The damp and misty weekend in London before Christmas reflected the mood of the capital under the shadow of the rampant new omicron variant of the coronavirus. Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a “major incident”, mobilising the emergency services, health and local authorities to meet the challenges of an anticipated wave of infections and hospital admissions.

On Saturday morning, I found myself at Broadway Market in Hackney where my wife was singing carols with the Hackney Singers, raising funds for local charities, with the enthusiastic support of Hackney Council’s Mayor and Speaker, resplendent in his chains of office. Only a few years ago an area of derelict canal-side warehouses and workshops, Broadway Market is now a symbol of Hackney’s rejuvenation as a centre of cultural innovation and rocketing property prices. The occasional hipster paused while passing the exotic streetfood, charcuterie and homemade bread stalls to join in the singing and throw a coin into the bucket, but the mood was sombre rather than festive.

On Sunday, I returned to the same streets, together with a medical student from Hong Kong, bringing booster doses of the Covid-19 vaccination to the housebound elderly or infirm who were unable to attend the clinic. This initiative was part of a London-wide drive to maximise resistance to the new variant, given early indications that the protection offered by earlier vaccination or infection might not be sufficient to protect against further illness and transmission.

It is frustrating that regulations forbid bringing the vaccinations around by bike – Deliveroo-style – which would have made negotiating the traffic, the new “low traffic neighbourhood” restrictions and the inaccessible estates much easier. Still, it was heartening to be involved, with a now-familiar team of doctors, pharmacists, nurses, medical students, administrators and volunteers, in the latest phase of this long-running public health emergency.

The contrast between the affluence of Broadway Market and the conditions of chronic ill health and disability, social isolation and poverty afflicting many housebound patients in the area was immediately striking. Yet most were enthusiastic to get their boosters, recognising the threat posed by the apparent rapidity of the spread of the new variant. Some had survived hospital admission with Covid – and other conditions and complications – and were all too aware of the impact of the virus on the capacity of the NHS. One elderly lady told us that she put her faith in the Lord as well as the vaccine and insisted that we return when she got back from church.

I returned home from the vaccination drive to hear the news that our son and his partner, expected to join us for Christmas, have come down with Covid-19 and are obliged to self-isolate for the duration. So Christmas is cancelled. Let’s hope for better times ahead in a New Year beyond omicron.

Sceptics need to trust the experts

I was also struck by the contrast between the pragmatic stoicism of these patients – and those queueing in the cold outside the vaccine centre – and the ill-informed bombast of the Covid sceptics with their allegations of “scaremongering” and historically illiterate allusions to Stalin and Hitler, and Geroge Orwell’s 1984. While there are good grounds for resisting vaccine passports and mandatory vaccination, these do not include claims that omicron is likely to be no more serious than seasonal flu, that herd immunity has already been reached or that NHS standards are not seriously in jeopardy. The same combination of wishful thinking and virtue-signalling about liberty – relying on the same handful of dubious authorities – has accompanied each wave of Covid infections, to the detriment of sensible measures to reduce the impact of a lethal virus.

What have I learnt in nearly two years of Covid-19? You need to read the science carefully and choose the experts to trust even more carefully. The virologists, microbiologists and infectious disease specialists (and the modellers!) have proven much more reliable than the sociologists, psychologists and political scientists. And if you don’t understand the mathematics, put your faith in somebody who does.