‘We are not the victims of the virus, as Boris Johnson would have it’

• IT did not have to be like this.

As with syphilis and global warming, pandemics are social. Covid-19 is a social disease of very short duration.

But unlike syphilis it does not lie dormant and can be eliminated by strict isolation and support so we could all go back to work and larking about.

Labour colluded in the lie that the pandemic was a force of nature and called it “constructive opposition”, reserving its ire for the left.

As a medical doctor I know the pandemic is no more a force of nature than poverty or golf.

We are not the victims of the virus, as Boris Johnson would have it. We are the victims of the failure to suppress the virus.

Let’s call it what it is: the great failure.

We knew by summer that the virus could not be fought from call centres; that it had to be managed with a huge injection of cash to local public health for personalised isolation and social support.

Failure is on Johnson for failing to prepare for winter. The failure is on Labour for not showing us how.

For a possible hit in the polls in the summer, Labour could have emerged with credibility. Now nobody is listening.

The gods did not put Johnson 10 points ahead in polls, Labour did.

Labour’s constructive opposition was a strategic error and failed the British people. The vaccine may come to the Tories’ rescue, but not to Labour’s.

Yes, there was incompetence and delay, but the decisive error was one of direction.

The key policy error was the centralised test-and-trace, £26billion to the friends of the Tories and next to nothing to local public health.

We were left without a voice. A failure of democracy.

We will come out of the pandemic not as victors, but as something endured, not a collective sense of celebration but of relief.

It is not that we don’t have heroes – we have a multitude of them. The shelf-stacker, bus driver, hospital porter. And so so many more.

The millions who did small and big acts of kindness. They cared for our elderly, our poor and lonely.

In this pandemic we need solidarity and anger; anger at the tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths; and a healthy psychological response to our catastrophic handling of the virus that will assist our recovery from this trauma.

So let’s have a great time when this is over. But if our political leaders show up at our street parties, let’s run them off.

DR PAUL O’BRIEN
Gaisford Street, NW5