Bill Harvey: Children of the grave

Readers with longer memories may recall, with a mix of both horror and ironic amusement, the look on the face of John Selwyn Gummer’s daughter as her father made her eat a burger on national news. The aim was to underline the minister’s confidence in meat safety as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (commonly known as mad cow disease) took hold in the UK. Today, we learned how Putin has allowed his daughter (but not himself) to receive a newly announced Russian vaccine against Covid-19, despite no Phase 3 trials yet having taken place and little data beyond the anecdotal having been released.