When your only plan fails......

Yesterday, several countries, including Portugal, we moved from the "green list" to the "amber list", meaning that from Tuesday, if you returned from one you would have to quarantine.

The Indian Variant, now called Delta, has been allowed to establish itself in the UK and is now dominant in many areas, some worryingly so.

The UK Government could have taken a more cautious route from March, but was intent on a fixed plan of unlocking, divorced from reality and facts. While travellers from Pakistan and Bangladesh had to quarantine for weeks, in India where Delta was rampant, travellers could just arrive and travel wherever. Even when there was a requirement to quarantine, travellers from India could mix with arrivals from elsewhere in the queue at immigration, where some days the line was eight hours long.

It took to Tuesday, THIS WEEK, for those arriving from amber and red list countries to have a separate terminal.

If the Government had set out to ensure as many people will get infected as possible, then its actions would be little different from what we have seen.

Where caution was needed, mitigations in schools were removed, and now transmission data from schools from the second half of May has, for some reason, not been published.

The Government has just the one plan; vaccination, but with every variant that is allowed in, we run a risk for all of humanity for a new mutation to emerge, one that is vaccine resistant, and then we will really be in deep trouble. Vaccines are no indestructable, we should have protected them, and stopped all but essentail travel into and out of the country. But no.

We are where we are, but we must also realise why, and that this is just the latest in a serious of deadly errors committed by Johnson and his Government.

I hope I am wrong, and that we will be OK, but this virus has mutated so many times.....

Deepti Gurdasani

@dgurdasani1

Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology, statistical genetics, machine learning. Intersectional feminist. Advocating for a better culture in academia, says:

I can't begin to describe how angry I feel that a highly transmissible, more severe variant, with significant escape from vaccines was not only allowed to enter the country, but allowed to spread while our govt removed mitigations & minimised the risks posed by this. Over the past few months, I've been labelled 'alarmist' for advising caution & suggesting that these variants may pose a very real risk. I've been attacked for suggesting that vaccine escape is a real possibility. For saying we shouldn't 'wait & see' until evidence accumulates. The thing is - this is alarming. Some of us raised the alarm many weeks ago when we saw what was happening in India- when we saw this variant outcompeting B.1.1.7, and the mass death associated with it.

While many in our scientific community minimised - suggesting Indian plight was mainly their poor healthcare system. Or that deaths were a small proportion of population (ignoring massive underreporting). Ignoring reports of greater severity. Ignoring deaths among the vaccinated. Yes, we didn't have systematic data on much of this, but it was enough to be alarmed. So why didn't we practice caution while waiting for risks to become clearer? We did the opposite- opened up, removed mitigations from schools, opened up borders - waiting for evidence. I hope we can reflect - as scientists- as to what happened here and the responsibility we hold. The picture has been deeply concerning for weeks, so why were these risks minimised by some scientists & a lot of media again and again.

Using uncertainty to dismiss risk, when the risk has been real and apparent for a really long time. I'm honestly I'm particularly fed up of the rhetoric that variants cannot ever escape vaccines. They can, and are. Every new variant puts our vaccine resources at risk - it's astonishing to me that given this is our primary strategy, govt is willing to take these risks.fed up not just from fighting a govt that's corrupt and negligent, but also blind optimism from members of our scientific community, that undermines caution. We have a responsibility to protect our vaccines, not just for us, but for the global pandemic. And we as scientists need to be putting out the key message that these resources need protection. They aren't bullet-proof, and if we don't protect them, they will ultimately fall.

And it'll be because we literally threw every mutation of the virus at them by allowing continued transmission & import of new variants due to a flawed idea that vaccines couldn't be overcome. Paradoxically, it's this blind optimism that leads us to take these unacceptable risks. SAGE in their 13th May statement made this clear- the cost of waiting to act was likely far greater than overacting early on, given the risks such a variant entailed. They were absolutely right. And next time someone talks about 'living with the virus', consider the virus we're talking about living with. A virus which has adapted rapidly, spawning new variants, each one replacing the previous regionally or globally. Each one more transmissible than the last. More severe. And with every new variant comes the very real gamble of vaccine escape- widely agreed to be the way out of the global pandemic. Why on earth would anyone think this is something we could or should live with?