YOU could be forgiven for believing that Covid-19 is all over – bar the shouting. More often than not, it no longer even appears in any news bulletin and only then when someone prominent catches it, like the recent repeated infections of the US President and First Lady.

This media and public complacency is not borne out by any statistical or human reality. Worldwide, five million cases are still being recorded every week. That is correct – the population of Scotland is being recorded as infected each and every week and, in reality, that is a minute fraction of the true figure.

For example, the UK recorded through testing a mere 10,000 cases last week. But we know from ONS survey evidence that the actual infection rate was over 2 million, 200 times the recorded positive test level.

As vaccination has spread over the globe, so the serious illness and death rate has declined. But this is all relative. Almost 13,000 souls died with Covid last week. Of course, that is well down on the winter of 20/21 when approximately that number of human beings were dying every single day, but it is still a mighty number.

READ MORE: Scotland's Covid rates fall to lowest in months but remain above rest of UK

Let us imagine ourselves back into a pre-pandemic world and a new virus was detected which was killing 2000 people worldwide every day or (as it did over last week) 674 people across the UK. There would be pandemonium. It would lead every bulletin, dramatic public health measures would be introduced and every sinew would be strained to cope with the pandemic.

Not now. Politicians tell people not to be complacent, but then speak about the pandemic in the past tense. The public have settled into a comfortable sense of security that Covid is now akin to a bad cold or a mild flu.

Except that it is not.

Among the recent celebrity tweets of Covid infection, one in particular caught my eye.

Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla tested positive for Covid-19 and was experiencing “very mild symptoms,” he revealed on Twitter. He also confided that he had received four doses of his own company’s vaccine and was starting a course of its antiviral wonder drug, Paxlovid.

I do hope Albert has made a full recovery but his affliction demonstrates two things.

Firstly, the ingenuity of coronavirus in evading even the most boosted vaccines and afflicting even those vaccinated to the hilt. It is true that, by and large, the variants against a vaccinated population are proving significantly less vicious than the original virus against unprotected victims. However, that does not account for the impact of “long Covid” currently afflicting an estimated 3% of the population and where the jury is well and truly out.

Nor does it allow for further variants which could break through the vaccine defences in even more spectacular fashion. Over centuries, viruses get less potent as natural human defences build up. There is no such guarantee with Covid in just a few years. The real current worldwide rate of weekly infection is probably 100 million or so. That is 100 million potential mutations every week, any one of which could turn into something yet more deadly.

Secondly, the aforesaid Mr Bourla is very lucky not to be relying on the Scottish health service for his treatment. At 60, he would have received three vaccinations, not four, and would NOT have been prescribed his $500 treatment anti-viral. Although Paxlovid is designed to treat mild-to-moderate Covid-19 and is highly successful, in Scotland, it is being effectively rationed by most GPs to those elderly and at-risk patients who have already developed severe symptoms. In other words, in Scotland you have to be near the point of hospitalisation before you will be prescribed a drug designed to prevent severe illness and hospitalisation and Bourla would not have qualified.

THE reality of Covid-19 as of August 2022 is this. The virus is still killing tens of thousands of people every week across the globe and hundreds across the UK. Despite the initial impressive rollout of the new vaccines, the coronavirus virus worldwide is still mutating one step ahead of the science and a full virus vaccine is still some time away.

The vaccination programme in the UK under the near somnolent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has slowed to a trickle, leaving many partially vaccinated people unnecessarily vulnerable to severe illness, while the NHS is rationing the costly anti-viral treatments.

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At the rate the Health Services are moving, many over 50s will have caught the flu before they get their double winter vaccines and most people will have been a full year since their last booster Covid shot.

As a result, people are still suffering and dying unnecessarily.

There is nothing whatsoever to be complacent about and, outwith our absolutely heroic frontline health and caring staff, little to be proud of in this catalogue of incompetence and complacency in this sick pretence of a public health policy.

Meanwhile – at the real business end of the virus where the money is to be made – Moderna is suing Pfizer and BioNTech for infringement of vaccine development patents!