Vaccine, Letters, Uncertainty

 

Britannia's Realm
John Brett ( 1831-1902)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

We are a nation happiest in self-flagellation. Yes, our death rates are shameful, lockdowns came too late and our borders are bafflingly porous. But for a second, silence your negativity, park political recrimination, transcend the shrill social media moment and pause to take pride in something we've done right.

Because those who detest this government seem almost disappointed that the vaccine programme is - so far - a success...

Perhaps this is the government's one pandemic success because it was not outsourced to private firms employing atomised and disgruntled gig-economy staff. We may over-romanticise the NHS but nothing matches its esprit de corps. The Excel team is driven by concern for exhausted colleagues: every injection is another patient whose dying moments a nurse in ICU won't have to Face Time to sobbing relatives. Many hospital medics come straight off shift and grab a syringe. You could be injected by a civilian who just learnt on a rubber arm or a distinguished professor...

Our vaccination programme is the ultimate British queue - with maximum opprobrium for pushers-in. In Italy, the rich could buy a vaccine privately before there was a single public sector dose; in the US, "concierge" medical centres are illegally securing supplies.

The UAE has vaccinated a higher proportion of its citizens than Britain because it hasn't prioritised the vulnerable: people of any age can walk in. It is a far harder task to operate in strict order of need. But it is uplifting to know that the Queen, David Attenborough and Joan Collins had to wait their turns just like my mum. Harley Street can froth, yet so far paying a member's club £25,000 to fly to Dubai or India is the only way that wealthy Brits can cheat...

In France, 60 per cent say they're unlikely to have the jab - perhaps their drug companies should work on delivery by suppository - but more than 70 per cent of us are enlightened, rational and trusting enough of our health system to want the vaccine.

If, as looks likely, we reach 13 million doses by by mid-February, we should take pride... At the Excel I felt a patriotism very far from brittle, Brexity nationalism. It was that almost forgotten London Olympics sense of a diverse, resourceful, cheerful and fair-minded country pulling together. Dragging us out of the fear and darkness, vial by vial.

(Janice Turner, The Times, 2021)

The credit goes to the health workers most of all.

Letters

Sir, Christine North asks if police will be breaking up octogenarian raves. I have only seen the police break up one party, at the bowling club whose green backed on to my garden. One cannot fully appreciate The Laughing Policeman until hearing it screeched drunkenly by 100 or so elderly people at 2am.

(Stephen Knight, London EN5, The Times, 2021) 

Sir, David Timson has the germ of an idea, that vaccines be distributed via ice cream vans - but for music, rather than Greensleeves, I suggest The Cure by Lady Gaga or Needles and Pins by The Searchers.

(Edward Lucas-Smith, Teddington, Middlesex, The Times, 2021)

Regarding vaccinations in Salisbury Cathedral, the organist needs to get hold of the sheet music for Wilco's A Shot in the Arm.

(Phil Thomas, Thingwall, Merseyside, The Guardian, 2021)

Uncertainty

Type the words "kind of", "probably" or "perhaps" into an email in Microsoft Outlook and the program might well tell you to think again. If the artificial intelligence-powered "Microsoft Editor" decides you're not sounding decisive enough, it will warn you: "Words expressing uncertainty lessen your impact."

To me, this suggestion encapsulates something we've got wrong in society. Leaving aside the extent to which Big Tech is creeping ever further into our lives, it highlights a broader issue: we live in a world that rewards those who speak with conviction - even when that is misplaced - and gives very little airtime to those who acknowledge doubt...

Research shows that the human brain is hard-wired to hate uncertainty...While confident-sounding pundits might be giving us what our brains crave, the relief they are providing is probably illusory. As the mathematician John Allen Paulos once said: "Uncertainty is the only certainty there is." That is particularly true in the context of a novel virus about which so much is yet to be understood.

Yet overconfident "thought leaders" and other public figures are usually the ones who get the most newspaper headlines and biggest social media followings...

Study of a Fox
Jacques Laurent Agasse (1767-1849)
Photo Credit: Yale Center for British Art [Public Domain]

Professor Tetlock divided up forecasters into "foxes" and "hedgehogs", a distinction first popularised by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Foxes consider all sorts of different approaches and perspectives, and synthesise those into nuanced conclusions. Hedgehogs tend to view the world through the lens of one single defining idea. That makes the hedgehogs worse forecasters but more likely to get attention...

And it makes sense that when we're all feeling anxious and making many sacrifices, we would want to feel that some adults somewhere know what they're doing...Yet here I am, full of certainty on the need to stop paying so much attention to those expressing certainty...

(Jemima Kelly, The i, 2021)

Is certainty something we should be looking for and shouldn't we be sceptical of grand ideological theories? In terms of the virus do you believe those overconfident hedgehog politicians who grab the headlines or the medical experts?

The biggest social media followings tell us more about the nature of the followers than the one who is being followed.