Normal life was snatched from Sarah Hemmings a year before it was from everyone else. In early 2019, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that can interfere with the brain and spinal cord, making everyday tasks difficult.
Then the pandemic struck.
Taking treatment for MS and caring with her husband for two young children, Hemmings stepped back from a job teaching at a local primary school and almost never left the house. She is now one of 3.8m people across the UK deemed clinically extremely vulnerable to Covid-19, advised until recently to “shield” from the outside world.
The government hopes the effectiveness and high take-up of vaccines will protect them once most of England’s legal restrictions are removed next week, although it says that people like Hemmings should consider going to the shops at “quieter times of the day”.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, meanwhile, has suggested administering variant-targeting booster shots to the group from September.
Yet given the UK is reporting more than 42,000…
