Triumph of the heart

The greatest trick national governments ever played was to convince the people over which they govern that they simply couldn’t do it without them!
And yet, here we find ourselves, essentially without a Prime Minister and seemingly able to navigate our way out of an international pandemic using our own intuition and sound judgements. It feels like a while since we talked about COVID and that in itself feels like progress.

In the last few years, one of the most repeated narratives from the outgoing Prime Minister has been how ‘he is delivering the vaccine’. It is now common knowledge that the life sciences industry would have done that even if Mr Tumble had been in Number 10.

We are also beginning to realise it is the kinship we have with our own health that has empowered us to make decisions without handholding. Pragmatism and knowledge among the men and women on the street have taken over and we are all better for it.

Meanwhile, the candidates for the premiership squabble over percentages and how much they ‘know about hard-working families’. Little, however, has been spoken about the neo-healthcare ecosystem and how we can ignite the imagination that has already sparked collaboration between pharma companies, the NHS and the general public.

It is, after all, this sense of unity, trust and awareness about what can be achieved that has been the one silver lining of COVID-19. A triumph of science, yes, but most strikingly a triumph of the heart.