The Innocents

The BBC reports that (the government's) "expert committee on vaccination for the UK has decided against giving the seasonal flu jab to healthy under fives or children aged five to 15."

When you're a prem baby living in substandard social housing, constructed badly from unsuitable materials, and which is cold on account of the energy companies putting their prices up to the extent that your parents can't afford to heat the place, then the seasonal flu jab might be the difference between life and death.

How sickening it is that in the 21st Century, British children might die on account of the backward, primitive beliefs held by some of those on the right that absolutely everything in this country must be owned by someone, that the British people must not be allowed to anything in common for their own benefit, and that private profit must come before public service.

I have recently finished reading 'The Spirit Level'. Apart from the bit near the end where the authors went off on a frolic of their own about climate change, it made perfect sense to an interested person who rides on public transport in the west of Scotland every day. Indeed, most of it is a statement of the bleedin' obvious. One can see why the feral right, that part of the right that would love to be able to kick the poor to death in the street without fear of penalty, hates it so much. It is a direct challenge to everything they hold dear. In what passes for their minds, they and those they favour must be top dogs, and they will not share, and consider the idea that anyone else is entitled to live a dignified life free from illness, crime, ignorance and want to be an unacceptable restriction on their liberty.

Damn their liberty, and damn them.

Should Providence spare that book's authors for a few years, it would be a sad but interesting exercise for them to revisit the question of the impact of inequality upon influenza-related child mortality. I hope that they don't get the chance, and that God in his infinite mercy will let this potential Biblical plague pass us over. If it does come to that, however, then I imagine the results would indicate that in more unequal societies, more babies die of vaccinatable influenza than in more equal ones - the sort of thing that happens when right-wing nutjobs are allowed to get their hands on the health budget, and prefer bolstering bank balance sheets, and buying (or is it renting?) nuclear weapons, to buying medicines that might save poor children's lives.