Boris Johnson is taking a big gamble with ‘Freedom Day’

With their usual flourish, British tabloids dubbed 19 July as “Freedom Day”, or more prosaically, the day the United Kingdom entered stage four of its reopening plan. There is much that can be criticized in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic, and there has been much criticism by epidemiologists and other experts of the decision to go ahead with a full reopening, in the face of sharply rising infections, and, even more worryingly, upticks in hospitalization and deaths, due, in large part, to the ubiquity of the delta variant, which is highly transmissible and has greater immune-escaping properties than the conventional covid virus—meaning that it is possible for those already fully vaccinated to become infected. In light of this, it is striking that in a video message shared on 18 July via Twitter, Johnson offered this rationale for the reopening, in the form of a rhetorical question: “If we don’t do it now, we’ve got to ask ourselves, when will we do it?” As he also remarked, due to the high vaccination rate, new infections have now largely been decoupled from new hospitalizations and increased mortality. A similar logic has underpinned the elimination of pandemic-era restrictions in a number of states of the United States—mostly the “Red” rather than “Blue” states, that is those with Republican rather than Democratic governments—and the same underlies the sentiment increasingly heard from political conservatives in the Anglo-American sphere, that post-vaccination, covid should be seen as another, albeit an especially, nasty flu, and cannot be the basis for lockdowns and restrictions without end.