Everything Will Be Alright in the End

I had one of those “Oh shit” moments today. I glanced at a tweet by the former Sun political editor and now Times Radio presenter Tom Newton-Dunn:  ‘Oxford University’s Regius Professor of Medicine Sir John Bell tells G&T (a radio show) the South African covid variant is more worrying than the Kent variant “by some margin”. “It’s here” already, and the current vaccines may not work on it: “There’s a big question mark about that”‘ Oh shit indeed.

There I was, getting all excited about getting my CVOD vaccine drug and this bloke Sir John Bell, who is not just a professor of medicine but your actual ‘Regius’ professor, not that I know what Regius means, says this vaccine might not work on the virus. Hence my excrement-based outburst. I could almost feel my soul deflating. But Mr Newton-Dunn was being selective with the truth. It’s potentially bad news, but not that bad.

You can take the boy out of The Sun, but you can’t take the Sun out of the boy. And certain words were omitted from Professor Bell’s comments, ones which said that it would only take between 4-6 weeks to adapt the vaccine. And his literal closing words were “Everyone should stay calm. It’s going to be fine.”

It seems to me that Newton-Dunn has transferred his red top skills with great ease. Rather than inform The Great British Public, or perhaps both the people who listen to Times Radio, he’s trying to scare us instead. If he’d said, “Current vaccines may not work on the new variant of COVID so just give up the fight, lose all hope and then die” it wouldn’t have been a great deal more misleading than what he actually tweeted.

To conclude, we’re still living in “Oh shit” times. New infections of the virus are out of control and a new national lockdown is virtually certain, especially since Boris Johnson has said it isn’t. The vaccine will come to our rescue, eventually, even if it has to be regularly adapted, as vaccines always do.

The Sun lives by the adage that any news is good news but bad news is the best news of all. Clearly Tom Newton-Dunn is carrying on with that tradition at Times Radio.