Compulsory vaccination should be used where needed - Yorkshire Post letters

From: Bridget Duncan, Pontefract.
A vaccinators of the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine at the medical centre in Bridport, England. (Photo by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images).A vaccinators of the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine at the medical centre in Bridport, England. (Photo by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images).
A vaccinators of the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine at the medical centre in Bridport, England. (Photo by Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images).

I FIND myself in total agreement with the clear and tightly argued views regarding compulsory vaccination against Covid that Jayne Dowle expressed (The Yorkshire Post May 20).

Additional weight is added to her already strong arguments, as from the start she recognises that there are some people who are medically unable to have the vaccine.

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She lays bare, with reasons, her original vaccine hesitancy, and the thinking that has led her to her current viewpoint.

The suggestion (The Yorkshire Post, May 19) of more local ‘lockdowns’ and ‘tiers’, which Ms Dowle rightly describes as punitive, sent a deep cold grip into the core of my being.

We have a national problem and it should be treated as such. Levelling up for the North should mean exactly that. A return to grinding restrictions for areas that already suffer from numerous deprivations, that have already been subject to extremely lengthy periods of restrictions going back to late summer 2020, is just not acceptable.

Instead, the focus should be on a huge additional input of whatever resources are needed in order to bring the region up (or is it down?) to the lower infection rates now in existence in large swathes of the country.

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Ms Dowle expresses deep concern at the potential damage that more lockdowns and ‘tiers’ etc will wreak upon her children’s education and life chances. In the ‘autumn’ of life, physical and mental capacity, and the sands of time, feel to run out increasingly swiftly. For either group, indeed for any age group, more than a year of restrictions have already robbed us of time to live a fulfilling stage of life.

We need to move forward and rebuild better.

In Parliament, Matt Hancock’s frustration was palpable when he said that a number of the patients now seriously ill in hospital in Burnley had been offered the vaccine and had declined it.

I wonder if they and their contacts would still do so? Somehow I rather doubt it. I believe a great number of people will agree with the sentiments expressed in this excellent article.

It should be compulsory reading for all who are charged with the decision making needed to steer the country to the calmer waters of a post-Covid world.

Clearly, vaccination for all, compulsory if necessary, should be employed as the main tool to generate a ‘normal’ or at least a ‘new normal’ life for the whole population.