Treatment of people who won’t get jab

North

IT is suggested that use of a ‘vaccine passport’ to regulate access to venues would be discriminatory – as if this is somehow something bad.

What do we mean by ‘discrimination? The ability to distinguish between two things having a difference in some characteristic is fundamental to the management of everyday life and survival – between safe and unsafe food, or stronger and weaker job applicants, for example.

The problem arises when discrimination is applied against people based (‘unfairly’) on a characteristic they cannot change, such as race or sex. The issue of discrimination based on religion is an interesting anomaly, since religious adherence has proved through history to be quite mutable.

Hence in the context of the Covid pandemic, we have the question as to whether an individual feeling discriminated against on the basis of nonvaccination is entirely unable to do anything about it and, if not, whether the neighbouring population is justified in seeking ways to keep its distance.

It is not a question of being unwilling to change the characteristic at point, but to be absolutely unable, which is the fundamental root of potential unfair discrimination.

From: Diane Grimoldby, Advanced nurse practitioner, Pontefract.

PERHAPS Tom Richmond (The Yorkshire Post, April 3) ought to be enlightened as to how low morale is in General Practice, and how hard we are working.

1. We have had to make the practice safe for our staff and our patients.

2. We are seeing patients faceto-face, yes we are seeing fewer patients as we have to clean down the rooms and ourselves between patients.

3. We are contacting patients by phone as some can be sorted out over the phone which saves time. We also have to make sure the patient is safe to come into the surgery.

4. We are still doing home visits to our housebound and terminally-ill patients

5. We have worked with severely depleted staffing levels as our staff have caught Covid – and some of our staff also have had to work from home as they are too vulnerable to work from surgery.

We are on our knees and exhausted.

From: Pauline Beasley, Retford.

TOM Richmond’s column ‘Urgent treatment needed for our ailing GP Practices” (The Yorkshire Post, April 3) mirrors my own experience. My written complaint was met with a vindictive response – so no learning curve there. Where are our GPs? Not putting needles in arms apparently.