(Belated) New Year Thoughts on the Barriers to Ending the Pandemic

By | 13th January 2022

A year ago, we in the UK were approaching Christmas and New Year with quiet optimism as the first Covid vaccines rolled out into the NHS. Light was appearing at the end of a long dark tunnel. Sadly, that hope was extinguished by the emergence of Covid variants, first alpha and later delta. Much of the year was spent in a race between these variants and the vaccination programme. Today, we can see the benefits in the wall of immunity that has been created by the combination of vaccination and infection. Over 98 per cent of the UK population have a measurable degree of antibodies that should resist the new omicron variant, according to the Office of National Statistics…

The light is coming back, in England at least, as many people decide that the future risks of Covid are tolerable. We do not have to accept a ‘new normal’, where scientific, medical or political elites decide how everyone should lead their lives.

The remaining barriers are social more than scientific…

We can reach the end of the tunnel in 2022 but there are still a lot of rock falls to clear.

A Social Science Space blog

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