Dear Editor,
Reference is made to comments attributed to Vice President Jagdeo in which he tells unvaccinated people, “the minute you start going out, you go to work or a club and everyone else has taken the vaccine and you haven’t, you’re putting other people’s lives at risk.”
This makes no sense. If the vaccines make serious illness or death very unlikely then how is it that an unvaccinated person is a threat except to him or herself? Secondly there is compelling evidence that vaccinated people can be infected and transmit the Delta variant at equal rates as the unvaccinated. So who really needs protecting from whom?
The reasons why people are not getting vaccinated are many but I would suggest that resistance is very high among young people simply because they are not seeing their peers becoming particularly sick from covid-19. And the statistics bear this out. The chances of dying from the virus for those under 30 are 1 in 10,000. Negligible. For someone over 50, it is 1 in 50, for over 80, 1 in 12. So age is the overwhelming variable in both hospitalisation and death rates.
Could the ministry now tell us the percentage of people over 50 who have been vaccinated? Clearly this is the age range which needs to be targeted and encouraged – not some 25-year-old in good health. And that is why the coercive measures denying citizens access to public services and even their jobs are so abject and disreputable.
The government is rapidly creating a segregated society of the vaccinated and the not. We now see they are postponing some of the measures for two weeks, but they should also “take warning”, many, many people will never get this vaccine. So what is their end game?
Sincerely,
Lynn Nicholas