How much longer can we tolerate anti-vaxxers clogging up the NHS

SADLY, the pernicious anti-vaxxer movement is helping sustain Covid19. It’s filling up hospital beds as the latest month’s figures show that two-thirds of the under-50s admitted with the virus are unvaccinated.

The knock-on effect is that the NHS is constrained from treating others desperately ill with conditions such as cancer.

As important as booster jabs are, the priority is still to reach the millions of supposedly adult citizens who have refused the vaccine.

It is believed that half of professional footballers haven’t even had a first jab. Refusing the jab is not merely irrational, it’s taking a chance with your life. A gamble where lives are being lost.

There have been tragic examples – such as a 58-year-old Cambridgeeducated lawyer who said he hoped he had got the virus because he’d prefer to have the antibodies in his blood than take the jab.

‘I’d rather take my chances with my immune system,’ he added. He did just that – and died.

Undaunted by such stories, antivaxxers continue to defy medical advice and common sense.

This leads again to the question that won’t go away: how much longer can we tolerate seeing the NHS clogged 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 – particularly with the threat of a return of social restrictions for us all, and perhaps even another lockdown.

IACKNOWLEDGE, having been a Minister for 11 years, that the options are not easy. It’s tempting to suggest that anti-vaxxers should be denied treatment, or treated only at their own expense. This has been seriously suggested in Australia. But I doubt it would work there and certainly won’t work in the UK.

But a vaccine passport might. Why shouldn’t we ban those who refuse the vaccine from visiting places of entertainment or – as Italy has done – from going to work?

I believe it is no exaggeration to say that what anti-vaxxers are doing could be likened to someone running along a street stabbing passers-by at random.

Unpalatable as many will find it, I am convinced that we must act, otherwise there’s a terrible danger we’ll be saddled with unmanageable Covid outbreaks for as far ahead as we can see.

The choice is stark: a vaccine passport system – or disruption, misery and irreparable damage to millions of lives and to the economy.