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My mother is nearly 88. She has yet to receive an invitation for a Covid vaccination. I hope it comes soon. The risk to her comes entirely from me. She has hardly left the house since March, but I have to go shopping. If I caught Covid on one of those shopping trips, it would be difficult to stop her catching it too. We live in the same house and I care for her. If an 88-year-old catches Covid, there is a good chance she would end up in hospital and a good chance that she would die.
In Northern Ireland 6.23% of the population has been vaccinated.
In England 5.49% of the population has been vaccinated.
In Scotland 4.12 % of the population has been vaccinated.
In Wales 4.01 % of the population has been vaccinated.
England is about to send out vaccine invitations to the over 70s. I am left to conclude that if my mother lived in England she would already have been vaccinated. If she catches Covid in the next few weeks and dies it will be because we live in Scotland under an SNP Government that prioritises independence over healthcare.
We are lucky however that we live in Britain. The United Kingdom has vaccinated more of its population that anyone else except Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. We are ahead of the United States and massively ahead of the EU.
If Scotland had voted for independence in 2014, then either we would be reliant on the EU to supply the vaccine or if we had failed to join the EU we would be reliant on ourselves. But no small independent country in Europe is doing better than Britain including Switzerland. It is hard to believe that independence would turn Scotland either into Bahrain, the UAE or Israel. It is unlikely that Scotland would have done better than Ireland which has vaccinated only 1.6% of the population and we might be doing as badly as badly as Bulgaria which has managed only 0.3%.
We are doing better than nearly everyone else firstly because we left the EU. The EU managed the vaccine collectively and didn’t do it well. The British Government did better at ordering the various vaccines and also developed our own. We made these vaccines available before anyone else and the British vaccine is easier to deliver because it does not require ultra-low temperatures.
Being a part of Britain is therefore saving Scottish lives. This is not merely because the British Army is helping to organise and administer the vaccine, but because the British Government made the right choices which led to us buying effective vaccines and developing our own. The Scottish Government neither funded, nor ordered any vaccines. We are completely dependent on the supplies we are getting from Britain. The only thing the Scottish Government is responsible for is organising the rollout of the vaccine. Healthcare unfortunately is devolved. It is doing that job worse than England and Northern Ireland.
Scotland is getting a proportional share of the vaccine. There are supply difficulties for everyone. England and Northern Ireland may have advantages because they are rather more densely populated than Scotland. It may be harder to administer the vaccine to very remote places in the Highlands and Islands. But this also makes it less likely that we will catch the virus in the first place.
Scotland may have decided to vaccinate care homes first, which given the difficulty of bringing ultra-low temperature vaccines to such places might be slowing us down. But why didn’t we use the Oxford-AstraZeneca in care homes, which requires only an ordinary fridge and use the Pfizer vaccine elsewhere. I hate to think that Sturgeon doesn’t want to use the English vaccine. She cannot even bear to say the word Oxford.
Covid is the defining event of our time, but the SNP’s handling of it has been poor since the start. With our low population density Scotland should have done much better than England in terms of Covid cases and deaths.
Scotland has had 1,492,656 cases with 7,704 deaths.
But this is worse than any other European country with a population of 5 million
Denmark has had 189,000 cases and 1,775 deaths.
Slovakia has had 223,000 cases and 3,474 deaths.
Norway has had 58,651 cases and 517 deaths.
Finland has had 40,337 cases and 618 deaths.
If you compare like with like, then it becomes obvious that SNP Scotland has not merely done worse than anywhere else with a population of 5 million it has done more than ten times worse in terms of deaths than Norway and Finland.
Scotland has been kept going this year because the UK Treasury has funded us. We are receiving the vaccine only because the UK is supplying it. We have done no better than the UK as a whole with regard to Covid cases and deaths and on care home deaths, which ought to have been avoidable, we have done considerably worse. Despite having the advantage of low population density, we have done massively worse than any European country of a similar size. It is staggering to believe that so many Scots believe that Nicola Sturgeon has done a good job.
Everything that has gone well this year, such as furlough and the vaccine has been provided by the British Government. Everything that has gone badly such as our failure to deliver the vaccine as quickly as England and Northern Ireland and our decision to send people sick with Covid back into care homes has been due to decisions made by the SNP.
This year has demonstrated that Scotland has depended on the British Government for paying our wages and for the vaccine that will end the pandemic. But it is just now when she should be concentrating on delivering the vaccine that Sturgeon is distracted not merely by the Salmond Inquiry scandal, but by her starting another drive for independence. Focus on the day job Sturgeon or you will be responsible for still more unnecessary deaths. Already Scottish pensioners will be dying because of Scotland doing worse at rolling out the vaccine.
Scots who want independence should refuse their furlough money and refuse the vaccine, because if the SNP had won in 2014, we would have got neither.
This post was originally published by the author on her personal blog: https://www.effiedeans.com/2021/01/snp-mismanagement-is-killing-scots.html
