Things are going according to plan. Despite a few wobbles about vanishingly small blood-clot risks, our vaccine rollout charges forward. And tomorrow we will enter the next phase of our roadmap to freedom.
But at the Downing Street press conference last Monday, England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty was circumspect. Moving ‘steadily’ was key, he said. ‘Just because you vaccinate lots of people [doesn’t mean] the problem goes away.’
He pointed to the South American state of Chile as an ‘extreme’ example of this. So what is going on there?
Like us, Chile began vaccinating in December. They have now jabbed roughly a third of their 19 million population at a rate faster than the rest of South America. Only Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the Seychelles have fully vaccinated a larger proportion of their populations. Yet today, Chile is seeing a terrifying surge in cases.