Letters: If 33 million can vote on a single day, why is vaccination so slow?

SIR – For her annual flu vaccination in November, my wife was in and out of the surgery in five minutes – about the same time taken in a polling station.

On June 23 2016, 33.5 million people voted in the referendum. If, as Pfizer and AstraZenica say, there is no shortage of vaccine, why is the Government targeting no more than two million vaccinations a week by the end of this month?

Rolling out this vaccine is the single most important event in our lives this year. We can accommodate half the population voting in a single day but apparently can only vaccinate fewer than 300,000. Is this acceptable?

Henry Hare
Wellington, Somerset

SIR – The NHS is excusing delays by commenting on the “huge difficulties in creating an army of vaccinators”, and saying that “you cannot just vaccinate two million people a week from nothing” (report, January 4).

But they shouldn’t be starting from nothing – the NHS has had all summer to prepare for a roll-out that obviously had to happen in 2021. What on earth have the NHS managers been doing?

Chris Phillips
Seascale, Cumbria

SIR – Last month my wife was cross with herself for forgetting an essential from her monthly shop at Waitrose. So I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived in time for tea. The NHS is clearly not up to the job. It should ask Amazon to deliver the Covid vaccines.

Tom Suffolk
West Horsley, Surrey

SIR – It is good to learn that Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, will authorise the applications of 25,000 retired doctors and nurses which have been ignored. Will he also confirm that distribution of vaccines is now under the direction of the private sector and the military, not the NHS, which is overwhelmed? The lack of urgency and competence is shameful.

Martin Greenwood
Fringford, Oxfordshire

SIR – The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation – armchair doctors and scientists – along with Public Health England and Sage appear unable to prioritise vaccination.

The most vulnerable, most likely to contract and spread Covid, should be first. These are the non-Covid majority inpatients in our acute hospitals living in fear and isolated from family – for no good scientific reason.

They are many times more at risk than fit healthcare workers, nursing-home residents or teachers. Testing and vaccination on admission should start now.

Professor Charles Davis
Preston, Lancashire

SIR – A dear friend missed Christmas with her family because she was isolating before a very serious lung operation. Having passed her Covid test, she was told yesterday (when expecting to be collected by a driver) that the operation had been cancelled.

G T Higgins
Gravesend, Kent

Schools close

SIR – My grandson, aged 11, had a Covid test last Friday arranged by his mother with a view to enabling him to return to school, as promised by the Government.

Notwithstanding the fact that the test was negative, he has now been told that this will not happen. He is confused and upset.

Quite apart from the well-documented harm that the lack of education is causing to our children, how are they ever expected to trust politicians in the future?

Clare Seymour
East Hanningfield, Essex

SIR – Boris Johnson said he believed that schools were safe.

My wife is a teacher and mixed with up to 140 different households a day (seven lessons with 20 pupils each), five days a week.

Yet being in Tier 4 we could not invite a single family into our home because that was deemed not safe.

Peter Fowles
Solihull

SIR – Why did we not teach teachers to vaccinate pupils in their class? It would have all been done in two hours. People are taught to give injections to their partners when it is necessary.

The procedure is simple, requires a few easy checks first, and minimal training. The risk-benefit ratio is enormously favourable.

Dr Peter Humphrey
Caldy, Wirral

SIR – There is a lot of hot air being expended on the notion that children deprived of schooling for a few weeks are forever disadvantaged.

Education is not like watching a film at the cinema where 20 minutes’ absence from the auditorium could result in the rest of the film becoming incomprehensible. All school topics are available for revisiting at any time and children learn much more effectively when they think they need to know something.

I taught for over 40 years and could give lots of anecdotal evidence to back up my view. Let’s do safety first and forget the red herrings.

Eric Mansfield 
Waddington, Lancashire

Smart car chargers

SIR – As with smart meters, “smart” electric-vehicle wall chargers will allow suppliers to disconnect the electricity supply remotely.

All domestic electric-vehicle wall chargers have to be smart, and it is likely that, following the Government consultation, all roadside chargers will be smart too.

This means that in a situation of high demand and low supply you would not be able to charge your electric vehicle.

William Loneskie
Lauder, Berwickshire

Followers of fashion

SIR – As a teenager I borrowed my mother’s sewing machine (Letters, January 4) to make my narrow jeans flared. My son borrowed his mother’s machine to make his jeans narrower.

He now has his own machine and is creating his second jacket.

Tony Parrack
London SW20

Romantic recipe

SIR – My husband proposed (Letters, January 4) after I had just cooked him a meal with the question: would I like to cook for him for ever? I am still cooking for him, 61 years later.

Barbara Lucas
Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

Teatime hate

SIR – I must protest at Ofcom (Letters, January 4) increasing the number of hate-speech subjects from four to 18 with no mention of the word intention.

I know of a recent case of a young female doctor entering a staff room full of women and saying the words: “Good morning ladies, can I get anyone a cup of tea?” She was reported to human resources for hate, and was given an official warning. Apparently one of those present did not wish to be addressed as a lady.

What reasonable person could object to such a greeting? Surely this way of handling such innocent and polite speech is getting out of hand and should be stopped before we are banned from any comment on a subject that somebody may not like.

Christopher Piggins
Salisbury, Wiltshire

Web contact forms

SIR – Like Chris Wood (Letters, January 2), I am annoyed by organisations that give no email address and just provide a web contact form, as this leaves me with no record of my sent message. However, there is often a solution.

Type random letters into each box of the web form and include a dummy phone number and email address in the normal format. Press send and, in many cases, the email address of the recipient will appear, which can be used to email in the normal way.

Any time wasted by the recipient of my nonsense web contact form is a suitable punishment for not having provided an email address.

Chris Russell
Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire

Felled orchards

SIR – Thousands of Kashmir’s Gujjar people have been forced out of their homes. Their orchards have been chopped down and livelihoods destroyed. This was done during an Indian government-led eviction campaign.

So why not a squeak of protest from Black Lives Matter? Brown lives obviously do not seem to count.

Roger Croston
Christleton, Cheshire

Bin end present

SIR – The senior management in this household decided that a new set of dustbin numbers were my Christmas present (Letters, January 1).

Peter Hulme

Gawsworth, Cheshire

Astronaut’s trick to make space in his memory

SIR – Al Bean, the fourth man to walk on the Moon, had a more radical method for freeing up his memory than Sherlock Holmes (Letters, December 31).

When training for his Apollo 12 mission, he refused to commit to memory the names of the dignitaries he was introduced to at PR events. His fear was that remembering the name of a mayor’s wife, for example, might push important information out of his brain, and he would forget how to assist Pete Conrad in landing the Lunar Module.

His approach worked. Shortly after launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning and the electrical system froze. Bean was the only crew member able to follow the instruction from Mission Control to switch “SCE to Aux” – which, much like a Windows restart, rebooted the system and saved the mission.

Bean retired from Nasa in 1981 to pursue a long and successful career as an artist, specialising in reproducing the sights he had seen on the Moon.

Thanks to his cunning plan to train his brain, he retained a huge number of images, resulting in a magnificent body of work. He remains the only professional artist to have walked on another celestial body.

Martin Stern
Dunmow, Essex

Parakeets mustn’t be left to empty native nests

SIR – During the first lockdown we discovered a nuthatch nest in our local park with our granddaughters. We enjoyed watching the birds flying in and out.

A few days later we returned and, while we watched, a flock of parakeets discovered it and flew around the tree shrieking. Within a few minutes they had raided the nest. The newly hatched baby birds were dragged out and devoured. We therefore support the proposed cull of green parakeets.

Janet and Malcolm Pegg
Bromley, Kent

Letters to the Editor

We accept letters by post, fax and email only. Please include name, address, work and home telephone numbers.

ADDRESS: 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 0DT

FAX: 020 7931 2878

EMAIL: dtletters@telegraph.co.uk

FOLLOW: Telegraph Letters on Twitter @LettersDesk