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Never one to use two words when six will do, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has reached for a range of verbal contortions to predict an end to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He’s used the 1815 battle of Waterloo—“the morale-boosting bugle-blasting excitement of Wellington’s Prussian allies coming through the woods”—to describe vaccinations, and warned against the premature lifting of restrictions by invoking Steve McQueen’s fate in the 1960s movie The Great Escape: “if we try to jump the fence now, we will simply tangle ourselves in the last barbed wire.”
Despite the verbose promises of victory as vaccine programs around the world accelerate, the pandemic is unlikely to end with the knock-out blow against the virus that Johnson and other political leaders promise. The best we can hope for, scientists predict, is an uneasy truce.
I don’t think that anyone who is reasonably well-informed about infectious ...
