This is such disengenuous bullshit. Lots of people who needed to shield couldn’t because the government mishandled they shielding measures; and in the absence of test track trace and mass gatherings - horse racing! VE Day conga lines - outside is unsafer than ever. https://twitter.com/matthancock/status/1266995931439943683
Sorry to keep mentioning it, but two days ago, a few weeks after relaxed rules precisely when we’d expect cases to increase with no containment, the U.K. death toll hit 60k and the highest per capita in the world https://twitter.com/chrisgiles_/status/1266045604494487552?s=21 https://twitter.com/chrisgiles_/status/1266045604494487552
Literally this week stuck in getting threats from our social landlord with court action for wanting to postpone the annual gas safety check due to shielding. This rule likely has nothing to do w protecting high risk ppl, and everything to do w forcing us back to business as usual
The bit of this I hate is that none of us argued hard enough that those who needed to shield could shield adequately, with the consequences that so many of the disproportionate deaths of Black and brown people were connected to high risk ppl being made to work w/out adequate PPE.
The message from the exposes from the Sunday Times and elsewhere about the government has been clear: the project was never to protect UK citizens or residents, just to protect the NHS this and past govt’s have been determined to dismantle. Nothing about this is about ppls safety
How the hell are companies going to allow their employees, especially key workers, to go sick with pay to shield if the government never mandated it, and when it came to pay for it offered 200£ only per person. For 12 weeks? Where did that £350bill go because it wasn’t on this?
We know Black ppl & PoC are disproportionately more likely to be high risk due to effects of intergenerational racism, less likely to receive NHS help due to medical racism and more likely to work in low paid precarious key worker roles. So shielding failures are racist, ableist.
The whole thing is a stitch up and we should all be furious.
ALSO: how does it make any sense for the Health Secretary to be saying shielding people can “finally go outside” when we’ve had all major supermarkets offering ELDERLY AND VULNERABLE PERSONS hours not least bc the Shielding food took weeks to arrive?
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