Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate, or at least does so on the basis of age and health conditions rather than politics. Why, then, have views on how we should manage it — and particularly how we should treat vaccination — become so heartless, judgemental and politically tribal?

We have a milder case of it in Britain than some countries. But there’s a correlation between (broadly Remain-affiliated) liberal urbanites and the new hygiene-authoritarianism. This has been emerging for a while: back in 2020 the research group UK In A Changing Europe noted that while “it’s not the case that all Leavers are lockdown sceptics” nonetheless “it’s pretty much the case that all lockdown sceptics are Leavers”. More recently, 99 Tories voted against Covid passes before Christmas, compared to 22 in Labour.

In the US, analogous (and angrier) patterns emerge. Free-wheeling, mask-optional Republican Florida is pitted against Democrat California, which mandates indoor mask-wearing, including for all children over the age of two, and announced in October that vaccination would become mandatory for in-person school attendance. Vaccination is already mandatory for employment in the police force and healthcare on public-health grounds.

More interesting than arguing for either one side or the other, though, is what the arguments reveal about our ongoing political realignment. In particular, it sounds the death-knell for a relatively mild-mannered twentieth-century version of progressivism characterised by a desire to ensure the world is fair, and to avoid harming others.

What’s emerging to replace it is more bellicose, more ruthless — and increasingly religious. So-called “secular liberalism” has, in other words, stopped pretending to be secular. It’s been received opinion since the end of World War II that authoritarian religiosity was exclusive to the Right. Theodor Adorno’s 1950 The Authoritarian Personality cited batteries of research to argue that fascism, and the Holocaust, could be explained by the prevalence of an ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’. This ‘personality type’, he argued, was characterised by blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, respect for submission to acknowledged authority, and a tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

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In turn, Adorno’s conviction that these behaviours are characteristic of the Right crops up again in a far more recent, but also influential book: Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind. Here, Haidt argued that the reason ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ routinely misunderstand one another is that there exist five ‘moral foundations’ on which we all base our political views: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argues that liberals are only interested in care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right is attuned to all five foundations.

Does this apply in the Covid debate? Certainly at the surface, calls for coercive measures tend to start off with arguments about protecting people. For example, Scottish public health adviser Jason Leitch told BBC Good Morning Scotland that the aim of Covid passes was “to allow people to attend events and environments safely”.

At the core of this argument is the not unreasonable point that when it comes to physical wellbeing, we can’t be wholly individualistic. The moment you get ill or injure yourself as a consequence of having taken some risk (for example after breaking your leg skiing), you need care and are thus, by definition, no longer taking sole responsibility for your wellbeing.

Does this mean vaxx authoritarians have a point? Hiltzik points out that mandates have long existed on other health grounds where risk-taking imposes costs on wider society, such as seatbelt-wearing, smoking, or drink-driving. Insisting on the individual right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated therefore “places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest”.

We might simply shrug, and say this is just another data point for that 2021 study which showed that contra Adorno, there is abundant evidence for authoritarianism among left-liberals. Certainly, calls from self-identified progressives to “crush the resistance” to vaccines by making the lives of the unvaccinated a “total misery” might challenge the idea that the ‘authoritarian personality’ can only flourish on the Right.

But it’s the character and chosen terrain of the emerging progressive authoritarianism that’s distinctive. For it’s not merely a matter of progressives waking up to the possibility that they, too, may use coercive measures to pursue their chosen ends. It’s also the nature of those ends. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2020 fentanyl killed more Californians than Covid. But unlike Covid, the drug epidemic inspired few coercive measures — only safe injection sites, billboards encouraging users to take drugs with friends or programmes that pay them not to use.

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If avoiding harm justified coercive interventions, surely we’d have seen more of them in Californian drug policy. But their absence in the case of drug abuse, and fervent application in the case of virus control, suggests there’s a different motive at work than the prevention of harm.

In an Evening Standard piece last week, former editor Emily Sheffield argued that our capital city’s unvaccinated residents should “pay with their freedoms, not ours”. And on social media, we saw the same punitive ferocity recently when one American mother reported that when her son tested positive she didn’t just quarantine him but also “took the X-Box”, a measure more consistent with chastisement than infection control. The only reason she didn’t also confiscate the phone, she says, “is so he can text for food and water”.

Recently, we’ve had news that Omicron appears to be more infectious but milder, and research that indicates vaccination does very little to prevent transmission of the virus. So rationally, none of these vengeful attitudes make much sense. What’s going on?

The recent furore over the entry into Australia of (unvaccinated) tennis superstar Novak Djokovic offers a clue. One Melbourne journalist tweeted about how, since he was allowed into the country, fans “won’t want to come” to the tennis matches. Objectively, one single unvaccinated tennis player would make a negligible difference to someone’s risk of catching Covid; the only possible reason someone might skip the Australian Open because of Djokovic’s presence is if the fear was of a subtler, more metaphysical contagion.

In the Bay of Kells, in Ireland’s County Kerry, there’s a small secret graveyard that until recently was overgrown with brambles and largely forgotten. It was a place where grieving parents buried babies who died before they could be baptised — for the unbaptised were spiritually unclean, and therefore not permitted burial on a churchyard’s consecrated ground.

In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), GK Chesterton observed that “it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism”. Today the prescience of Chesterton’s remark is clear, as is the convergence in terms of social meaning between vaccination and baptism.

The growing tendency for ‘the vaccinated’ to treat ‘the unvaccinated’ as other or impure recalls the willingness of an earlier age to deny others simple forms of inclusion on the basis of baptism. Never mind what studies say about the efficacy of Covid vaccination in protecting us from severe illness (which evidence strongly suggests it does) or mitigating further infection (perhaps more debatable). Increasingly, vaccination carries a social meaning as well as a medical one. It’s a ritual infusion — albeit via injection, not anointment — of sacred liquid, whose application confers freedom from spiritual taint.

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Perhaps it’s just that the correlation between left-liberalism and secularism in both Britain and America has left progressives especially hungry for something to fill the God-shaped hole, and the yearning for measures that speak to the fundamental moral instinct Haidt calls ‘sanctity/degradation’. This might help account for the ongoing, fruitless, rationally debunked but nonetheless persistent obsession Tom Chivers recently noted, with disinfecting surfaces ‘because of Covid’ despite mounting evidence that the virus is airborne.

An increasingly post-Christian West, then, finds itself grabbing gratefully onto Covid hygiene theatre, in pursuit of a purity more metaphysical than bacterial. And as we’ve now spent two years clapping for carers, sharing dancing nurse videos, and creating window iconography and even altar-cloths to venerate medical professionals, it’s probably a bit late to rein this blossoming spiritualisation of hygiene.

For to imagine we can do so would be to say we still live in a world of reasoned debate. And when ‘experts’ offer ‘evidence’ to counter rumours of Covid propagandising, only to be met with derisive accusations of using fact-checking to propagandise, we might as well abandon ‘reasoned debate’ altogether and, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, stick two pencils up our noses and wear underpants on our heads.

Or, alternatively, start praying. Progressives spent half of the twentieth century telling us that this was pointless: the search for metaphysical purity was low-status, ‘authoritarian’ or simply obsolete, and reason replaced all that. Their children, though, have discovered that purification rituals don’t have to be confined to the individualistic realm of ‘juice cleanses’ or ‘clean eating’, but can be imposed on entire societies.

We can expect them to go on chasing that high. And meanwhile, it seems enough of the rest of us like having something to worship, and a suitable group of sinners to despise. If you don’t already pray, you might as well start; we all once again live in a religious world.

Yet still it hurts. He’d also developed a moisture lesion, the start of a pressure sore, on his lower back — a consequence of not being repositioned regularly. Joseph’s death wasn’t caused by anything we did, but what we were unable to do. Had we had our full team of staff, I’m sure that we could have moved him more regularly and perhaps have prevented the lesion, which no doubt hastened his decline.

One of us could have sat with him and fed him, listened to him and held his hand. But we simply don’t have the time. The loss of one permanent member of staff a few weeks ago because she refused to be vaccinated, and the resulting reliance on agency staff, has had a devastating impact on the standard of care in our home. When it becomes compulsory next April for staff to be jabbed unless they have a medical exemption — at the moment care homes can decide their own policy — the situation will only deteriorate. Some estimates suggest more than 100,000 unvaccinated care home workers could be forced to quit.

Tonight’s shift is intensely busy, as always. We have 30 residents in our private care home in Sheffield. They all need feeding, washing and changing — and I don’t stop for a moment. It’s six hours into my shift when I’m stopped by my colleague Lisa. Grabbing my arm, she practically throws me into the room and onto the sofa and tells me to sit down for five minutes.

“You’ve not stopped,” she says. “Eat something!” I check the clock. She is right. It is almost 1.30am and I haven’t eaten a thing since I clocked on at 7pm. The only time I’ve stopped is to pop to the toilet and take a few sips of cold coffee. It is time for a quick break.

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I sit down to eat a sandwich, but a pile of paperwork sits on my desk and I can’t ignore it. As the senior member of staff on duty that night, it’s my responsibility to be in charge of the medications, so I might as well audit the drugs paperwork while I eat my dinner. It will save time later.

Barely five minutes have passed when another colleague, Sheila, asks for some help moving one of our residents, Anne, who has soiled herself. Many of our residents are incontinent and accidents are common, but it’s often impossible for care workers to move residents on their own, particularly when they’re only 5ft 2ins like Sheila. If we don’t clean and move them swiftly, bed sores can develop and that’s when residents are at risk of infections which can be fatal.

We find Anne in some discomfort and distress. Who knows how long she’s been lying in her mess? The staff tonight are spread even more thinly than usual: Clare, one of the younger members of the team, called in sick and no agency nurse has turned up. We clean Anne up and make her comfortable and she sleeps.

It’s a small consolation. I have worked in the care sector for ten years and while we’ve always been busy, it’s becoming clear that things are dangerously close to breaking point now. The pandemic was stressful but now we have the added burden of being short-staffed. Carly, the unvaccinated nurse, left a fortnight ago and we are unable to find a permanent replacement.

Carly is one of many careworkers who refuses to have the Covid vaccination. She’s not what you’d call an ‘anti-vaxxer’ because she’s had other vaccinations such as flu; she simply didn’t trust this one. She felt it hadn’t been tested rigorously enough and could harm her health in the future. I’ve no idea why. The rest of us tried to persuade her that it was safer — for the residents, herself and us. It felt like another level of protection.

But for whatever reason, Carly was adamant she didn’t want it. She initially thought the Government might perform a U-turn but when it became clear they wouldn’t, she looked for a new job. She’s working in a school now.

Of course, it’s a shame. She loved her job and she was good at it. But if she’s going to put others at risk, I can’t blame the Government for wanting her out.

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Yet her departure leaves us in the lurch and it makes me nervous about what lies ahead. Although I have a 36-hour-a-week contract, I’m regularly working up to 60 hours — all for £9.60 per hour and I’m exhausted. There’s no bonus for overtime. I suppose I should count my blessings. I know of another home that has lost four members of staff who refused to have the vaccine.

Once Anne is cleaned, I return to the staffroom to finish the drugs paperwork. I’m always terrified of making a mistake when I’m tired. Only two weeks ago I’d been so busy rushing from room to room that I’d forgotten to give someone his epilepsy drug. He ended up having a seizure and although we found him in time and he was fine, I felt dreadful. I held my hands up. I knew it was my fault. But with so few staff, mistakes are going to happen. Not long ago a lady fell in our lounge area and broke her hip. I watched it happen, almost in slow motion but I couldn’t get to her in time. Would that have happened if we’d had enough staff members? Possibly. But I couldn’t help but feel she might have been saved if someone had been able to keep a closer eye on her that day.

I thought things might improve when the pandemic started to subside this spring. Like many frontline workers, we had little in the way of PPE at first and had no idea what we were dealing with. Watching people deteriorate when they got the virus was horrific. I’ll never forget them desperately gasping for breath, as if they were drowning. We couldn’t do anything except prop them up on their side or turn them over onto their fronts. That seemed to help. But we lost seven of our residents and there would be many nights where I’d go home in tears.

The terror and paranoia of bringing the virus home has never really left me, even now. After my shift ended, I would undress at work and put my uniform in a tightly sealed bag to take home and boil wash. But when I got home, I was fearful that I still had the virus on me, so I’d strip off in the hallway and rush up to the shower to scrub myself clean before I went anywhere near my daughters. My husband would grab the bag, put the uniform in the washing machine and then thoroughly scrub his hands.

When the vaccine arrived, it felt like we’d been saved. I managed to have mine early in the year and I’ve now had all three. I don’t think anyone should be forced to have the vaccine, but I still can’t understand how people in our sector are reluctant to get jabbed. We have people in our homes in their 90s who are completely bedridden with dementia. Even though they’ve been vaccinated, they will be among the most vulnerable if this new Omicron variant takes hold, as it looks like it will.

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For the moment we’re relying on agency staff to plug the gaps but this is never ideal. Although they’re competent enough, the people who need the care can become upset if they see a face they don’t recognise. There’s no continuity of care. Last week, one of our more vocal residents got spooked. She doesn’t speak much English and was screaming and crying about the new staff member.

And so I feel pessimistic about the next few months. We are currently Covid-free in the home but I don’t expect that to last. Our residents have all been vaccinated so we know they have some level of protection and that’s reassuring. But it’s the ‘stepdown beds’ — people who arrive in the home for temporary care straight from the local hospital — who we constantly worry about. Although they are tested before they arrive and they’re put in isolation and tested again on Day 5 of their stay, we’re all worried that one of them will bring in the new variant.

Then what do we do? Will it mean another lockdown? Families unable to visit their loved ones again? Although I hope it doesn’t come to that, we are all expecting it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love this job and I don’t want to leave. But there have been many nights where I’ve come home — sometimes after 16 hours on my feet — and I wonder if it’s worth it. We are all scrambling. And things are only going to get worse.

Judging by the stream of recent headlines, petitions and open letters, parents of 12 to 15-year-olds could soon be heading for a showdown over the “right to be vaccinated against Covid”. The UK’s Chief Medical Officers this week announced a plan to offer them jabs — despite the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s advice that the direct benefits for healthy children were too marginal.

And while parents will be required to give their consent for their child to be vaccinated, a child will be able to override their parents’ refusal providing he or she is deemed to have “enough intelligence, competence and understanding to fully appreciate what’s involved in their treatment” (otherwise known as being Gillick competent).

Covid-19 has always been a crisis in search of a culture war, and the response to this announcement has been no exception. When such luminaries as Gillian McKeith and Laurence Fox, and groups with titles such as Family Defence League and Lawyers for Liberty, start advising parental resistance, you know it’s about more than the scientific specifics of just one jab. Suddenly it is about personal freedom, the rejection of state interference in family life and the principle that a parent should decide what is right for their child. It is about where you stand politically and how you want to be perceived.

I’ll be honest: I do not want to be standing alongside Laurence Fox. I know which “side” of this debate I am meant to be on — which one suits both my political persuasions and my parenting style. And it is that, more than any in-depth medical knowledge, which tempts me to declare myself fine with my own children overriding my consent (were it not for the fact that this in itself constitutes a form of giving consent — the eternal paradox of liberal parenting).

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I find the idea of a child ending up in mediation with their own parents over the right to be vaccinated not just unlikely, but bizarre (the idea of slammed doors, mealtime sulks, plaintive cries of “but EVERYONE else has had one!”). Yet for others, the anxiety is real, with schools being inundated with letters from parents fearful that vaccinations will take place behind their backs.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but ever since I was allowed — just allowed! — to take my firstborn home from the hospital, I’ve been sceptical about the idea that parents know best.

Parental decisions are informed not just by love, but politics. We know this, though we tend to tell ourselves it is those other parents — those of the opposing political tribe — who are getting it wrong. This inconsistency is particularly glaring in current debates on the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. There are parents who support social transition, the prescription of puberty blockers and/or the use of binders, and parents who don’t — with both sides insisting they are motivated by an understanding of their child inaccessible to anyone else. In accounts of raising trans children, or opposing a child’s desire to transition, “I know what’s best for my child” merges with “any loving parent in my position would make the same choice” (or, at the sharp end, “any parent who would not make the same choice obviously wants their child dead”).

It is uncomfortable to admit that your love, and what is in the “best interests of the child”, is tainted by your own background, self-image, friendship groups and even personal traumas. Yet I know mine is, even when I think I’m right. Indeed, it is by watching the Covid vaccination debate play out that I’ve felt, more than ever, how much more attractive it is to cling to our slogans rather than admit how little we know.

I have my own self-defeating list of things that I, as a parent, should and should not be allowed to do. Not allowed: smacking children; restricting access to contraception and abortion (providing safeguarding checks are made); vetoing access to good sex education (I decide what “good” is). Allowed: vetoing access to dodgy sex education (I decide what “dodgy” is); intervening where a treatment constitutes self-harm (I decide what “self-harm” is).

I know this is provisional and shaky, riven with qualifications, making the bodies of my children (and yours) a testing ground for my politics. I do think there are areas — such as the administration of physical punishment, or the use of breast binders — where it is possible to make a more objective case for harm being done, but the template of “parents’ rights” is unhelpful. With the proposed Covid vaccinations, the situation is different still; the play-off is not between potential losses and gains for one’s own child, but potential gains for other people, perhaps even yourself.

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Here we have an example where the primary beneficiaries of a treatment may not be — indeed, most probably are not — those receiving it. As a result, the simplistic concept of individuals, or their parents, knowing what’s best for them falls apart. Writing in The Independent, Victoria Richards argues in favour of “competent” children making the final decision on vaccination using the principle of “knowing best”:

“Some children under the age of 15 will be deemed “Gilick competent”, some won’t… Parents or carers know their children best — so chances are, you know which camp your child would likely fall into. If you’re a parent who’s vaccine-hesitant, I can understand why you might feel upset – even angry — about such a scenario. But what I really feel is that we should trust our kids; many of whom are mature, intelligent and information-savvy well before the age of 12.”

I think my children are mature, intelligent and information-savvy; the trouble is, I don’t think the debate over having a Covid jab is a test of these qualities. This is a complex situation, hijacked by narratives about state control, science and freedom. It is also one in which moral pressure is being exerted on children, one that might come from schools, but which could also come from parents who want their children to be vaccinated. Coercing children — however subtly — to do something with their bodies which isn’t primarily for their benefit is questionable. But so, too, is making that body the site for spurious, abstract arguments about liberty and parental infallibility. Neither side is coming off well.

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Richards goes on to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice”: “We can’t very well teach our children that they have the right to say “no” to unwanted physical contact one minute, and then demand they kiss an aged aunt the next… And if we are teaching our kids that their bodies (rightly) belong to them, then that should go for whatever it is they decide about the vaccine, too.”

But this is a reversal of our usual message regarding consent, because the focus is on the right to say “yes”, not “no”. There’s something telling in the way that liberal leanings push us towards making the dominant message “you have the right to override your parents if they say no”, rather than “you have the right to override them if they say yes”. It smacks — just a little — of an uncomfortable political division on consent, whereby some of us only want to focus on the giving rather than the withholding. For all the accusations of illiberal moral panic one might throw at those raising alarm about the vaccine, “my body, my choice” is a slogan that would seem to me to apply better to the children saying no for themselves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself veering, ever so slightly, Laurence Fox-wards.

I am not going to fight with my children over the vaccine; they want to have one and I will not stop them. But there are bigger questions to ask, not just about what influence parents should have, but what we are using our children for. Children have been asked to make significant, necessary sacrifices for adults; it is not necessary to use them to fight our own culture wars.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) explained that this is the result of a risk-benefit analysis. The JCVI’s Prof Adam Finn in a briefing with the Science Media Centre pointed out that “happily the virus very rarely affects children seriously”, and that the very small risks of adverse effects from the vaccine outweigh the risk to a child of getting, and then becoming ill with, Covid. The UK medicines regulator has declared the Pfizer vaccine safe and effective in children, but the JCVI has a more stringent approach.

Similar calculations were made back in March. At the time, a small number of cases of a rare clotting disease were detected in people who had had the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. As a result, the JCVI recommended that it not be used in the under-40s unless no other options were available.

That decision was based on a straightforward risk-benefit analysis. The risk of a blood clot caused by the vaccine is vanishingly small – about one in 50,000, with the risk of severe health impacts lower still. But young people are also at very low risk of getting severely ill if they develop Covid, and the number of people with Covid at the time was very low – only about 6,000 new cases a day, compared to about 60,000 at the January peak. That meant that the chance of a young person getting infected, and then getting very ill, was even smaller than the risk of a blood clot, as the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication showed.

“Freedom Day” has happened now. It’s far from clear what effect it will actually have. The Government’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O)’s latest modelling paper, published last week, says that by the end of August, we could end up with fewer than 100 hospitalisations a day, or more than 10,000. 

Small changes to our assumptions drive huge changes to the outcomes: will 90% of people stop wearing masks? 70% 50%? Will we all pile into nightclubs and theatres, or only a few of us? We don’t know: these things, or a million others. As the Bristol maths professor Oliver Johnson puts it, “the range of uncertainty around any reasonable forecast probably includes both ‘it’s basically fine’ and ‘we have a very serious problem’.” 

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What we do know, though, is that cases were already growing before Freedom Day. The R value is well above one. If we wanted to reduce the number of cases, to make the line on that chart actually go down, then we would need to reintroduce some (probably quite stringent) measures. That seems unlikely.

But what we can do is get more people vaccinated. And it seems that two obvious ways of doing that are to vaccinate children, and to start using the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in younger people again.

Vaccination makes a huge difference to Covid risk, in every way. Which is why it’s a problem that our programme has tailed off so much. On one glorious day back in March, 844,000 vaccine doses were reported to have been administered across the UK. That was anomalous; but from March until about June, there was an average of between 500,000 and 600,000 doses being administered every day.

Since early June, though, those numbers have sagged dispiritingly. It’s been more like 250,000 for the last few weeks.

So how do we get it back up to higher levels, given that vaccine coverage is more important than ever? 

There are two drivers of vaccine uptake: supply and demand. The most obvious problem, at the moment, is that demand is down. Paul Mainwood, a strategist who has spent recent months looking at vaccine delivery, points out that first-dose vaccine uptake shows a distinct curve. At first, each age group is vaccinated slowly, so the numbers creep up; then it accelerates, and shoots upward; then, as it nears 100%, it levels off again. The curve on the graph is S-shaped..

With the over-50 age groups, that flattening-off happened at above 95% coverage; but as you come down the cohorts, the levelling-off happens earlier and earlier. For 30- to 34-year-olds, the line has flattened significantly and it hasn’t yet reached 80%. For 18- to 24-year-olds, it’s lower still: the flattening is visible and it’s only around 65%.

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That suggests that there is reluctance among younger people to get the vaccine. Whether that’s true anti-vaxx attitudes, or an understandable wariness of feeling rubbish for a day or two in exchange for a reduction in an already tiny risk of death – or an equally understandable, if in my view wrongheaded, concern about the more severe side-effects – is hard to know, although the ONS says that “vaccine hesitancy” is rare. Even among 16- to 29-year-olds, the most hesitant group, only 13% say they are reluctant to take the vaccine. But even if they’re not reluctant, we seem to be running out of people who are noticeably keen.

How you persuade those increasingly hard-to-reach groups is disputed. Finn of the JCVI said that one reason they were being so stringent is that they are worried about “the impact on public trust” if the JCVI recommends vaccines for groups who would not directly benefit from them: I worry about the opposite problem, about the impact on public trust if you tell the public that the vaccines aren’t safe. 

But given that demand is a problem, it does seem that an obvious way to increase demand would be to widen the availability of the vaccine. About 20% of the UK’s population is under 18; roughly 13 million people. Probably about four million of those are between 12 and 18. We can expand demand simply enough by offering it to them.

One question is, of course, whether we could vaccinate those young people quickly enough to make a difference. 

It does seem that the UK is not, right now, struggling with supply. I spoke to Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of statistics at the Open University, and he noted that all his local vaccine centres have walk-in availability for Pfizer, suggesting that it’s not an immediate problem.

But Mainwood estimates that we are bumping right up against our supply with Pfizer. If we were to take steps to speed up vaccination – by offering second doses earlier than eight weeks, for instance, or by allowing teenagers to be vaccinated – we would struggle.

The thing is, though, we have literally millions of AstraZeneca vaccines sitting unused. We bought 100 million. It’s very hard to get detailed breakdowns of which vaccines have been used, something that Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, who I spoke to, is somewhat annoyed by: but we can’t have used more than 82 million AZ doses, since that’s the total number of vaccine doses administered. Probably it’s more like half that. 

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And since those March days when the AZ risk-benefit calculations were carried out, the situation has changed enormously. Now, the number of cases every day is back up around 50,000, not far off the January peak. The latest ONS infection survey finds that around one person in every 95 has the disease right now. And it’s highest among the youngest age groups – almost 3% of 17- to 24-year-olds have it. The Winton Centre’s analysis suggests that when the numbers are that high, the risk-benefit analysis changes utterly. A twentysomething has about a one in 50,000 chance of a blood clot if they get the AZ vaccine ,but a higher than one in 16,000 chance of going into intensive care with Covid in the next 16 weeks if they don’t.

If we freed up those AZ doses, we could do all sorts of things. For one thing, we could offer people a mix-and-match vaccine dose, so that people who want their booster earlier than eight weeks could do so. The evidence of effectiveness for mixed Covid jabs is now quite good, and it may even be more effective than two jabs of the same dose.

And we could offer vaccines to older teenagers who are willing, with their parents’ consent, to take a very low risk of vaccine side-effects in exchange for a significantly decreased risk of spreading the disease.

People should be able to make these decisions, or in the case of older children, to make them in concert with their parents, just as we allow them to make other decisions about risk and wellness. Perhaps they would need to sign a waiver; but they should be allowed to.

In about seven weeks, children will be going back to school after their summer holidays. The virus will, in all likelihood, still be circulating at least as much as it is now. We will head into winter with few restrictions, possibly with new variants, and still, probably, with a large percentage of the population unvaccinated. We could significantly reduce that percentage if we allow people to make their own decisions about what is important.

Now that Freedom Day is here, we ought to allow people a real freedom: the freedom to choose to be vaccinated.