Books: Spike: the Virus v the People - the Inside Story: Red Flags.

Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja Profile Books, 2021, HB, 272pp, £14.99, 978-1788169226 On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 13 March 2020, Patrick Vallance, England’s Chief Scientific Adviser, told his interviewer that the aim was to flatten the coming peak, ‘to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease’ . The next day, I emailed my brothers (all now in the older, more at-risk group) with a GP’s perspective — there will be ‘a lot of it about’ so stay at home if you can. That month we had all been following the unfolding tragedy in Italy’s health service and the inexorable spread of COVID-19 into Spain and France, and the words herd immunity were to me a red flag, a sign that our government was out of its depth and that the NHS and its patients were facing a terrible time. Jeremy Farrar, in his account of the …