IN Scotland it is not (yet) illegal to laugh at our Nationalist overlords. For the amusement of anyone who has not yet seen it, here from last month is health secretary Humza Yousaf as we shall for ever remember him.
Surely at school he was warned never to run in corridors? Humza’s mishap in the hallway at Holyrood proved to be an allegory: rushing to impose vaccine passports for the start of October, the predictable outcome was a technological tangle and tumble by the SNP government.
Looking even more foolish than usual due to what Scotland’s late-night trade group derided as a ‘shambles’, our red-faced rulers pressed ahead but designated the first half of October to be a test period and delayed enforcement until this week.
Shamefully, from last Monday owners of late-night venues and organisers of large-scale events face prosecution if they do not comply with this despicable scheme. It is also illogical: only the double-jabbed – who might nonetheless be infectious – may now enter Scotland’s nightclubs and largest football stadia; yet anyone unvaccinated who has either a negative test result or evidence of antibodies can go hang.
This week’s authoritarianism did not end there: Scotland’s secondary school pupils were ordered to continue wearing masks, including during classroom lessons.
Apart from demonstrating who is boss, the justification from Education Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville for this continuing abuse comprised the usual boilerplate: ‘Cautious approach . . . no room for complacency . . . remain vigilant to reduce the spread . . .’ Zzzz. It is a safe bet that pupils will remain muzzled throughout the winter ahead – much to the delight of the largest teaching union, the all-powerful Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS). General Secretary Larry Flanagan approvingly commented: ‘The EIS has argued for great caution in any easing of school mitigations, especially in light of continuing high levels of infection and the incomplete rollout of vaccinations for pupils.’
From which you will deduce that the EIS has been a cheerleader for 12- to 15-year-olds needlessly being injected with what originally was classified as an ‘adult vaccine for the adult population’.
Also ignoring the recommendation of theJoint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) that ‘the margin of benefit is considered too small to support universal vaccination’ is education minister Somerville. This week she boasted that ‘progress with vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds has been remarkable and is already over 40 per cent’.
This level of unnecessary and reckless jabbing of adolescents is cause for shame rather than pride. Yet the vaccinations and the aforementioned mitigations are still not enough for a public health panjandrum such as Grampian NHS’s Jillian Evans, whose title Head of Health Intelligence belies her absurd alarmism.
For a zero-Covid zealot such as Evans, the ‘preventative measures’ of discriminatory vaccine passes and schoolchildren being muzzled and needled are insufficiently intrusive. So-called ‘new cases’ of Covid in Scotland have levelled off at around 2,500 per day but this week Evans was on the airwaves complaining: ‘I don’t think we can live with that figure, when you think about the people who are dying from Covid every day. That is not something that I find acceptable.’
For the record, during week ending October 17 Covid was mentioned on 139 death certificates – just over 10 per cent of all deaths (1,331). This remains a fraction of previous peaks. The latest statistic is not cause for celebration but currently the number of Covid-related deaths is much less troublesome than public policy in Scotland being influenced by doomsayer Jillian Evans.
