Of course ‘greed’ got us through pandemic – kindness and the NHS had nothing to do with it

Boris Johnson praised “greed” and “capitalism” as the values rescuing us from the pandemic. We should all thank these wonderful qualities, rather than unhelpful sh*tty kindness, which has been nothing but a drag on us for the last year.

When he was in intensive care, he must have looked through his weary eyes at the nurse caring for him, and thought, “I wonder why you’re doing this. I hope it’s because of naked self-interest or I don’t trust you. Hopefully you’re planning to use this situation to get a series on Netflix”.

He must see thousands of nurses working an 80-hour week in an environment that’s made them likely to catch the virus themselves, and hope they’re all doing this out of conservative greed, probably because they all have piles of old stuff to sell, and when someone’s recovering from a coma, that’s the ideal time to ask if they’re interested in a fully working secondhand fridge.

But now there are volunteers at every vaccination centre, making the programme possible, smiling with their clipboards and chirpy demeanour, for no money but through a sense of duty and community spirit. This is a disaster. They’re threatening to wreck everything, the shameless ungreedy idiots.

Every day, the hundreds of thousands who are vaccinated must think, “what a shame this isn’t being organised by Serco”.

So Boris Johnson needs to act quickly, and make sure the programme is run by greedy capitalists. Then we could have at least two companies competing for the contract to tell people which cubicle to go in, as part of a “customer enhanced needle service”.

The vaccine could be 20 quid a shot, or 35 for the two. There could be adverts for the competing vaccines, in which kids at breakfast are screaming: “Please, mum, this weekend can we get vaccinated again – please?”

She can reply, “I’m not sure we can afford it this week,” but her husband can look on a website and say, “Hmm, two adults and two kids, only £64.99 if we book before Monday,” then they all cheer and sing, “Vax to the Max with our family packs”.

Their rivals might choose an upmarket image, in which Angela Rippon tells us, “Be wiser with Pfizer”. And the cheapest jabs should be advertised on Heart FM, with someone gibbering quickly, “Where’s everybody rushing to?” “We’re all going to St Margaret’s church hall in Winthorpe Avenue where they’re offering shots of Covid jabs at prices you wouldn’t believe. It’s immunity – at prices that are lunacy!”

Then on the way out, everyone can be charged 10 pounds for photos of them pulling a face while getting the jab, like the ones taken on the water slide at Thorpe Park.

The cotton wool put on the area where the needle went could be sponsored, saying: “Direct Line Insurance, (It’s a shot in the arm for your insurance premium)”.

Or they could give you lots of tiny jabs, so they swell up and spell, “webuyanycar.com”, to increase brand recognition.

When we’ve got all that going, hopefully, greed and capitalism can withhold the supplies of the vaccine altogether for a while, to drive the price up, the way some companies did with HIV drugs 20 years ago.

Because this business where we all get vaccinated in order, depending on our age, job and physical condition, is communist nonsense, following Karl Marx’s ridiculous demand that “each must be jabbed according to their need”.

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The private companies motivated by capitalism would have been so much more honourable if they were in charge. When they were given the contracts to create a successful track and trace system, they were amazingly efficient, preparing a statement that the whole system had been put back until May, then another that it had been put back until September, then October, then not at all. That’s an amazing FOUR statements explaining they’d forgotten to do it, but the NHS hasn’t managed a single one. That’s what happens when you take away the motive of profit.

Greed and capitalism is also the most important motive for staff morale in the Health Service. They spend years training in the hope that one day Matt Hancock comes in with a hernia, so that while they’re giving him a bed bath they can become his mate, and win a contract off him for supplying millions of bits of something they know nothing about, that they will make too small so they all have to be dumped in landfill, but they get paid anyway.

Almost every week there’s a new revelation that a company was awarded an £80bn contract for supplying cleaning equipment to hospitals dealing with Covid patients, but they ran out of sponges so they didn’t send any but sent three packets of Quavers instead and still got paid, and it turns out the managing director was nine years old and was the son of a junior minister of defence.

That’s the spirit that has kept us together as a nation this last year, especially when we applauded the nurses every week, for promoting the NHS so it would raise the price when it was floated on the stock exchange.

It must also be why the government with the worst record on dealing with Covid is the one that was led by Donald Trump. That must be because he wasn’t greedy or capitalist enough.

It’s a wonderful testament to the delightful flights of Boris Johnson’s imagination, that he can conclude from the process of dealing with Covid, that capitalism has sorted things out. This is a charming quality, and he can tell us next that we should thank the Evergreen ship that’s been stuck for the last few days, for the smooth and efficient running of the Suez Canal.