This old codger gets very angry when he hears about the large number of people in Australia and elsewhere who claim the ‘right’ to refuse Covid-19 vaccination. The argument circles around the belief that ‘I have the right to refuse to have foreign material put into my body’. Of course there are others who subscribe to various conspiracy theories such as ‘They are putting a microchip in with the vaccine’ and ”The coronavirus epidemic is a fraud engineered by Big Pharma to make more profits’ and ‘More people die from the vaccination than from the disease’
Ignoring the patent nonsense of the conspiracy theories, let’s talk about the right to refuse vaccination. There are several responses to this attitude. Firstly, it is very likely that the anti-vaxxers are here to make their protests, and healthy, because they received all their childhood vaccinations: measles, chickenpox, scarlet fever, polio etc. Not that long ago, one in five children died early in life because they were unprotected against disease. I can recall pictures of wards full of children in ‘iron lungs’ because they were unable to breath because of Polio, and there are adults now who were crippled by the disease as children before the Polio vaccine became available. Science has come along way in a century in devising protection against bacterial and viral diseases; the Covid vaccines are just a step in that progress.
I wonder if the anti-vaxxers would be demanding their rights if they lived in Africa and were threatened with the possibility of contracting the deadly Ebola disease? The ‘right’ of healthy adults to refuse vaccination seems to be an indulgence. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there are two sides to the coin – with rights go responsibilities. In this case there is a responsibility to protect others: a fully vaccinated population prevents the spread of the virus. And there is more one can say to refute their attitude – see next post: Anti-vaxxers 2
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