Was 2021 better than 2020? Well, yes, but not much

In the last days of 2020, even in the face of the gathering wave of what was then known as the Kent variant, there was a settled view around. Whatever happened, whatever possibly happened, after Brexit and Trump and Corbyn and Covid and Brexit and Brexit and Brexit and Brexit, 2021 was surely going to be the first year in a very long time that was definitely going to be better than the one before.

So was it? Well, yes, but it’s fair to say the nation might have been hoping for a rather more emphatic victory.

At 7.30am on 4 January 2021, a man named Brian Pinker became the first person in the world to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. It wasn’t as seismic a moment as that which had occurred a month earlier, when Pfizer got there first.

But it should have been. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is cheap, does not require extra cold storage, and was sold at cost around the world.

It was clear, back then, every bit as clear as it is now, that there would be no end to the pandemic without herd immunity, and that humanity is a single herd. And it would be the Oxford vaccine, more so than the others, that would bring that herd immunity about.

Two days later, as it happened, the sitting President of the United States personally orchestrated an armed coup on the Capitol building in Washington DC, inspired by the lie that the election he lost had been rigged. Five people, including a police officer, were killed.

It was the clearest and most potent demonstration of the sheer power and possibility of breathtaking lies that we have witnessed in this, the age of fake news, ushered in by the avarice and straightforward moral bankruptcy of big tech.

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A year later, Omicron, which emerged in South Africa and has since swept the world confirms the obvious – that herd immunity has not been achieved, is nowhere near being achieved, and nor is the kind of global leadership it requires.

It is speculated, not unreasonably, that the Covid vaccines came just too late for Trump to win a second term. He was desperate that they would come on stream in time. And yet, his former cheerleaders, who may yet be his cheerleaders again, have decided to make politics by agitating against the vaccine. Just a few days ago, Sarah Palin – remember her? – was telling whooping crowds that they’d have to vaccinate her “over her dead body.”

And fake news has been waged against the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine too, notably in France, where Emmanuel Macron dismally described it as “quasi-ineffective”in the over 60s. As a direct result, large numbers of over 60s refused it, of whom many died as a direct result.

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So, 2021 has certainly been defined as a battle between Covid and human ingenuity. Human ingenuity is winning, but the contest is gruelling, and as yet, the stunning ingenuity of science has been blunted by low quality politics. It hardly needs to be stated that vaccinating the world would not be an altruistic thing to do but an absolute necessity. Normal life cannot resume until it is done.

That sense of struggle, of ying and yang, has characterised events this year perhaps more than any other.

The world was shaken by a truly terrifying report about the incoming impacts of catastrophic climate change, to which the response has been far too slow. There was a mass climate conference from which some optimism emerged, but not enough. Jeff Bezos flew in by private jet, not long after he had flown himself to space inside a stubby, penis-shaped rocket. Humanity is not acting fast enough to save itself, and the response of its richest, arguably most daring people, has been not to find a way to save the planet, but to investigate how they might be able to escape it and live in its orbit.

We must hope it’s not too revealing that, from a cultural perspective, nothing gripped us like a Korean drama about the institutionalised mass murder of desperate, poor people.

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Gareth Southgate’s England team also transfixed the nation, the English bit of it at least, in a way that no football team has done before. An England team that campaigned against poverty and racism, that raised extraordinary sums of money for Covid charities, and in so doing humiliated a hooligan government that tried but failed to vilify them.

It is, of course, not their fault that their hour of almost greatness would be undermined by dismal scenes at Wembley and even more dismal ones on social media afterwards. Such scenes are a reminder that theirs is yet more good work that is still very far from done.

It was, at least, thrilling to see actual crowds back in sporting venues, even if large numbers of them hadn’t bought a ticket, and one of them had spent a long lager filled afternoon bent over in Leicester Square with a lit flare up his backside.

Even as the Omicron wave takes hold, and with especially visceral force in London, sporting arenas are stuffed to the gunwales. That English sports stadiums are filled while others in, for example, Germany, are not, has no scientific basis at all, but is purely down to the libertarian instincts of this country’s prime minister, and the even more libertarian instincts of his party, of which he has lost control.

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That three thousand very drunk men are roaring the night away inside the Alexandra Palace every night at the World Darts Championship is thanks to Boris Johnson, so it is somewhat unfair that they are repaying this debt by chanting, on live television, about how much they hate him. Football crowds are doing the same, up and down the country.

There is no shortage of irony there. We know that it was with great reluctance that he has put in place any lockdowns at all. Last winter, he delayed, against the advice of his scientists, and he has done the same this winter. The reason the crowds hate him is because they now know that, even if he couldn’t allow the country to do whatever they pleased, he certainly did with his staff. They might seem like tittle tattle, but the most consequential moments of 2021 have come right at the very end. That politicians and their people held drunken parties while hundreds of thousands of people all around the country, said goodbye to dying loved ones over video call has induced a level of rage that has rarely been seen. And it is not merely the standard fury that is unleashed when politicians fail to live by the rules they set for others. It is infused with a sense of guilt. A sense that, if that’s what they were up to, then I should have broken the rules too. I shouldn’t have left my mother to die alone.

Political soothsaying is a mug’s game, but these are wounds that will not quickly or easily heal.

The final days of 2021 have also yielded a medical breakthrough that is not receiving as much attention as the vaccines of twelve months ago, but they are almost as insignificant. The results of Pfizer’s Covid-19 retroviral pill are astonishing, and according to Professor Chris Whitty, it will be these kinds of treatments that will guide rich countries out of the pandemic. Scientists are genuinely confident that next Christmas will not be like this one. Yes, we have heard these words before, but generally from chancer politicians, not people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Covid-19 may be on the way out. That it came along on the watch of the most malignant government the country has had in a century or more, and quite possibly ever, is unlucky. But its most recent disgrace might very well mean that it is carried off with it.