From an earlier BBC report when Van Morrison criticized the lockdown. The BBC were quick to line up critics:
18/9/20 Coronavirus: Van Morrison lockdown protest songs 'dangerous’
"…Sean McGovern, a consultant in emergency medicine, said that figures showed that Covid-19 is the second most common cause of death in Northern Ireland, behind only cancer.
He added that it was “wrong to use celebrity status to dilute the message and create problems”."
(Never mind that the cause of death claim is dubious, as Covid has counting-privilege.)
On that celebrity status, I put on Radio4 today - I know, I need to take responsibility for my own actions 
- and heard the little Dolly Parton jingle Vaccine, vaccine… and it was explained that good ol’ Dolly had donated $1m to vaccines (the Moderna, I think?), and not only that,she refused to jump the queue!
A posh Radio 4 voice then said “I love Dolly Parton!”
He probably went on to say he also loved Shostakovich and Beethoven but I’ll never know.
The thing is - Van the Man used his celeb status to tell people to think for themselves.
Whereas all the shlebs the BBC promotes are saying Copy These Puppets/Role Models, and Don’t Use Your Own Brain.
It makes me so…unlikely to put on R4 in a hurry.
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Just a little unrelated snippet. There’s an election coming up…
7/3/21 We’re Almost Done With COVID Curbs, Netanyahu Says as Israel Reopens Restaurants
Trouble is, Israel’s R number seems to be higher than 1.
New cases last week: 26982, prev week: 24436.
The Israeli leader has somebody to blame…
5/3/21 Israel’s experts fear ‘fake news’ harming vaccine drive
Bogus information on the internet about the inoculations is making some Israelis reluctant to get inoculated, leading to potentially disastrous impact on public health as those who refused to get vaccinated fall ill
except he knew about the rising cases - so to blame anyone else will be irrelevant.
Another unrelated snippet…good points made by David Mitchell about the unnatural polarisation of Covid opinion along old political lines.
“Jammy Johnson”
"…Perhaps language is partly to blame. The rhetoric of safety is hard to counter and, in Britain’s lamely capitalist way, all the attempts to do so have involved citing the economy. That, in turn, has led to accusations from the left that any murmurs against the lockdown’s severity are putting money ahead of people’s lives. This is enormously simplistic as it’s not economic activity that the lockdown primarily prevents, but just activity in general – freedom, life. Striking a balance between the living of life and the saving of life is a constant human quandary and causes rows about everything from wearing seatbelts to climbing mountains. But that whole complex discussion has been silenced as a horrific attempt to drive the vulnerable into their graves in the name of GDP.
The result is that, in this unnuanced age, commitment to a tough lockdown has been added to the long list of things that you have to wholeheartedly think to avoid the leftwing bits of the internet denouncing you as a quisling to the cause of progress. This puts Keir Starmer in an awkward position, which Boris Johnson has clearly noticed. As the government’s approach to lockdown has become more and more virally cautious, and less and less concerned with the economy, so Starmer’s political room for manoeuvre has disappeared. In response to new measures, he can only bleat a grudging assent and say something moany about the furlough. Any attempt he might make to represent the views of those Labour voters more desperate for the lockdown to end than for it not to end too soon would be deemed a heretical departure from the tribal orthodoxy.
This unhelpful presumed alignment between the left and “safety” and the right and “the economy” reduces the debate on the handling of the pandemic to one about ideology rather than competence. That suits the prime minister very well because his government is packed with incompetent people. He didn’t realise, back in 2019, that his hand-picked array of pro-Brexit yes-cretins would have to run the country during a fast-changing emergency. But while Covid remains a left-versus-right issue in which Johnson can push Starmer towards demanding more and more joyless safety, and then saying “OK, thanks” when he gets it, the issue of competence is hardly raised.
As a result, Johnson finds himself in an amazingly jammy position: his government has imposed brutal curbs on civil liberties, presided over the highest death rate in the world and entirely closed down normal life, so that the economy has tanked, no one’s getting educated, no one’s making any money and no one’s allowed any fun. The prime minister has seemingly conjured up the absolute worst of all worlds. And yet, despite all that, he’s virtually unopposed by all but a few grumpy fellow Tories, enjoying massive public support thanks to the vaccine rollout, and seven points clear in the polls."
