There was plenty in the news yesterday across Britain. For instance, had the conclusion of the horrific trial which found a 6 year old boy called Arthur Labinjo-Hughes had been tortured and killed by his father and his partner – two individuals who can’t be described as anything other than evil.

You might also have read the news that Germany is going to stop those who aren’t vaccinated against Covid from attending cinemas, restaurants and a lot of shops. Or the story about Meghan Markle getting one over The Mail on Sunday in the courts. It kept journalists busy all day.

And when there’s a busy day in the news, you can be assured someone somewhere is doing a Jo Moore. Yesterday, it was the government. Remember the Events Research Programme earlier in the year? The first batch of results were published late on a Friday afternoon – meaning journalists keen to go home at the end of the working week would give it less attention.

So what’s in it? I haven’t read through everything yet – I do have other things to do, you know – but I’m already coming to the conclusion that they need not have bothered. For example, the report says “numerous factors were likely to have contributed to the higher transmission risk at these events.”. And the government had to pay to find this out?

They also cite “high rates of unvaccinated attendees, community prevalence at the time of the events studied, the structure of the events, and the behaviour of attendees leading up to and after attending these events” as other factors. Most of these events took place in the spring, when Covid rates were dramatically down on the massive peak seen in January.

Now that we’re in a situation where rates of vaccinated people are high, yet community transmission also remains high but fairly stable, what use is any of this information now? Was the whole exercise a complete waste of time designed to give the impression the government was being sensible?

I’m fast beginning to suspect so…