The Faculty of Paediatrics at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland also called for the legal age to buy tobacco products and vapes to be raised to 21 years
And some experts believe that’s what we’re at risk of right now: that a giddy sense of self-satisfaction is blinding us to the fact we are in mortal danger; that we could be caught flat-footed, just as the promised land of a virus-vanquishing vaccine appears. And this is not just about the slumped rates of QR code scanning. It goes to the top, and seeps throughout the whole system, warns one senior doctor. “There s just been this reluctance to engage with anybody else with ideas,” says Professor Des Gorman. “What underpins this reticence? Political risk has driven a culture of ‘best in show’, ‘we re the envy of the world’. It s a very pervasive culture, and it s the wrong culture. The culture we should have is: how do we do better tomorrow than we did yesterday?”