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Ruth Maguire, a Scottish National party MSP who chaired Holyrood’s equalities and human rights committee, is taking a leave of absence from the Scottish parliament after cervical cancer was diagnosed.
Maguire, who was re-elected the MSP for Cunninghame South on 6 May, said she was told on 27 April she had stage 3 cervical cancer. She said doctors believed it was treatable, but it had taken until now to “process what this means for me and talk things over with my family”. She went on:
For now, I will concentrate on doing everything I can to get well and strong again and I thank everyone for their understanding. Being re-elected to serve my community is a privilege that I hold dearly every single day and I look forward to when I can resume my full duties.
This morning Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, said that if the vaccines keep people out of hospital, the pandemic would be over. In an interview on the Today programme he was asked about data from Public Health England released at the weekend about the effectiveness of the vaccines at protecting people from infection. But focusing on protection from infection was “the wrong exam question”, he suggested. He went on:
The thing that makes this a pandemic is people going into hospital. And so what we really need to know, and we don’t have the data yet for certain, is how well both vaccines are performing in preventing people from going into hospital.
And what we’ve seen so far in the pandemic is that protection from vaccines against hospitalisation and death is much, much higher than the protection against mild infection, which is what these tests are detecting.
If the current generation of vaccines are able to stop people going into hospital, whilst there is still mild infections, people are getting the common cold with the virus, then the pandemic is over.
Because we can live with the virus, in fact we are going to have to live with the virus in one way or another, but it doesn’t matter if most people are kept out of hospital because then the NHS can continue to function and life will be back to normal. We just need a little bit more time to have certainty around this.
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