Vaccine Wars

Oh God, What Now?

Podmasters

Politics, Government, News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

As the EU considers restricting exports of the COVID vaccines, are we in the midst of the first authentic post-Brexit row between the EU and the UK – or are Brexiters just using it as a distraction from their own failures? And who’s really to blame for the vaccine shortage? Plus, what has the Year of Living Isolatedly done to Britain’s appetite for alcohol and “miscellaneous stimulation”? What will an independent English parliament look like if (when) it happens? And, in the Extra Bit, what did we think of Russell T Davies’s AIDS drama It’s A Sin? “Boris Johnson did far LESS than he should have. 100,000 deaths should be a resigning matter.” – Naomi Smith “Maybe after five years of Brexit campaigning, British people really DO trust celebrities more than scientists…” – Alex Andreou “If we create vaccine passports we’re just reserving travel for the richest countries.” – Yasmeen Serhan “We’re entering a dangerous phase in the UK:EU relationship where each side is trying to use the other side’s failure of their own success.” – Naomi Smith Presented by Ros Taylor with Naomi Smith, Yasmeen Serhan and Alex Andreou. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers: Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofronijevic. Audio production by Alex Rees. OH GOD, WHAT NOW? is a Podmasters production. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Oh God What Now. Don't worry listeners, things will look very different
0:11.5	by Easter. I said different, not better. I'm Ros Taylor, editor of the LSE's COVID-19
0:17.6	blog. Naomi Smith is CEO of Best Britain. Hi Naomi. Hello, hello. You tweeted this morning
0:24.1	that you woke up with extra fire in your belly after watching Boris Johnson's scruffy non-contrition
0:29.6	last night. I see an answer more than 100,000 Britons had died of COVID. That's one in every
0:34.2	660 office. Do you feel agiased? Is that the only thing we can take from this ghastly experience?
0:41.7	Well, that's what I'm taking from it Ros. I mean, I am incredibly angry today. You know,
0:47.7	this is 100,000 British people dead, which means many more hundreds of thousands of grieving.
0:55.1	You know, all of those people have had more than one person in their family, I'm sure.
1:00.9	And more will be suffering other effects of disease, whether directly was long COVID or
1:05.9	indirectly through delayed medical procedures or declining mental health, you name it.
1:11.0	And news out yesterday as well that we have the worst recession among the G7. And these
1:16.0	two points are related because this government strategy was to have us try to live with the
1:20.7	virus because they spun us all those falsehoods that you had to choose between saving lives
1:26.3	or saving the economy. And it's just not bloody true. All of those countries that prioritize
1:31.0	saving lives rather than living with the virus, which is what our government prioritized.
1:35.2	And now back in our open for business and having a much more normal time and none of it
1:39.5	had to be like this. They ignored advice. They thought a virus gave a shit about British
1:44.1	exceptionalism, which of course, it along with the rest of the world does not. And in the
1:48.4	first wave, it took just 251 days for us to reach 50,000 deaths. And in the second, just
1:56.3	79 days. That means that the government got worse at handling the virus, not better. So
2:01.9	yes, I'm beyond livid. I spoke to Rachel Clark, who's a hospice
	...

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