A vaccine milestone has been achieved in our region

It doesn’t seem all that long ago when the vast bulk of our opinion columns in The News were either directly related to the Covid-19 pandemic, or at least dealing with topics which had been directly or indirectly affected by it.

We lived in a time of strange fear and uncertainty. A time of infection rates, furloughs, daily death counts, variants and serious-faced medical experts warning us to keep our masks on, obey social distancing rules, stay within in our homes, obey the lockdown and keep alert for future announcements.

Businesses suffered horribly, our personal lives suffered, our personal freedoms suffered.

The news of a working vaccine helped considerably, and entire armies of volunteers rallied to the vaccination centres to help spread hope that the nightmare would eventually end.

There were relatively large numbers of people who spurned the vaccinations.

Social media was rife with dark conspiracys and ‘antivaxx’ rhetoric with bizarre claims rangeing from tiny nanobots within the vaccine that would re-program our brains to deliberate biological weapons tests on an unwitting population.

We know that the Covid vaccines can lead to some adverse side affects in a small percentage of people – but the same can be said for all medicines and legal drugs.

Fortunately, the majority of the population are sensible enough to have avoided the wild conspiracy theories and right now Hampshire and the Isle of Wight is celebrating a new milestone with five million doses having been delivered.

Over 240,000 people across our region are now eligible for a spring vaccine, and getting it makes a lot of sense. Because although Covid is not quite the same dire threat as it was during the pandemic, it’s definitely still around.

And plenty of people are still catching it – there were 124 people in QA last week with it.

Better safe than sorry,