Anti-vaxxers are biggest danger

THE anti-vax brigade that turned up outside a school to try to stop people receiving the Covid-19 vaccine are at best stupid and at worst sinister.

Across the world, the roll-out of the live-saving vaccines is being slowed by increasingly vocal groups more willing to believe internet conspiracy theories than the evidence of their own eyes.

Far fewer people are now dying because of the successful roll-out of the vaccine.

Yet these people ignore the clear evidence in order to scare people into accepting their warped world view.

We are used to seeing such scenes outside medical facilities in the US.

To see this misguided lunacy unfold at the gates of a Scottish school is alarming.

The anti-vaccine movement is rooted in an ultra-conservative desire to fight against what they see as the big state and driven by political forces intent on rolling back progress.

The mad theories range from preying on the worries of people about “untested” medicines, to the plain bonkers claims that vaccines are a “form of government control of the people”.

Anti-vaxxers use fear, contested history and legal mumbo jumbo to try to unsettle the rest of the population into questioning the vaccine programme.

In the UK, the perverted campaign against jabs includes sending quasi-legal threats to schools and “informing”, or rather confusing, parents and pupils with misleading literature at the school gates.

In some cases, as we have now seen outside a Scottish school, the idiots resort to intimidation when no one is willing to listen to their nonsense.

The truth is that if teenagers have the vaccine, it will reduce transmission and serious illness and mean fewer days will be lost in school attendance.

School pupils have lost out enough in the last 18 months because of this dreadful virus and the lockdown.

There is also clear evidence getting the vaccine out to teenagers will help stop the spread of the virus among those older age groups who are still very much at risk.

The anti-vax brigade has to be stopped in its tracks in Scotland so the roll-out of the vaccines can proceed unhindered.