; meanwhile you still can’t go into a vet’s consulting room with your pet. So where exactly are we with regards to […]
Dear Editor-in-chief, Nearly a fortnight ago the Prime Minister of Japan, Yoshihide Suga, resigned after taking personal responsibility for nearly 17,000 deaths from Covid-19. This, in a country of some 126 million people which has recently hosted the Olympic Games. Many in Japan thought the games should be delayed again, but they compromised by not allowing spectators […]
At the beginning of August, the headline in the Guardian stated “Johnson faces rebellion over ‘intolerable’ hunger and poverty in home counties”. Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire (and lead Brexiter) was apparently shocked by the crisis in food insecurity after a study by Sheffield University researchers revealed that his constituency is one of […]
MP for Yeovil Marcus Fysh has miraculously become a medic – and an epidemiologist and virologist to boot. Perhaps he’s piloting a new government strategy aimed at filling the shortages in experienced staff across a whole range of sectors whereby an individual has only to express a nodding acquaintance with a subject or a function […]
We are upcycling this old one because – guess what – they (you know who we mean!) are at it again…running own the NHS to soften us up for health plans and privatisation. YouGov (which has a certain bias…) have conducted a poll which managed to make 58 per cent of us feel dissatisfied and […]
After weeks of speculation on whether or not children aged 12-15 would be offered a Covid-19 vaccination, the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation (JCVI) finally released their report on 3 September. As is often the case, the findings widely reported in the press didn’t fully reflect what the report actually said, and this has […]
Dear Editor-in-Chief I saw this tweet and I found myself wondering what on earth has happened to us? Why aren’t we outraged to hear that the government won’t be putting any Covid restrictions in place unless deaths go above 1000 a week or, as was later clarified, 50,000 a year? How have we got to […]
About a fortnight ago we saw medics and commentators expressing concerns over shortages of blood bottles. Research indicated that this was a worldwide phenomenon created by the massive hike in demand as a consequence of the pandemic. Now it appears that Brexit is exacerbating an already difficult situation with supply chains interrupted by border issues […]
On 19 August Health minister Sajid Javid tweeted that he was on his way to open “one of the new 48 hospitals” promised by his government. Only he wasn’t. He was going to open a new cancer unit, part of an existing hospital: the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle, Cumbria, opened by Tony Blair in 2000. […]
The south west now has some of the highest Covid-19 prevalence rates in the country. We run a small manufacturing business in Cornwall, and I am updating our business Covid-19 protocols so have the unenviable job of trawling through the government guidelines. It’s been like circulating on a Möbius strip. First up, when to isolate. […]
There is a lot to unpack in this story. We had just finished watching dramatic scenes on @TheBlock 2017 (#renovators highly recommend!), getting all tucked up into bed, when I heard a young woman crying outside our window. Living in a town centre, this sort of thing was not unusual. She was on a video […]
I realised a few weeks back that I’ve been riding bikes off-road, in one form or another, for well over four decades. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of a friend’s older brother rescuing rusty bikes from skips and the local scrapyard, and repurposing them as cow-horn-barred “tracker” bikes which we’d spend the summer […]
I listened to Johnson’s levelling-up speech with hope in my heart that he would at last focus on the sector that has the potential to make the most difference to children’s life outcomes – early years care and education. In the speech, Johnson acknowledged that after ten years of Conservative government: “If you are a […]
The southernmost tip of the British Isles, Jersey, (until recently) had an exemplary track record for its handling of Covid-19. On the tiny island, with a population just shy of 110,000, the authorities started preparing their Covid-19 response before any cases were discovered on the island. They were monitoring their borders, held meetings with commercial, […]
Dear Sarah, May I call you Sarah? In these days of social media you might well be Sergei, a computer whizz, hacking out of a basement flat in St Petersburg. But I checked your profile, your number of followers and the style of your posts (and your impressive range of expletives), and I reckon you […]