COVID vaccine

The editorial (December 4) appealing for people to be responsible regarding protecting themselves and others this coming festive season is timely indeed.

What would be welcome, however, is for the authorities to start being upfront with us and to call a spade a spade. While, like everyone else, I hope for this vaccine to be effective for all (and I would like it ‘yesterday’!) we are perhaps not being kept in the picture.

For weeks now, I have understood the difference between infection and disease, with regard to what these vaccines are designed to do.

The media has reported that these issues have been discussed by well-credentialled scientists, the latest of whom was Stefania Salmaso, epidemiologist at the Istituto Nazionale di Sanità, in Rome speaking on RAI radio.

I am not the right person to lecture anybody about this but, surely, it is an important matter, one which might engender conscientious behaviour from people.

Also, the normal time frame for pharmaceutical approval is of seven to eight months. This vaccine is obviously being fast tracked, of necessity.

But that leaves a lot of questions, which will only become clearer once it begins to be rolled out and we can see how it performs. In all senses.

Another question is that, since Europe is sourcing various vaccines, just because the three front runners share the same technology in how they act does it mean that it will be safe for the public to take one type of jab for the first shot and perhaps another for the second? We know that two are needed.

It’s all very well to lay down ultimatums for ‘business as usual’ (I wish business had never stopped being ‘as usual’, for one) but it might be more prudent to be realistic.

For example, ‘as usual’ might not mean goodbye masks and distancing, if,  indeed, these first vaccines address disease but not infection and, hence,  herd immunity.

This telling it like it is would, hopefully, encourage people to be optimistic and hopeful but not foolhardy. Especially since one still sees mask ‘self-exempters’,  those who ‘do not believe in this virus’.

Here we have gone from over-exaggerated panic last March, whereby a section of the community was precluded from staying healthy and exhorted to stay under their beds instead, to the irresponsibly reckless ‘everybody celebrate’ of last summer.

It would be very welcome indeed to be treated like intelligent consumers who can deal with facts (for those who seek them out) as is the case overseas.

Anna Micallef – Sliema

Muscat’s no-holds -barred testimony

Joseph Muscat has his temperature tested before entering the law courts. Photo: Mark Zammit Cordina

During his five-hour testimony before the board set up by Joseph Muscat himself, to inquire whether “the State” – not the PL government – could have prevented the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the former prime minister demolished the malicious insinuations and allegations which had been made against him in order to somehow link him with the atrocious murder of the blogger.

Such insinuations had started from October 16, 2017, the fateful day when Caruana Galizia was murdered. It was immediately obvious that, for some people,  the top priority was not to find out the perpetrators of that hideous criminal act but how to turn it into a very potent political weapon against the man who had turned the PN into an irrelevant political force.

Muscat’s no-holds-barred testimony exposed the reality that this inquiry had been allowed to turn into a “political exercise” by the lawyers representing the murdered blogger’s family, Nationalist MPs Jason Azzopardi and Therese Comodini Cachia.

I will not delve into the many points raised so pointedly by Muscat, except to add that one could note that the three judges did not challenge Muscat on what he was saying.

Two points I would like to make are:  why is the board seemingly uninterested in finding out whether Caruana Galizia had somehow unwillingly contributed to her own murder by making it so much easier for anyone who may have wanted to get rid of her when she used to demean the police force and refused to have police protection?

The second point is why no one from the PN side has been called to answer questions, especially when Caruana Galizia had posted comments that she was being “threatened by Delia’s rabble” and,  particularly, called a “liar” and “biċċa blogger” by the former PN leader when for quite a few months Caruana Galizia had forgotten the PL and had turned her guns on Delia’s PN? Why?

Eddy Privitera – Mosta

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