Professor Jonathan Van-Tam peered over his reading glasses, did one of his hamster snuffles and assured us there was really no need to worry. It was, he said, “full steam ahead” for Britain’s Covid jabs programme. Carry on. Calm down. Panic not.
“BREAKING NEWS!!!!” flashed the rolling-news channels. Klaxons. Honkers. Bonkers. Tabloid websites reached for headline capitals. TV presenters adopted those frowns they reserve for really sad stories. “Some people will have concerns,” said Jane Hill on the BBC News website.
They will if you all keep ramping it up, Auntie.
I did not dare switch on Sky News but suspect that by now their afternoon newscasters were clopping round the studio in hazmat suits and radiation-proof lead boots, reading the autocue through Darth Vader masks. Is that you, Beth?
Hypochondria being nowadays chiefly a media rather than medical condition, two dry-as-salt afternoon press conferences acquired sudden, immense stature. The balloon had gone up! And so our attention was hauled to a news briefing in Amsterdam, where four very chewy bods from the European Medicines Agency were saying zat ze AstraZeneca jab was still a good idea, despite “very rare” problems with blood clotting.
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When even the Europeans are saying there is not much to worry about with our wonderful, life-saving, delicious jab, it really must be OK.
Moments later a similar event, though a touch more suburban, was held at the Department of Health in London. This was the one chaired by “JVT” Van-Tam. Alongside him was a Dr Lim Wei Shen, a Prof Jane Raine and a Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed. Experts, we had ’em. And not a single politician to be found.
Did that prove things were truly dire? Or was it a sign that the whole media world had gone nuts over a perfectly normal vaccines development which no one in the political world considered serious enough to merit the presence of a cabinet minister?
If Matt Hancock had been there, it really might have been time to worry.
The profs burbled about blood platelets and thrombocytopenia and a few other things with long scientific names that need not bother us (which may be a way of saying I can not start to spell them).
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Raine had an earnest, sympathetic manner. Pirmohamed could have been a Harley Street quack assuring a rich patient there was no need yet to alter the tax-avoidance provisions in his will.
Lim perched at the far end, a little horn of hair sticking up on one side as he eloquently explained why things should be fine. At one point Pirmohamed started talking of DVT — deep vein thrombosis. Unless I misheard him and he was addressing JVT.
Van-Tam said they were announcing a minor “course correction” and this sort of thing was entirely routine in the vaccines world. He would have been amazed had there not been one. He produced a groovy graph with blue and orange bloblets to show potential harms and benefits. The blue ones (goodies) far outnumbered the orange ones (baddies), some of which were not even full bloblets but more like crescent moons.
Under-30s should avoid the Chateau AstraZeneca if other choices were available, said JVT, but time and again it was stressed that vaccination remained a good idea.
“Abundance of caution,” murmured Pirmohamed, as if scribbling a prescription. “Extremely small numbers,” said Raine. Lim, an unfazed, logical fellow, managed subtly to give the impression the scare artistes were daft. Van-Tam actually said it would be “pretty absurd” not to offer AstraZeneca to the over-30s (as one of the journos suggested).
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JVT, who likes his metaphors, also managed in one sentence to compare the British vaccination programme to a massive beast and to an Atlantic liner. Every sea voyage, he argued, had “at least one course correction”.
The Titanic’s didn’t. And look what happened then.