The clock is ticking... jabs are our route to normality

WHEN my fiancé moved in during lockdown, one of the many issues we could not have foreseen – lack of bookshelf space, battles over unloading the dishwasher, a four-month period where the only other person we saw was Cameron at the supermarket click and collect counter (who may yet make the wedding guest list) – was that it would impede his ability to be vaccinated.

Indeed, we thought we were being sensible when we made the decision that he should stay registered to his old GP in a different part of the city.

My own surgery was sending doomladen text messages informing me that they were experiencing ‘unprecedented levels in demand’ and asking me not to trouble them unless it was a genuine emergency. Trying to register a new patient would, I suspected, be pretty low down their priority list.

Staying with his previous surgery until ‘all this blew over’ (oh, how naïve we were) seemed wise, rather than risk being lost in the quagmire of NHS paperwork in a pandemic.

But when the coveted blue envelopes started dropping through the letterboxes of over-40s earlier this year, there was no sign of my fiancé’s. When mine landed, I urged him to ring the helpline and inquire.

‘Ah, yes,’ the woman on the other end told him. ‘Your appointment was today.’

I have no doubt that this will be one of many similar stories which, in part at least, make up the astonishing 1.3million missed or cancelled vaccine appointments revealed this week – more than 400,000 of them classed as ‘Did Not Attend’.

Other stories will be equally mundane. Childcare issues or unmissable work events, not to mention those who were having to self-isolate.

Some blue envelopes have simply gone awry, as post inevitably does. And in many cases, as in my fiancé’s, appointments will have been rebooked just a few days later.

Increasingly, as the first jabs have moved down the age groups, and particularly in areas where there has been a spike in cases, individuals are simply ignoring their letters and turning up at drop-in centres to be vaccinated on the spot. They, too, form part of these figures.

But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

In those first shaky months the system itself was unreliable, with letters not sent and confusing mixed messages from GP surgeries.

And then there are those who have simply decided not to get the jab. Without knowing individual reasons, it is difficult to criticise but, in my view, it seems a little like the debate over face masks which raged a year ago when the new legislation to make them mandatory in indoor public places was introduced.

Because just like masks, the jabs aren’t just about protecting you. They’re about protecting everyone around you – your loved ones, your community and, ultimately, the whole nation. To ignore that collective responsibility seems, to me, a supremely selfish decision.

We have been told time and time again that the only way out of this pandemic and back to the normality we all so desperately crave is by double vaccinating everyone. That we are in a race against the virus, and the clock is a-ticking.

If there really are hundreds of thousands of people roaming around Scotland unvaccinated, I worry about what it means for herd immunity. If they are vulnerable to the new variant, then all our freedoms face being delayed.

We are already seeing the Delta variant ripping through the younger, unvaccinated generations, so much so that the dreaded words ‘third wave’ are already becoming part of the summer lexicon.

Ultimately, then, the onus must be on the authorities. We must, must track down these people and encourage them to be vaccinated. Otherwise, I fear we will be stuck in this cycle forever, and normality will remain tantalisingly out of reach.