An article by David Mellor in today’s edition of the Daily Mail Online is titled – “How much longer can we tolerate anti-vaxxers?”
Mr. Mellor goes on to write, and I quote.
The anti-vaxxer world is full of crazed voices and faced with such nonsense, you might reasonably think the best thing to do is laugh and pass it by.
I don’t agree. This is stuff is pernicious. It is helping to sustain Covid-19, to prolong suffering and death.
It’s filling up hospital beds, thereby constraining the health service from treating patients desperately ill with other conditions like cancer – treatment put on hold during the pandemic with often devastating effects.
Let me concentrate the mind with a few statistics.
As many as four out of ten of those hospitalised with Covid-19 are not fully vaccinated.
Pensioners are three times more likely to be admitted to hospital with Covid if they are anti-vaxxers.
Too many of whom now occupy beds in intensive care.
Refusing the vaccine is not merely irrational, it’s taking a chance with your life. A gamble where lives are lost.
Leslie Lawrenson, a 58 year old Cambridge-educated lawyer, blogged: ‘I hope I’ve got it because I’d rather have the antibodies in my blood than take the jab…the potential dangers from taking these experimental jabs weren’t worth the risk. I’d rather take my chances with my immune system.’
Well he did, and he lost. A few days later, his 11 year old son found him dead.
Matthew Keenan was ‘a wholly confirmed vaccine sceptic’, when he fell desperately ill last July. He said if he could turn back time, he would. But he couldn’t.
Throughout history tens of millions have died of diseases that wouldn’t kill them today because of vaccinations.
In a quiet graveyard in Dorset, two infants are buried. My aunt and uncle, who died of diphtheria in the 1920s, when it was the biggest killer of kids. Diphtheria was known as ‘the silent strangler’ because of the awful manner of their death.
Today, most youngsters have never even heard of diphtheria, let alone died from it, because vaccinations finished it off.
There’s a word for some people’s rejection of a life-saving jab, and that word is decadence.
I look back six decades to Geoff Hall, a hero of my childhood. This Birmingham City and England fullback was enjoying a hugely successful career. Then polio killed him.
Wouldn’t he have loved the opportunity to be vaccinated? One sadly didn’t emerge until a few years too late for him.
Thankfully, children today know nothing of polio, either.
As to the anti-vaxxers, we cannot merely switch them off, much as I would like to do so.
So, again, the question that won’t go away: how much longer can we tolerate seeing the NHS bunged up with people who get Covid really badly because they won’t be vaccinated?
Is this just a matter for individual choice? Or are the consequences for society too serious to overlook?
Ask the people not getting proper care for cancer.
Ask the people whose lives have been thrown into chaos by the wider effects of the continuing Covid meltdown.
It’s tempting to suggest that anti-vaxxers should be denied treatment, or treated only at their own expense. It’s been seriously suggested in Australia.
But I doubt it would work there and certainly won’t work here.
But a vaccine passport might. Why shouldn’t we ban those who refuse the vaccine from places of entertainment or – as Italy has done – from going to work?
Forcing the anti-vaxxers to stay at home, it can be argued, is necessary for public protection.
If they wish to exercise their individual choice, then let them do so. But in a way that does not damage you or me or the wider public interest.
What the anti-vaxxers are doing is, in its way, as harmful to society as if they ran along a street stabbing passers-by at random.
Unpalatable as many will find it, I believe we have to act or there’s a terrible danger we’ll be saddled with unmanageable Covid outbreaks for as far ahead as we can see.
All that disruption. All that misery. All the damage caused to business and the economy.
I’m not up for that.
Comment
A hard hitting viewpoint from the UK and one containing views that one or two commentators have raised in the Solomon Islands. Let us not have such division at home and time remains for those still to be vaccinated and to do so before the end of this month.
Please take into consideration your own duty of care as a morale obligation and in accordance with what scripture teaches about care of one's family.
How true it is that vaccinations have saved lives over many years from smallpox, polio, diphtheria and more recently measles, so why not Covid-19?
End of quote
Yours sincerely
Frank Short
