Tremr

I got my first dose of the Astra Zeneca vaccine yesterday. There was a steward to let me in to the health centre, another to guide me to my seat and tell me when it was my turn for the pre-assessment, another to greet me to the area where I was to wait for the jab itself and finally, one to check me out. As it turned out, the whole operation was so slick that I didn't have time to sit down in the second waiting area. I checked my watch as I left and it was only five minutes past the time of my appointment. I was hugely impressed and grateful once again to our National Health Service who this week learned that they would receive a paltry 1% pay rise after a year of unprecedented stress. The justification that the economy is under extreme strain might be understandable if our government hadn't squandered billions by handing contracts to third parties with no history of healthcare to procure personal protective equipment (PPE) for NHS staff that had to be discarded when it was ...

Yesterday was a good news day. In the 20 minutes that I had the radio on there were two really positive stories. The story about Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine gives real hope that we might be able to return to something resembling normality after this strangest of years. The speed with which their vaccine and other similar ones have been brought to this stage is unprecedented. No one reading this needs reminding that Covid-19 has blighted everyone's lives and presented new and unwelcome challenges to those already struggling with Parkinsons so this is a breakthrough worth shouting about. I was still smiling about that story when Nick Robinson of BBC News started talking to Demis Hassabis of DeepMind about how they have largely solved the 50 year old problem of protein folding. Despite the enormous significance of the vaccine, I don't think that it's an exaggeration to say that this could be just as important. Image attribution: Dcrjsr While current treatments for Parkinso...