The vaccines debate is over - so let’s stop persecuting the losing side

SO, what’s been troubling you this past week?

Weather been a bit chilly and stormy (well, it is still winter after all!) for your liking?

Or maybe the cost of living crisis is eating away at you and your budget?

Perhaps you have been fretting about the threat of war in Ukraine, or worrying that Cork City may not have what it takes to win promotion as another season dawns.

All legitimate concerns, of course.

But stretch your mind back a year ago this week, when Covid-19 and the attendant restrictions were dominating our every waking hour (and a few non-waking ones too, no doubt).

It was a momentous time: On February 18, 2021, the first Covid vaccines began to be rolled out to the over 85s in the community, after the first tranche had gone to residents in nursing homes and health workers.

It was hailed in The Echo as “a historic moment” and “the start of the recovery from Covid-19”. The expert who said that cannot be accused of hyperbole.

Just 52 weeks later, and here we are: Covid is barely mentioned - in Ireland at least. We enjoyed the largest take-up of vaccines in the European Union, and after a wobble over Omicron, we appear to be out of the woods.

What a difference a year makes.

It’s worth casting our minds back to the dark days of the pandemic, though, as it was a time when all of us were hearing about the vaccines, and making decisions on whether we would take them ourselves.

Here’s a statistic that may well astound you: In October, 2020, before any Covid vaccines had been approved, an RTÉ poll found just 56% said it was likely they would take it, while a sizeable 32% said they would be unlikely to have the jab.

But a month later, as hopes rose of a vaccine breakthrough from several different manufacturers, 74% of Irish people told a Sunday Business Post survey they would take the jab. A huge leap.

A couple of months later, the vaccines arrived - and the take-up in Ireland since has been, and I wouldn’t use this word unless it was justified - amazing.

As we stand, 95.8% of the Irish adult population have received at least one dose, and 94.7% of the Irish adult population are fully vaccinated.

These are off-the-scale figures, not seen in any other country.

A tiny, tiny fraction of the population decided against being vaccinated for Covid-19.

Sure, the prospect of a vaccination certificate to enable you to go to a pub, restaurant or cinema was a juicy carrot for some, but I believe the vast majority of us wanted to take one in the arm for ourselves and our friends and family as we trusted the science.

There were calls for vaccines to be made mandatory, but I am glad Ireland never considered that option: I’m not sure I want to live in a society that forces people to be injected with something they don’t want inside them, it sounds too much like a scene from a horror sci-fi movie.

Besides, with a near 96% take-up, and concrete proof that the vaccine reduced your chances of being seriously ill or dying, the country was clearly winning the pandemic battle in any case.

There is an old saying: that you should be magnanimous in victory and gracious in defeat, and I like to think Taoiseach Micheál Martin was exercising that when he scrapped the need for vaccine certificates last month as he reopened society.

That should have taken the issue of the non-vaccinated off the table, but, surprisingly, it hasn’t. There appears to be a small group of pro-vaxxers who will not let the debate lie.

Last week, a national newspaper ran an interesting article in which it spoke to people who had not been vaccinated, and they said they felt vindicated in their belief, now almost all restrictions were off the table.

It will strike 95.8% of the adult population as an odd view, given the evidence many of us saw in front of our eyes that the vaccines had allowed us to return to normality. But this was such a tiny percentage of the population that it surely didn’t matter.

Except it did, to the type of people who have been calling for mandatory vaccinations, and who have spent the past 12 months labelling those who didn’t opt to take the jab as “anti-vaxxers” and “far-right nut-jobs”.

It wasn’t enough for these people to be on the winning side. They still wanted the fraction of people on the losing side to be silenced, and to suffer in some way for their choice.

Many of this cohort took to social media to rail against the newspaper for publishing the views of the non-vaccinated.

Crikey, let it go, guys. The voting is over, the results are in... let’s allow a couple of hundred thousand people - the population of Kildare - to disagree with the mainstream and not be vilified forever more.

I see the same unpleasant attitude to tennis great Novak Djokovich, who infamously missed out on a chance to win the Australian Open last month because he hadn’t been vaccinated.

This week, he said he would be prepared to miss out on Wimbledon and the French Open too over his stance, even though he only needs to win one of them to become the greatest ever male player.

That sacrifice would make him a pin-up boy for the small group of people who are against the Covid jab, but it would also show a level of tolerance in Europe which leaves me very uncomfortable (I took the jabs, by the way).

It’s funny how it’s often the people who use the term ‘tolerance’ so much, who are most often guilty of breaching it.

Djokovich’s stance, and last week’s newspaper report, also underlined my belief, expressed in these pages last year, that only a very small percentage of those people refusing to take the Covid jab were in fact “far-right”, as they had been smeared.

Sure, a handful of them were, and gathered at sparsely-attended rallies espousing their ‘right’ to liberty. But the large majority of the non-vaccine group are, in fact, rational, often health-conscious people, who have simply made a decision not to have the jab.

People were wrong to denigrate them a year ago; but to do so now smacks of a deeply unpleasant intolerance to someone with a different view: A need to punish someone who disagrees with you.

It’s too late now to try to change these people’s minds, and they are so trenchant at this stage that it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

Leave them be. Move on. Let Novak play his tennis. We won: 95.8% against 4.2%. Game over.