I’m just angry now

[BathFullOfEels]

They knew a vaccine would be the only way of getting us out of this mess. The country has already been locked down twice. Why, why, why didn’t they use this time to set up the logistics of distributing and administering these vaccines?

Why, why, why are the government allowed to decide who to prioritise to receive these vaccines when they were always going to distribute in a way that benefits them. Surely any government with an ounce of realism would be self aware enough to realise that they would make this vaccine distribution a political decision and instead allow the decision to be made by an independent third party who can distribute it in a way that would allow the country to get back to work. Instead it’s likely that months and months down the line we’ll all be forced to go back to work despite still be unprotected.

I have visions of pensioners being able to swan off on holiday over the summer while the workers of the country will still be unable to.

It’s an absolute fucking farce. Watching that press conference last night just finally made it snap for me - they genuinely don’t know what they’re doing at all

@trulydelicious You aren’t serious? @hopsalong explains clearly and her argument is clear and precise.

I'm all for protecting the elderly and vulnerable but bbc news was reporting nurses and doctors saying that they have patients in their 20s 30s and 40s getting seriously ill and that no one knows who will get really ill, its a Russian roulette for everyone. To me that sounds like we need to be protecting the working population too. I'm in my 30s. The online vaccine calculator days I won't get a vaccine until 2022. I'm fine about that but if my life is the roll of a dice do I not deserve the vaccine as much as an 80 year old. I have young children to take care of.

User. Even if you end up in intensive care, provided it isn't overloaded, your chance of survival is very high.

If it's overrun however, your chance of survival drops

Even if you get the vaccine, you may be one of the unlucky ones who does not develop a good response, and so you could still end up in intensive care. Or you could end up in a car crash. Or develop cancer

Now if we vaccinate those most likely to become ill, then you get saved in all those cases

If we don't..

This post reeks of a very selfish “They’ve had their time” kind of attitude. Pensioners are at the greatest risk of having serious and life threatening illness from Covid. My 69-year-old father has just come out of hospital and was so severely ill he nearly didn’t make it. He lives in his own and was terribly lonely he was so careful if he had to go out but still caught it. My mother who also lives alone sees no one and is very down. Do you really believe good hard working people who put into the nhs all their working lives need to be condemned to spending some of their last few years alone depressed and locked away from their families or risking death?! Who puts more strain on the nhs if they get ill? Those are the ones that need to be vaccinated first- alongside those like healthcare workers and teachers forced to put theirs and their families heath at risk everyday. All this moaning, we’ve all just got to get a grip and get on with abiding by the rules.

@Bohemiagirl. I genuinely don't understand what you find disgusting about my post. Can you explain? I find your response weird.

Lockdown is clearly necessary again and I believe very strongly that older people should be the first to get vaccinations. But surely you don't disagree that the lockdown has benefited the old and the unwell more than the young and the healthy, who are at tiny risk from covid and who won't be getting vaccinated? At the same time, the cost has been almost entirely born by the young.

My grandfather fought in the war but he would now have been in his mid 90s. It's true that very few people of that generation are left. But my parents generation (baby boomers, now in their 70s) have undeniably as a group enjoyed amazing advantages relative both to their own parents and, increasingly, their children and grandchildren. This isn't to say that many individuals haven't suffered great hardship, but as a generation they've been very well served. My father for example: grammar school education, full grant to university, 105% mortgage from the GLC in mid 20s on a 3 bed house in nice London suburb (the 5% to buy furniture!) without a super well-paying job, fantastic pension etc. I have spent most of today writing references for students who graduated last year with a first, couldn't get anything other than bar jobs, and have now been laid off those. They have worked much harder for exams than my peers ever seemed to, from secondary school onwards, and yet the job and housing market is effectively closed to them.

The country as a whole is going to be a lot poorer and very likely more unhealthy as a result of the economic damage caused by lockdown. That will have much more effect on young people, who have also lost education, than the middle-aged and old who aren't retroactively having years of their own schooling chopped out or being condemned never to own a house. The question is how to redistribute wealth downwards to help children catch up. The Tories are never going to do much about this because their voters are unusually elderly (and it's hard to imagine them picking up many news ones after the shitshow that is Bojo).

Lockdown has not benefited any one

Being able to have a chance to carry on with life after this is all over isn't a benefit , some perk that should be rationed to those most deserving

This is unbelievable. Complaining about the government. People, you cannot complain about a government that was elected fairly. And further, it would suit the government better to vaccinate working people first to ensure a larger flow of taxes in the future. And finally OP, do a little more reading on logistics.
My boys are 15 and 17. They have been told it is what it is and luckily they agree that they are in a better position than the grandfather they lost in 2020 who, when he was their age, had bombs falling on London. It’s a lot less scary than that and it will pass. They will be stronger for it.

@hopsalong there is a change in tone between your 2 posts but you omit a lot of facts to strip money from the elderly to give to the young as payment for not being thrown to the wolves in Covid
This government voters tore down the red wall the left are so fond of, the wealth demographic of who voted Tory also shifted that’s not as long as your paragraph on the north south divide.

Ah..that myth

. It's not lockdown that kills the economy , it's the effect of a pandemic.

The countries that control the virus better have stronger economies

The way we have mis - managed lockdown exit means that we have had repeated lockdowns doing more damage to the economy, but if we didn't lockdown the evidence from previous pandemics is that our economy would be hit even worse

Yes, the economy could be worse. And we would lose half a million people at the same time.

Well I don't think the system we have in this country does give a fairly elected government that is representive of the way people voted

The proportion of Tory MPs is way higher than the proportion of people who voted Tory

Well said welllockmedown

@Flaxmeadow

The hatred towards elderly people on here is mind blowing

Quite. It’s like they don’t think they will get old.

Lockdown has not benefited any one

Except for Jeff Bezos and whoever owns Zoom, as well as a handful of people who got huge PPE contracts from the UK government.

Since the statement I was responding to was "lockdown has benefitted the old more than the young" ! It hasn't really benefitted anyone, i would class zoom and specific businesses as none human

I agree with you arethereleftatall... too many to please...all I have to say there were 5 year old, students, nurses, teachers.. during both world wars and yet that generation survived.. and turned out ok.. they didn’t even have Netflix to see them through and here we are complaining, get frustrated..why are we such a generation of entitled?? I agree with giving it to the old folks, the key workers and the most vulnerable. Children and healthy folk won’t die.

I am "elderly" and I am surprised at the degree of what appears to be loathing of elderly people.

We are not just one amorphous lump of people, with the same views and values. Personally, I am reluctant to have the vaccine as I feel it has been rushed through and I also dislike the "othering" of people who express doubts. Anyone who expresses such a viewpoint issubjected to some very disapproving remarks..

Being prioritised for a vaccine is not my decision and it could be argued it is a decision being made for what are considered to be pragmatic reasons and on the basis that a vaccine will in due course reduce the incidence of contracting and transmitting the virus. Part of the reasoning, for those who have total faith in the vaccine's safety and efficacy, is that if elderly people get the virus they are likely to be much more ill and take up much more medical expertise - thus affecting the rest of the population, possibly not primarily in terms of Covid treatment but in terms of accessing investigatory and treatment resources for other potentially life threatening illnesses.

I wish people would stop saying that they want teachers vaccinating and send the kids back to school. All that will do is stop the teachers getting it but kids will still be spreading it to their families and wider community.

I do think they should be prioritised before some other groups but far better to keep the kids at home for now and get the people who are most likely to die from it to be vaccinated. It's really not going to help if 25 year old Katie from the local Supermarket is protected if the hospitals are crammed full of elderly people.

My grandfather fought in the war but he would now have been in his mid 90s. It's true that very few people of that generation are left. But my parents generation (baby boomers, now in their 70s) have undeniably as a group enjoyed amazing advantages relative both to their own parents and, increasingly, their children and grandchildren. This isn't to say that many individuals haven't suffered great hardship, but as a generation they've been very well served. My father for example: grammar school education, full grant to university, 105% mortgage from the GLC in mid 20s on a 3 bed house in nice London suburb (the 5% to buy furniture!) without a super well-paying job, fantastic pension etc. I have spent most of today writing references for students who graduated last year with a first, couldn't get anything other than bar jobs, and have now been laid off those. They have worked much harder for exams than my peers ever seemed to, from secondary school onwards, and yet the job and housing market is effectively closed to them.
THIS. Spot on.

Grammar school education, full grant university education, top ? 10% ? Of his generation

most didn't have any of that

If lockdown hasn't benefited anyone, then what the hell do you think we are doing?! It would be barmy to do something with very obvious costs and no benefits.

In particular, it has benefited two categories of people: a) anyone who would have been very ill from Covid-19, had they caught it, but who was prevented from doing so by reduced community transmission and b) anyone who caught it and received treatment that they would have been denied without lockdown. The argument about it benefiting other users of the health service rests on the premise that without lockdown the NHS wouldn't have operated any kind of triage system and that they would have treated Covid patients alongside /instead of other people. It has harmed several obvious groups too: a) young people who have missed almost a full year of education (university students have paid full fees throughout, sometimes to be locked in isolation into small dorm rooms) b) young people unable to leave home or find employment c) people of all ages who have struggled with loneliness and isolation, d) frontline doctors who have been called upon to perform impossible feats, e) people who have lost their livelihoods and businesses.

And of course 30-something wasn't ever, by any historical standards, considered a long or full life. The median age of death in pre-industrial societies was very low because of very high infant mortality. The age of majority wouldn't have been 21 if people had only a few years left to live. And women regularly had children into their 40s. But, sadly or not, depending on your viewpoint, we are mortal creatures; limits on our lifespan are ordained by nature and very few of us, even with the most careful living imaginable and the best possible medical care, can expect to see 95 or 100. The mortality rate is, in the end, always 100%.

hopsalong it has also harmed many people like myself. I’m still waiting for follow up investigations for my urgent cancer referral that was started a year ago. I have had to visit the Emergency Department at my nearest hospital 4 times in the last 6 months due to me vomiting blood. Each time I’m given pain relief and sent home as I’ve already been referred to the specialist and it can’t be sped up due to COVID. I genuinely feel as though I’m being left to die at this point, along with many, many others.

I’m not disagreeing with lockdown btw. I just think there’s a lot of very scared, very ill people who have been utterly abandoned.

I think it has benefitted everyone, society level , and no one, cos it sucks

Hopsalong. I don't want to get into a huge debate. But my dad, who died 2 years ago, was one of the generation who fought in the war. Despite winning a scholarship to art college he had to leave school at 14 because as the eldest of 5 children when his father died he had to go out to work. My mother grew up in a household so poor she didn't even have a toothbrush.
I'm in my 50s and one of the lucky middle aged people you refer to. I bought my first house at a time when, within a year, interest rates were almost 15%. Through having to move areas to get another job I ended up in negative equity, owing thousands of pounds yet I'd never not paid a bill. I couldn't sleep at night.
Now, in my 50s, I have no work because of covid. And finding it difficult to find a job.
This isn't meant to be a sob story. But you cannot make sweeping generalisations about any age group; every generation faces different challenges. If we are lucky, by the time we are older, life is more comfortable.
The vaccine should go to those who need it most. The elderly.
My late mum once said to me 'I may look old, but I still feel 21 inside'. There are many people on here who should learn from that. If lucky, we will all be old one day.

I'm in group 4 in the vaccine priority grouping.
What people don't seem to be considering is the possibility, and it is just a possibility, that the priority list is in relationship to the expendability of groups.
By that I need to go back a step.........these vaccines have been given emergency licensing. Effectively, they are still in the trial period. There are still question marks in respect of the longer term safety, particularly in respect of people already taking medication, and those with long term medical conditions.
Who are most expendable? Which groups are the most expensive in relationship to cost to the economy? Which are the groups least able to put back into the economy? Which are the groups easiest to explain away?
The answer to all of those questions follows the same direction as the priority listing.
If people in their 80's die, it's seen as their time, a good innings, natural causes.
75+, still not a bad innings, and So on.
I'm cynical, I have no confidence in our government which doesn't help, and I may be way off the mark, but to be honest, if the choice were my husband and I or our children, and their children, there's no question, use us as guinea pigs!