Peter Rhodes on travel insurance, non-vaccine cures for Covid and replacing breastfeeding with chestfeeding

To recap. It is perfectly sensible to book any sort of holiday, at home or abroad for this summer - on condition you have 100 per cent guaranteed insurance cover if forced to cancel.

So how can you spot a super-safe, money-back, 100 per cent guaranteed insurance policy? It's the one with no small print, delivered by a unicorn.

Midwives in Brighton are being asked by their NHS trust to use gender-inclusive language such as “chestfeeding,” “human milk,” “co-parent” and “second biological parent.” I am sure it will make this wicked world a much better place. And yet it ignores an elephant in the living room.

For of all the professions in the state sector, none is more blatantly unequal and sexist than midwifery. There are about 40,000 midwives in Britain. Only 188 of them are male. Imagine the anger, the outrage, the feminist hue and cry if those gender proportions were reversed and midwifery was a closed-shop job for the boys. What is the point in making little changes to the language of caring for mums and babies (sorry, that should be “primary biological parents” and “humans of newness”) when such a glaring unfairness rumbles on?

So sing it loud and sing it proud: It is every man's right to be a midwife. And before anyone suggests that few men are interested in such a career, that's exactly the discredited old line trotted out to explain why there are so few Asians in professional football.

The pandemic seems to have ripped NHS dental service to shreds, with some patients having to pay hundreds of pounds privately for treatment that, until a year ago, was available on the state. It can only get worse. How long before there are more people with toothache than with Covid?

Possibly because of the media's obsession with vaccines going into arms, you may not be aware of other non-vaccine successes in the fight against Covid-19. Colchicine, a cheap drug normally used to treat gout, has been found to reduce hospital stays and the need for oxygen therapy. A common asthma inhaler, budesonide, cuts risk of hospitalisation by 90 per cent. An arthritis drug, tocilizumab , is said to be giving “tremendous” results against Covid. And in Israel a new drug, Allocetra, cured 90 per cent of patients with serious Covid symptoms amazingly quickly. One patient said he felt better in just two hours.

Similar research is quietly going on around the world. With luck, Covid may soon be not a disease we try to eliminate with vaccines but one we cure, simply and cheaply, with no more drama than a nurse telling you: “Just inhale this.”

The bad news? We are about to reach that grimly predictable NHS milestone where deaths from obesity exceed deaths from smoking. As one pundit put it: “We've replaced one oral fixation with another.”