In the Long Run, the Black Death Was a Good Thing

Medical scientists - persons of the grubby, ill-informed sort who thought that Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS law would harm public health - are once more risking the remnants of their tattered credibility by promulgating yet further heresies against the faith-based community in Westminster. Despite the dictates of present orthodoxy that profit always provides, it appears that various badger-influenced pathogens have been shifting the goalposts and becoming immune to antibiotics. Meanwhile, research into new antibiotics has declined because there is more money to be made out of bankers' diseases like high blood pressure than out of preventing future pandemics which may do little more than winnow out a few million of the weaker proles. To deal with the problem, the malcontents are suggesting hospitals with "greater distances between beds, lower bed occupancy rates, improved staff-patient ratios and large, openable windows"; in short, the polar opposite of modern public health policy, which calls for fewer hospitals treating more patients using a smaller staff with cheaper qualifications. Window dimensions might perhaps be negotiable, should the Minister for Health and News Corporation or any of his chums suddenly find their true professional level as double-glazing salesmen.