Boris Johnson says the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is safe – so now it’s definitely time to panic

When the prime minister set out to assure the public that their vaccine was safe, AstraZeneca must have known it was doomed

Sometimes it’s not immediately clear to see how AstraZeneca can have created a pandemic-ending vaccine in about three weeks, pledged to distribute it to the entire world on a not-for-profit basis, and the whole thing still turn into a PR disaster.

But in some ways the marketing team do have a lot to answer for. When there are all these rumours flying about that it might not be safe (it is safe), that it causes blood clots (it doesn’t cause blood clots), what you really need to turn the tide is someone with absolute credibility. Someone beyond reproach.

So when Boris Johnson wandered out to the Downing Street lectern at 5pm, that probably was the moment AZ bosses knew they were doomed. Couldn’t they have got Attenborough? Even Stephen Fry would have done the job.

But no, Johnson it was. Striding out to calm the gathering storm of untruth was the biggest, boldest, most notorious liar in the UK, certainly all of Europe, and, now that Trump’s on sabbatical, quite possibly the entire world.

What must they have been thinking, as they sat there watching Boris Johnson insisting that “these vaccines are safe”?

There’s a war of misinformation going on. There are politicians bad-mouthing life-saving medicines to protect their own reputations, and who have we got to sort it all out? Erm, the twice-sacked-for-lying Boris Johnson, I’m afraid. Best we could do. Sorry.

This is the guy, is it not, who spent months driving round the country in a big bus, promising to give the NHS £350m a week, and he’s the prime minister now and actually, it turns out, he’s giving the NHS nurses who saved his life a real terms pay cut. And now here he is, on prime time TV, saying, don’t panic, everything’s fine.

To think of all the people, up and down the country, who’ve spent the last God knows how long trying to calm down anxious relatives, who are meant to be going in for their vaccinations. They’ve been trying to tell them it’s all fine, it’s all going to be fine, and suddenly they’ve switched on the TV, they’ve seen Boris Johnson telling them it’s safe, and now they don’t know what to think.

Read more:

• All that clapping, it turns out, was simply the drum roll to a real-terms pay cut for NHS workers
• Dominic Cummings wants to turn the UK into the ‘home of science’ – but ignored all the scientists about lockdown
• Yes, if we’re serious about stopping the spread of Covid, we really must arrest more women at vigils

We would also learn that the prime minister is having his jab tomorrow, the Oxford-AstraZeneca one too, so you definitely don’t need to worry. We shall have to take these reassurances at face value, but they may not be all they appear.

After all, some years ago, in a toilet cubicle somewhere, Boris Johnson was by his own admission given some cocaine by a friend, which he then took. Some time after, he and the rest of us would learn that it was, in fact, only icing sugar, and that Johnson is not even sure whether any of it even went in. So the confirmed intent to take pharmaceutical substances, and then taking them, should not be considered any kind of guarantee in any way that they were actually taken.

They’re only antibodies, after all. They can be lied out of the bloodstream just as easily as they went in.