I'm sure the great majority of the many followers of The Trees require no convincing. But in some ways this was more telling than all the national stats and figures.
I was at King's Colllege Hospital last Thursday for a scheduled appointment, and got chatting to one of the respiratory consultants there. He told me that most of the inpatients currently in hospital with Covid were unvaccinated.
They were either:
- Too young to have been able to get a vaccine until recently, or
- Were older, and could have been vaccinated, but for some reason hadn't had it.
Further, cross infection within the hospital dropped massively once the hospital staff had had both doses.
For him, all this demonstrated that the vaccines were a good thing.
At the same time, it was also clear that the outpatients he saw from essentially middle-class or more educated backgrounds were almost all eager for the jab, for themselves and for their familires. Those who showed most hesitancy and doubt were often economically poorer or otherwise deprived, and also, often, from ethnic minority groups.
He was spending something like twice the expected lenght of time in clinic when seeing patients from the second group, simply to try and get over the importance of getting the vaccine.
An uphill struggle, albeit worthwhile.
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