Andrew Watterson

The guddle of UK politics, policy and science is starkly revealed this week. When faced with rapidly rising Omicron cases, three countries adopted additional precautionary Covid policies based on prevention and practical actions underpinned by science.

WHAT’S the problem? With cold weather and increases in seasonal indoor activities, ensuring adequate and effective indoor ventilation remains critically important, along with other virus control measures. Yet it is often neglected with good information lacking and best practice missing.

VACCINE hesitancy, vaccine reluctance, and vaccine resistance with restricted vaccine access in the general population all threaten our pandemic suppression programme.

THE failures of the Scottish oil and gas industries, their professional advisers, advocates, lobbyists, and apologists to cut carbon and protect global and Scottish Public Health can surely not be justified in any form. Will the Scottish Government now finally act urgently to curtail or reduce the industry’s development onshore and offshore where it has powers over public procurement, planning, enterprise funding and public health to do so?

POLITICIANS are again stressing the harms done by Covid controls to our economy and the education of children and young people. The view that Scotland should shift its Covid policy away from “coherent suppression” has recently gained greater traction in political circles. Covid suppression in these debates is frequently and falsely presented as a set of policies geared to totally eradicating the disease whereas it has always been based on eliminating the virus as far as possible by Covid con