Stopping them getting ill is vital in its own right, of course, but more importantly: they are healthcare workers. If they are all sick or self-isolating, they can’t save lives. It is, I think, pretty widely accepted that the death rates from Covid go up as the ratio of medics to patients goes down. That’s the logic of lockdowns — keep the number of patients as low as possible, so that each one can get plenty of medical attention. But it’s also why it’s important to stop your doctors getting ill, because if you have two doctors for 50 patients on a ward, and one of them gets ill, then you only have one doctor for 50 patients.

Preventing the NHS from getting overwhelmed was the primary justification for the original lockdown, and is a major part of the reasoning behind the most recent one and the continued tier systems. But if we can protect NHS workers with a vaccine, then the NHS will be that much less likely to get overwhelmed, so there will be more room. We can afford to get closer to normality.

The 800,000 doses we get in the first batch won’t get us very far towards that — they will go, I think, mainly to care-home staff and residents. But we will be taking delivery of hundreds of thousands of doses a month and it won’t be all that many months until there’s enough to vaccinate the entire healthcare system — about 1.5 million people, including GPs and other not-exactly-NHS staff. You might not get yours until the middle of the year or later, but I think you will start to notice the benefits, in terms of a less restricted society, well before then.