Behold!

The mad logic of Dr Clare Gerada, chair of the Royal College of GPs, as reported in the Telegraph:

Dr Gerada said healthy individuals who had paid to have the jab on a private patient basis at pharmacies shared some of the blame for the shortages. Many pharmacies have offered the jab for about £15.

Dr Gerada said: “People who are not in the at-risk groups are getting [private] vaccinations, leaving less supply for us…

She called for a study looking at how many healthy people had paid to have the jab privately, to gauge “whether there should be a law that they are not allowed to have it”.

Let’s get this straight.

There is medicine out there which might stop us getting sick. It was ordered in bulk by GPs, pharmacies and private companies.

Private citizens are buying some of this medicine from their own money. The government apparently did not buy enough for the NHS’s needs. So now the call comes for private people to be ‘banned’ from paying privately for medicine sold by private companies?

The same old story. The state sets up cumbersome mechanisms which can never be accurate enough, so along comes the collectivist shriek that the state respond to its own errors by reducing rather than expanding choice for all. 

Maybe there is another, better way of looking at such matters.