My mother is nearly 88. She has yet to receive an
invitation for a Covid vaccination. I hope it comes soon. The risk to her comes
entirely from me. She has hardly left the house since March, but I have to go
shopping. If I caught Covid on one of those shopping trips, it would be
difficult to stop her catching it too. We live in the same house and I care for
her. If an 88-year-old catches Covid, there is a good chance she would end up
in hospital and a good chance that she would die.
In England 5.49% of the population has been vaccinated.
In Scotland 4.12 % of the population has been
vaccinated.
In Wales 4.01 % of the population has been vaccinated.
We are lucky however that we live in Britain. The United Kingdom has vaccinated more of its population that anyone else except Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. We are ahead of the United States and massively ahead of the EU.
If Scotland had voted for independence in 2014, then either we would be reliant on the EU to supply the vaccine or if we had failed to join the EU we would be reliant on ourselves. But no small independent country in Europe is doing better than Britain including Switzerland. It is hard to believe that independence would turn Scotland either into Bahrain, the UAE or Israel. It is unlikely that Scotland would have done better than Ireland which has vaccinated only 1.6% of the population and we might be doing as badly as badly as Bulgaria which has managed only 0.3%.
We are doing better than nearly everyone else firstly
because we left the EU. The EU managed the vaccine collectively and didn’t do
it well. The British Government did better at ordering the various vaccines and
also developed our own. We made these vaccines available before anyone else and
the British vaccine is easier to deliver because it does not require ultra-low
temperatures.
Being a part of Britain is therefore saving Scottish
lives. This is not merely because the British Army is helping to organise and administer
the vaccine, but because the British Government made the right choices which
led to us buying effective vaccines and developing our own. The Scottish
Government neither funded, nor ordered any vaccines. We are completely dependent
on the supplies we are getting from Britain. The only thing the Scottish
Government is responsible for is organising the rollout of the vaccine. Healthcare
unfortunately is devolved. It is doing that job worse than England and Northern
Ireland.
Scotland is getting a proportional share of the
vaccine. There are supply difficulties for everyone. England and Northern
Ireland may have advantages because they are rather more densely populated than
Scotland. It may be harder to administer the vaccine to very remote places in
the Highlands and Islands. But this also makes it less likely that we will
catch the virus in the first place.
Scotland may have decided to vaccinate care homes
first, which given the difficulty of bringing ultra-low temperature vaccines to
such places might be slowing us down. But why didn’t we use the Oxford-AstraZeneca
in care homes, which requires only an ordinary fridge and use the Pfizer
vaccine elsewhere. I hate to think that Sturgeon doesn’t want to use the
English vaccine. She cannot even bear to say the word Oxford.
Covid is the defining event of our time, but the SNP’s
handling of it has been poor since the start. With our low population density
Scotland should have done much better than England in terms of Covid cases and
deaths.
Scotland has had 1,492,656 cases with 7,704 deaths.
But this is worse than any other European country with
a population of 5 million
Denmark has had 189,000 cases and 1,775 deaths.
Slovakia has had 223,000 cases and 3,474 deaths.
Norway has had 58,651 cases and 517 deaths.
Finland has had 40,337 cases and 618 deaths.
If you compare like with like, then it becomes obvious
that SNP Scotland has not merely done worse than anywhere else with a
population of 5 million it has done more than ten times worse in terms of
deaths than Norway and Finland.
Scotland has been kept going this year because the UK
Treasury has funded us. We are receiving the vaccine only because the UK is supplying
it. We have done no better than the UK as a whole with regard to Covid cases
and deaths and on care home deaths, which ought to have been avoidable, we have
done considerably worse. Despite having the advantage of low population density,
we have done massively worse than any European country of a similar size. It is
staggering to believe that so many Scots believe that Nicola Sturgeon has done
a good job.
Everything that has gone well this year, such as furlough
and the vaccine has been provided by the British Government. Everything that
has gone badly such as our failure to deliver the vaccine as quickly as England
and Northern Ireland and our decision to send people sick with Covid back into
care homes has been due to decisions made by the SNP.
This year has demonstrated that Scotland has depended
on the British Government for paying our wages and for the vaccine that will
end the pandemic. But it is just now when she should be concentrating on delivering
the vaccine that Sturgeon is distracted not merely by the Salmond Inquiry
scandal, but by her starting another drive for independence. Focus on the day
job Sturgeon or you will be responsible for still more unnecessary deaths.
Already Scottish pensioners will be dying because of Scotland doing worse at
rolling out the vaccine.
Scots who want independence should refuse their furlough money and refuse the vaccine, because if the SNP had won in 2014, we would have got neither.
