Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has predicted that restrictions including face masks, “will be needed” after 19 July. Numbers are getting bigger again – more positive tests and the like.

There’s talk, serious talk, of vaccinating children against Covid-19 – people under the age of 18. The EU are keen. 19 July is the latest in a long line of dates dangled in front of us proles and called something like Freedom Day. As always, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

The subject of vaccinating children has already been addressed by others, here on GB News. But I cannot let it lie without saying something too. Speaking for myself, from my heart, I say this is a fork in the road for our society. We will be judged, we should be judged, as human beings, by what we do next.

Covid-19 poses almost no threat at all to children. If they do catch it, the disease will manifest itself, in almost every case, in symptoms indistinguishable from those of the common cold.

Never before in medical history has there been a proposal to vaccinate children against a disease that poses them no measurable harm. Added to this is the undeniable fact these vaccines for Covid are experimental, in that no data is available concerning long term effects.

We vaccinate children against child killers like measles.

We vaccinate adolescents against the HPV virus that causes cervical cancer. We vaccinate children against flu, which kills young and old alike. In each case, the vaccines had been in development and rigorous testing for many years before any syringe ever got near any human flesh.

We have no long term data about the long term effects of the vaccines. Of course we don’t – we haven’t had the virus long term, far less the vaccines against it. An 80-year-old approaching the end of life and opting to take such a vaccine is one thing, since the perceived benefits in the short term might outweigh the risks over the long term; a 10-year-old at the start of life – a life in which decisions and actions taken in childhood might affect or compromise many decades of that life – is another thing entirely.

That we are even contemplating giving these vaccines to our children at this time – this time when so much remains unknown – strikes me as nothing less than grotesque. The apparent justification is that children may spread the virus and that by vaccinating them such risk is curtailed – that risk being primarily towards adults. But what of the risk to the children in receipt of a vaccine – the long term effects of which must remain unknown for years to come?

Are the adults of this country truly supporting the notion of standing behind a wall of safety built of our children and infants? That to me is an inversion of nature and should be contrary to what it means to be a parent, an adult with an eye to the future.

From around the world there are already reports of adults being offered free burgers and fries, or lottery tickets, or jobs, or easier sentences for crimes, in return for taking the vaccine. What sort of vaccines are these – what sort of a disease is Covid-19 indeed – if people must be bribed to take their medicine like good boys and girls.

A few years ago, had we heard about a pharmaceutical company bribing people to take a brand new drug, I think I’m right in saying there would have been an outcry of note and legal actions aplenty.

And so we are standing at a fork in the road. I say a society that contemplates putting children in the frontline of protecting adults, far less embarks upon such a strategy, is not a society worth saving. If we don’t put children, the young of the species, first – above all others – then frankly, what’s the point in anything?

These vaccines are a choice for adults. Take them or don’t – that is the stuff of a private and personal choice in an erstwhile free society. But leave the children alone. Leave the children alone.