For the people love “our NHS”, even though, during the pandemic, it was our NHS that shut non-Covid services other countries managed to keep open, almost certainly leading to thousands of premature deaths. Was it Nigel Lawson who said the NHS was the closest thing Britain had to a national religion? Electoral suicide to try and reform it, or so they say. God forbid any health minister should begin a speech without a heartfelt encomium to its quasi-divine status. They know they can get away with such behaviour because our chronically understaffed, criminally over-managed, unfit-for-purpose NHS is the “envy of the world”. I ask you, what kind of doctor would consider going on strike during a devastating pandemic when thousands of people are still walking around with undiagnosed cancers? And here’s another £250 million to bribe you to do the work for which you are already so handsomely rewarded! That’s the morally inert BMA which thinks it’s legitimate to ballot GPs on industrial action after Health Secretary Sajid Javid had the cheek to ask them to do their jobs, pretty please. Covid, which allows the British Medical Association, a far-Left militant trade union, to claim GPs are being “bullied” into seeing the same number of patients they somehow managed to see in person before the pandemic.
It’s not Covid any more – but Covid is far too useful a stick to beat the Government with to give it up that easily.Ĭovid, the capacious cloak of unaccountability that magically covers up all the NHS’s manifold deficiencies. “It’s not Covid we’re worried about,” the nurse says wearily. So the men argue and play politics while the children gasp for breath. “Minor inconveniences”, that’s what they call the masks, the social distancing and the stay-home instructions that kept those desperately ill babies away from the human contact they needed to be healthy.
What if a manager steals some of her staff while she’s away? What if a baby goes unmonitored for too long? What if a toddler has been lost when she walks in tomorrow morning? Such thoughts torment her, this lioness led by donkeys.įar away from the rhythmic bleeping and the machine sighs of the paediatric intensive care unit, important men, on the the radio and in Parliament, demand that more restrictions be brought back to stop the spread of Covid. She is exhausted but she is afraid to take her day off. Her unit already has too few nurses to give each child the attention they deserve. Paediatric ICU is supposed to have a higher ratio of staff to patients. They say they are understaffed, they need urgent reinforcements. Other departments in the hospital want her to send them some of her nurses. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says a senior nurse on the unit, “not this early in the winter.” Their immune systems, locked away for more than a year, recently got exposed to germs for the first time. Aged from zero to four, they are terribly ill, the poor mites. In a paediatric ICU, six infants are on ventilation.