Hot Air

To the many deplorable aspects of the present pandemic must now be added yet another: the coronavirus has lost its chance at being a source of profit to Sir James Dyson. As an enthusiastic purveyor of Brexit and other noisy toilet articles, Dyson was considered an ideal contractor to produce medical ventilators, but has now been laid off, having spent about £20 million on the project. According to the wealth creator himself, the company will not be seeking to cover its costs at the expense of the British taxpayer, except in a manner too sneaky and underhanded to raise undue objections.

Once the Department for Profitable Healthcare had decided that buying medical equipment from suppliers of medical equipment would constitute an unacceptable ideological deviation, several other companies were also commissioned to produce own-brand ventilators, but none of the new devices has gained approval from the regulator and the Government has found that its requirements are in any case somewhat lower than expected, since fatal diseases tend to be a self-solving problem provided treatment is sufficiently delayed. The only company to produce ventilators to the proper standard is a consortium that adapted proven devices rather than building new ones: an approach that in less glorious times would have been called conservatism.