Our Ed has got himself in the Sun two weeks in a row.
He has signed up to the paper’s scheme to provide volunteers to help with the rollout of the Covid vaccine.
I'm really proud to join this effort as a Volunteer Responder for the Jabs Army.
Getting these vaccines out is so important and we're all going to have to pull together to get through this difficult time.https://t.co/h1CO0IJxl4
— Ed Davey (@EdwardJDavey) January 8, 2021
It is certainly going to be some job to get this vaccine rolled out.
My Dad, who has just turned 75, got his first jab this week. It is such a relief. I don’t think I will even start to rest easy until my Mum and husband have had theirs, though.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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11 Comments
“Our Ed has got himself in the Sun two weeks in a row.”
On page 3 ?
Why is Ed endorsing a Sun marketing campaign that is about them selling more papers.
He could have signed up for this – and publicised it – without referencing The Sun at all.
The Sun will never, ever, be our friends. We should not treat them as such.
It’s not the papers scheme at all. You can sign up here – https://nhsvolunteerresponders.org.uk/i-want-to-volunteer
It’s not about supporting The Sun, it’s about talking to the people who read The Sun. Like it or not The Sun represents a voter demographic to which the LDs needs to communicate.
I dont really care where it’s advertised, the only important thing is getting jabs into arms.
Covid seems to be getting out of control in the care homes again. Both of my sisters work in care homes, and both are telling me that they have outbreaks with their residents, they have lost residents in the last week, have some residents gone to hospital for covid and they have some residents in each of their care homes with covid.
One sister has just told me that they are down to 3 members of permanent staff as the rest are all off with covid and are having to use agency staff.
They cannot understand what has gone wrong as they are vigilant with full PPE and hygiene standards and yet residents have still come down with infection.
We have to get this vaccine rolled out and into as many arms as soon as possible and I welcome any media platform that is pushing for it
@Hywel
Irrespective of whether or not the s*n would ever be our friends – don’t rather a lot of people read it? And on that basis mightn’t it be a good thing that he’s getting is name in it? Doing something good?
Delivering the jab into enough of the nation’s arms to make a difference depends on two factors: 1. The availability of sufficient doses and 2. The infrastructure to deliver it effectively. Short of putting Heineken in charge (remember the advert?) I really have a problem with Johnson and Co continuing to run the show (given my Heineken reference, the phrase ‘knees up in a brewery’ comes to mind). Perhaps, in the immortal words of the late and great Jake Thackray, we should leave the responsibility of sorting it out to “the frigging Brigadier” (he whom the press largely ignored at the COVID Press Conference the other day)!
I don’t see it as supporting the Sun, but using it as a vehicle to get a message out to a whole load of people who probably aren’t following us on social media, and even if a Focus were going out ( and as an aside I don’t think we should be delivering) wouldn’t read it.
the party needs more than Guardian readers !
Good for Ed. Together with his Carers’ campaign he is showing he is more in touch with ordinary people than any of the other political leaders. They might not be sexy but these sorts of campaigns can really get some traction if continued in different forms.
Suzanne – he’s not though. He retweets an article from the Sun saying he’s ‘really proud to join this effort.’ So he’s saying The Sun’s effort – not the NHS.
What you would be saying is that you are happy promoting the (homophobic and racist) Sun because it ‘gets the message out’. I don’t think you actually do mean that.
Why isn’t Ed saying, ‘excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave-it-to-Beaver-trip-back-to-the-fifties! No I won’t support the Sun, because your anti-EU, anti immigrant stance means we’ve lost X000 nurses in the last 5 years who are now missing when we need them most.’
Hywel
Not averse to your views on the paper in question but the cause is a good one.
Forgivable, understandable and if it had not been done the paper would not have noticed.
Well done Ed in my book.
Wouldn’t his time be better spent organising campaigns to point up how inept this government is?
For example, Boris promised business there would be no paperwork for shipments to/from Northern Ireland and that people should sent him any they were asked for. Perhaps Boris didn’t read the agreement he signed but most knew long ago this simply wasn’t true as is now being revealed by Project Reality. He asked for bags of customs paperwork to be delivered, so why not deliver it – on camera of course. 😊
Then there’s the not so little matter of Covid vaccinations. Back in April 2020 the government bought 100 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca one. A risk of course back then, but a proper one IMO. Regulatory checks must be thorough and so inevitably take time but by early December at the very latest, all the signs were that it worked and was safe. In other, words the risk of building a stockpile of ready-to-go vaccines in vials and ready for shipment but then losing money if it fell at the final fence was minimal.
Yet astonishingly that doesn’t seem to have been done at scale. There was a little vaccine but apparently also issues with batch approval and getting an adequate supply of vials. Why? All that should have been sorted months ago. It is now very nearly two weeks since the formal approval and the vaccine is only just starting to be rolled out at reasonable scale – and my instinct is that the target of 2 million per week is far too unambitious.