Get your vaccine as new wave looms

Hardly had the echoes of the health minister’s briefing died away on Thursday than the conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers were all over social media, ranting about lockdowns, “experimental” vaccines and a looming “Holocaust”.

The bottom line is that there is a new Covid variant out there and, though it is not yet known how virulent and dangerous it might be, it will be something else driving the already evident fourth wave.

Yet the deniers still deny. They refuse to be vaccinated. They refuse to wear masks.

It is true that the vaccines don’t offer 100% protection against infection; that they don’t stop people from spreading the virus either.

Yet, there is indisputable evidence from abroad that the jabs dramatically lower the possibility of hospitalisation and death – and that the majority of people dying now have not been vaccinated.

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A fourth wave getting out of control will, undoubtedly, see more restrictions – and our economy will get a further battering.

By wilfully ignoring the non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain the spread of the infection and by wilfully refusing to get vaccinate, some anti-social people are going to push us back into that ruinous lockdown.

It is the hill they have chosen to die on. And many of them will…