If he means, of late, he might have a point. We bet everything on the first few months, which made sense, given the state we were in back at the start of the year. We raced to 30m by Mar 31, but have barely added 10m since then. France, Germany, Italy, Spain and others are going to catch us up within a month at the current rate.
Source
Looks good for them right now as they've seen off their second/third wave and should have high communal levels of natural immunity, which might help more with suppressing Delta than vaccines.
We, on the other hand, are looking at a big fucking challenge in the second half of the year.
One of the first computer games I ever played was this:
In this clip, the early leader wins. But if you play it more than once, you know there's no way you'd take that for granted.
That's what's happening here. People naturally got on a bit of a high after the uncertainty as Brexit dragged on, and the utter human and social disaster of January and February. We raced ahead of Europe in 'the vaccine race', deaths dropped off quickly. That's what you call a salient psychological moment. The high point, the relief, after the massive worry and loss. It sticks in people's minds. And it looked like we had done better than Europe. Felt pretty smug and grateful. Even safe, when many of us got our first jabs sooner than expected.
But this 'race' isn't over, not by a long straight. All we did was get out of a hole we dug ourselves, and 'took the lead', on the back of taking AZ's early supply.
Now we'll need to see if AZ holds up against Delta, complete what vaccinations remain, then get a booster. Then start all over again for the winter. And hope we don't discover that we brought Beta back from Europe and seeded it on the quiet.
The dynamics are really going to be very complicated and I wouldn't make any predictions.
But right now, the clouds are parting for Europe, whilst the forecast for the UK is as unpredictable as our summers usually are. Not that Europe can't fuck this up big time, yet again. Just that we have not even come close to finishing the race by 'winning' the first round of vaccinations.
