SO, why are we waiting?
The death rate is near single figures and below average, the most vulnerable are jabbed and effectively immune, NHS wards are empty and the R-rate remains low despite schools reopening.
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We have all the data we need — now what about dates?
Why are we sticking to a lockdown timetable drawn up during dire but mistaken predictions of a third Covid wave?
Christmas was canned and now we’ve kissed goodbye to our second Easter in a row.
Cynicism is setting in.
People are openly breaking the “rules”, which automatically makes them redundant.
America, by contrast, is the Land of the Free.
Anyone with two jabs can travel.
Fully vaccinated foreigners don’t need to quarantine and passengers can board a plane without a test.
For all our cherished civil liberties, we are banned from meeting pals and relatives indoors even if everyone’s had both jabs.
It is inhumane, degrading and cruel.
There is no logical or medical reason why lockdown cannot be lifted.
Yet we now face a bizarre new form of apartheid, dividing people who carry the right papers and those who do not.
Vaccination passports are a disaster in the making.
We will live to regret an invasion of privacy which will extend way beyond this Covid nightmare and into 24/7 surveillance at the touch of a computer screen.
We are stumbling into a dystopian future where, if authorities choose, our every move and conversation can be monitored, even in our own homes.
Snooping has come a long way since George Orwell’s Soviet-style “Big Brother” eavesdropping on cowed citizens.
Robot technology and artificial intelligence are in their infancy.
REIGN OF TERROR
We had a narrow escape last year by ditching Communist China’s Huawei 5G hardware.
But you need only look at Hong Kong and the evil use of face-recognition technology to see how spying on the public is the new normal.
We may feel safe today, but surrender too much power to faceless officialdom and no intimate detail of our private lives will remain secret from a prying future government.
Michael Gove’s passports brainwave, sketched out in a newspaper column, was greeted with howls of fury from its usually supportive readers.
Voters have learned to be suspicious of any intervention dreamed up by Sage scientists using Covid as an excuse to expand state control.
It was “Bonking Boffin” Neil Ferguson whose report terrified us into the first lockdown with his shroud-waving fantasy of up to 500,000 corpses over the next two years if no measures were put in place.
Indeed, Ferguson admitted Sage could never have got away with lockdown at all but for Italy’s panicky decision to follow China and turn Lombardy into Fort Knox.
There is an awful lot of politics in Sage.
Take Ferguson.
His married lockdown lover Antonia Staats is an avowed left-wing campaigner, so you might guess where his sympathies lie.
Another key figure is Prof Susan Michie, a behavioural scientist, who says people can be manipulated with stick-and-carrot psycho tactics, the so-called Nudge Theory.
Ms Michie, by the way, is a Corbynite Marxist campaigner and paid-up member of the British Communist Party.
An all-powerful state holds no terror for her.
Alleged “scare tactics” by Sage scientists have now sparked a formal complaint by fellow psychologists to their professional body over the ethics of what is being said.
Members are accused of using “covert psychological strategies” — concealing important facts and statistics — to manipulate public behaviour.
The BBC helped work this reign of terror with reporter Clive Myrie’s notorious TV tour of Covid wards, intoning: “We’re all scared . . . we’re all scared.”
Whenever jabs are shown to be working their magic, medical and scientific chiefs Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance pop up to warn of fresh spikes and dangerous new variants.
Scare stories like this have been swallowed by trusting and compliant voters.
But faith in politicians is fragile.
It is unlikely to survive the devastating consequences of 18 months of lockdown.
News that 200,000 children are leaving primary school unable to read and write is just another permanent scar on our society.
Once we begin to raise our eyes and see the needless carnage of lost jobs, padlocked shops, untreated cancer, heart and kidney patients and casualties in mental health, we may ask if the destruction was a price worth paying.
