Category Archives: Coronavirus

‘Breathtaking’ starts tonight. Here’s a new clip to set you up for it

By now you should be primed for the new ITV drama, Breathtaking, about the Covid-19 crisis, how it affected the NHS, and the nonsense that was coming from Boris Johnson’s Tory government at the same time.

It starts this evening (February 19), and ITV has released this clip to get you prepared for it:

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Joanne Froggatt and Dr Rachel Clarke talk ‘Breathtaking’

With the ITV drama Breathtaking, based on Dr Rachel Clarke’s memoir of the Covid-19 pandemic, screening tomorrow (February 19, 2024), the BBC’s Woman’s Hour interviewed the author and star Joanne Froggatt.

Listen to the interview via the link below (starting one minute and 40 seconds in), and then make an appointment to watch the show that could be the next Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

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Will ‘Breathtaking’ do for the NHS what ‘Mr Bates’ did for sub-postmasters?

Fresh from the success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, ITV is about to screen another drama based on real-life political developments.

Breathtaking is based on the diary of Dr Rachel Clarke – @doctor_oxford on ‘X’ – and aims to show the facts about what was happening in the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic, contrasted with the Tory gaslighting of the public that was taking place at the same time.

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Peter Stefanovic has already seen it:

Here’s the trailer:

The BAFTA advance screening of the series was introduced by Michael Rosen, whose life was saved by NHS care after he contracted the virus – and it gave rise to an extraordinary coincidence:

Clearly, emotions are already running high around this new series.

As for Dr Clarke – her campaigning for an NHS that is able to do its job, free of the political interference that has restricted its abilities for more than a decade, continues. And she continues to inform us as the Tory government’s mismanagement steadily worsens the service we receive.

Here’s what she told us earlier this week:

Perhaps Breathtaking will remind us all of what we had to endure while the Tories were partying in Downing Street and giving away billions of pounds of public money to their friends for so-called “protective equipment” that simply wasn’t up to scratch.

In an election year, I’d say that makes it well worth watching.


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Liz Truss, Ayanda Capital, and yet another PPE scandal from the illegal ‘VIP lane’

Backhander: I use this image for obvious reasons – see the story below.

Here’s Carol Vorderman:

She’s reminding us that your Tory government spaffed hundreds of millions of pounds on its very rich friends when it should have been safeguarding us all from Covid-19 – and the money has never been recovered.

Undoubtedly there will be more on this and other scandals as the information is prised from the unwilling grip of the Tories responsible.

What really caused the inflation crisis? Here’s Gary to explain why rich people have your money

The real cause of inflation: the super-rich sucked up government cash that was given out to keep working- and middle-class people alive during the Covid crisis – by being the providers of the services and supplies everybody else needed. But that was a crisis and it should be time to normalise the situation. Why won’t politicians do it?

According to Gary Stevenson, governments like those in the UK and US caused the post-Covid inflation crisis by giving away thousands of pounds to keep us all going when the economy was locked down.

The problem was that those of us who normally work for a living had to then use that money to pay our bills (that’s not including This Writer; I just carried on writing Vox Political all the way through and lived on the money I earned from it, plus savings – those were happier days) while the rich, who issue the bills that we have to pay, just sucked up all the cash.

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They then started using that cash to buy what they could – not luxury items, because they were forbidden from doing it due to the shutdown of the economy, but so-called economic assets like houses. This stopped the rest of us from being able to buy them by keeping prices high – as Gary has discussed in previous clips.

Notice: he doesn’t say there was anything wrong with governments spending the money in the way they did; people needed cash to survive and it was inevitable that providing it to them from the Treasury, rather than the economy, would increase the national debt and massively increase wealth inequality between the poor who spent the cash and the rich who received it.

But because the circumstances were extraordinary, and the result was an unbalanced economy (increased inequality), the government should then have taken action to re-balance the economy by using the levers available to it to re-distribute the wealth.

It should have taxed the money back off the rich. Logically, the government could have got away with calling it a windfall tax because that’s what it would have been.

That hasn’t happened.

And neither of the ‘Big Two’ political parties – Labour and the Conservatives – are even considering such a rebalancing of the economy. Instead, they are both planning to bake it into our lives for a long time to come.

So we can say that Labour and the Tories both intend to increase wealth for the richest and poverty and debt for everybody else – and that includes those of you who are middle-class, sitting there smugly thinking you’ll be all right (you won’t).

There’s only one answer, but This Writer doubts many people will take it up.

You have to think for yourself.

That’s right; you have to get details of the political plans of every candidate standing in your constituency in the general election and you have to work out which of them – if any – intend to re-balance the economy to prevent us all falling into this debt trap.

How do you fancy that?

And politicians? Here’s a challenge for you:

Are you going to produce manifesto commitments to tax the money back off the super-rich – who don’t need it, remember – and re-balance the economy or are you too scared of them to dare upsetting them?


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Hundreds of doctors to sue NHS because government PPE failings gave them Long Covid

One MORE time: the PPE used in UK hospitals is pictured bottom right. Hundreds of doctors are now suing the UK government because they say they contracted Long Covid due to the inadequacy of the PPE they were provided.

In a sane country, wouldn’t this be enough reason for a government to take action to recover the millions (billions?) of pounds it wasted on useless Personal Protective Equipment during the Covid-19 crisis?

Hundreds of doctors plan to sue the NHS, claiming a lack of proper PPE left them disabled with Long Covid.

The case centres on an NHS diktat to downgrade the level of masks when the virus took hold. Staff were only required to wear blue surgical masks, plastic aprons and gloves.

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They claim they are facing financial ruin and that authorities should have known they were being placed at risk.

The government could recoup a huge amount of money, just by taking action to claw back the money wasted on inadequate PPE.

For example: what about the £203 million given to PPE Medpro, the company pushed through the illegal Tory VIP lane for contracts by Michelle Mone, who’s said to have profited by £65 million from the deal?

That could provide a million quid in compensation for more than 200 doctors with Long Covid.

And its just the tip of the VIP lane iceberg.

Why does the public purse always have to pay for the profligate failures of the government?

Source: Hundreds of doctors to sue NHS after lack of proper PPE left them disabled with Long Covid – Mirror Online


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Will Nicola Sturgeon enjoy renewed popularity over WhatsApp descriptions of Tories?

Take pride in it: is Nicola Sturgeon brandishing the finger with which she texted the claim that Liz Truss was as “useful as a marzipan dildo” on WhatsApp? Sadly not.

This Writer never had much time for Nicola Sturgeon – until now. What a shame she’s being praised for something that isn’t true but is from a parody account.

The SNP politician was ordered to disclose the contents of WhatsApp messages she sent during the Covid-19 crisis. What she said about Boris Johnson was bad enough – but a parody ‘X’ account took the story, ran with it, and brought joy to the nation:

Why would anybody want her to apologise for saying these things? This Writer reckons that if Sturgeon really had said them, she should have had a medal!

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I’m stealing the description of Suella Braverman, by the way. It’s only her first initial and the name of the foreign politician whose politics seem to most closely resemble her own.

Sadly, @PoliticoForYou is a parody account and the story isn’t true – apart from what Sturgeon said about Boris Johnson.

So it’s still bad news for him, after he tried to tell the Covid Inquiry in December that he got on well with Sturgeon and they had a good relationship. This may have been true in their interactions, but clearly her own opinion of him wasn’t as he described.

More details of the real WhatsApp messages are available (in watered-down form) here on the BBC News website.


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Tory health minister promised to sell shares in health firm – but didn’t. Is this the reason?

Lord Markham: his word is about as much use as that of Rishi Sunak’s in-laws’ firm, Infosys, it seems.

This Writer has a certain amount of sympathy with Tory health minister Lord Markham.

He may have promised to sell his shares in private health screening firm Cignpost, that made a fortune from Covid testing, a year ago and failed to do so, but he’s not the first.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife’s dad’s firm Infosys promised to stop operating in Russia after that country invaded Ukraine – but was still there, picking up contracts, eight months later (to my knowledge).

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If that firm – and the prime ministerial in-laws who run it – can ignore its promises, why can’t Markham?

After all, they’re all in it together – right?

A Tory health minister still owns a major stake in a private health screening firm making money from the crisis in the NHS a year after promising to sell it, the Mirror can reveal.

Lord Markham annouced last January that he was “undertaking to sell my stake” in Cignpost, a private Covid testing firm which made a fortune from the pandemic. But Company House records for Cignpost Investments Limited still show Markham owning between 25% and 50% of the business.

Cignpost has filed accounts showing that revenue soared by 467% to £278m in 2022, thanks to booming business helping firms comply with covid rules. The company has £52m cash in the bank and shareholder funds are up 150% from last year. Cignpost also offers mobile health screening, including heart health assessments and skin screening, which can be done in “your board room, staff car park or a third-party venue”.

Source: Tory health minister still hasn’t sold stake in Covid testing firm a year after promise – Mirror Online


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The UK has Covid-19 hotspots again – but who has been catching the JN.1 variant?

Rampant again: the Covid-19 virus is once again on the loose across the UK – apparently because of ‘festive socialising’. But who could afford to contract the disease by raving it up in a UK where only the super-rich have money to spare?

How many people in the UK have died of the JN.1 variant of Covid-19?

The article referenced below says 10,000 people across the world died of it in December 2023, but that is not useful to those of us who want to follow national trends.

Apparently no information on UK deaths is publicly available.

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Instead we get this:

Two regions of the UK have seen cases of Covid shoot up over the past week, making them the leading hotspots for the virus.

The South East topped the table with 1,237 new cases over the past seven days, which equates to 13.4 people per 100,000 of the population. London trailed a close second with 1,032 new infections. The region to have avoided the worst of the cases is the North East, which only registered 194 over the past week.

Experts fear that JN.1, which is thought to have rocketed in numbers due to festive socialising, could reach record levels in the UK in a matter of weeks if cases continue to rise.

This Writer would also like to see a demographic breakdown of which social groups contracted the disease due to “festive socialising”.

Here in Mid Wales, the pubs were practically empty for most of the Christmas and New Year period because people didn’t have the money to spend after coughing up for presents and groceries and covering the normal day-to-day cost of living that has skyrocketed under the Tories.

I’m willing to bet that the new generation of sufferers are the richest people in society who could afford to go out. The evidence that the South East and London are the current Covid hotspots tends to support this.

If they are now spreading it to the rest of us, it will be because they are too stupid to realise they need to isolate themselves until they are better.

So much for private education, eh?

Source: Covid hotspots in UK confirmed after rise in JN.1 variant – 10 areas with most cases


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Anti-vaxxers angry after study shows jabs could have prevented 7,000 Covid hospital admissions and deaths

Research published in The Lancet shows that 7,180 hospital admissions and deaths could have been prevented if people had received all their Covid-19 vaccinations.

The study links gaps in vaccine coverage of younger people, men, those in areas of higher deprivation, and people of non-white ethnicity with hospitalisations and deaths.

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But when the size of the group failing to receive vaccinations is compared with the number of hospitalisations and deaths, there may be merit in anti-vaxxer anger at the findings.

Experts found that between a third and a half of people had not had the recommended number of Covid vaccinations and boosters by 1 June, 2022: almost 27 million people in England alone.

The study looking at the whole UK population warned that gaps in vaccine coverage drove 7,180 hospital admissions and deaths during the summer of 2022.

There has been a backlash on the social media:

For the sake of balance, let’s remind ourselves:

Source: Covid jabs could have prevented 7,180 summer hospital admissions and deaths, study shows | The Independent


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