I think there was a lot of hubris at the start of the pandemic - a feeling that we, the human race backed up by the power of medical science, will soon see this off. But as the military know, plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, and so it has it turned out. The bug has proved to be more resilient than anyone, myself included, ever imagined it would be. I thought it would a three month wonder like SARS or MERS, but this time what the medical authorities feared those bugs could be has come to pass.

It hasn't helped of course that the vaccination programme has ended up tangled up in politics in a way that hasn't really happened before. These things are always predictable with hindsight but who had heard of antivaxers two years ago. There have been good things that have come out of it - some significant advances in anti viral drugs (which are themselves becoming mired in politics) and some massive improvements in the way vaccines are developed and produced.

mRNA vaccine tech - Pfizer and Moderna's approach - has probably been pushed forward about 15yrs in the last 18 months. It only took Moderna seven weeks to develop their Covid vaccine from scratch, and I suspect it would take less than that now if another vaccine was needed against the new version. There's a whole load of other diseases - including (some) cancer - where the same approach may also work and those vaccinations are being developed in parallel with the Covid version. I wonder how many anti vax demo's we'll see when there's 20 more diseases you can be vaccinated against. When, instead of months of uncertain outcome invasive surgery or 'palliative care only', it's a couple of injections.

None of that helps much at the moment and it isn't going to trickle down to the rural parts of Africa for example any time soon. I suspect the protect the vulnerable and let it burn itself out among the 'resistant' is the unspoken approach the government has been taking but the bug is nothing if not unpredictable. It remains to be seen whether we'll be starting again with a new round of jabs or whether the existing ones work against it but based on the precautions people seem to be taking in my local Sainsburys you'd get the impression it's all over already. I noticed yesterday the hand sanitiser has been shoved away into a corner to make way way for a few pallets of cut price Xmas booze. 'Eat, drink and be merry' indeed.