Sir, – What Diane Forsyth characterises as "an individual health choice" and Patrick Ussher as "individual freedom" – that is not getting vaccinated against Covid – ultimately illustrates a refusal or inability to grasp the entire problem (Letters, December 14th).
Clearly, when people become sick with infectious diseases they either go on with life, spreading the illness to others, or, if more unwell, go to hospital. This occupancy of a hospital bed costs us all about €1,000 per day, and well over €2,500 if intensive care is required.
The nursing and medical staff are in turn put at risk. They may, depending on their family units, be unable to safely return home.
I know many who have caught Covid infection at work in this way.
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Some hospital staff spent last winter living out of hotel rooms, and unable to see their families, due to concerns about spreading infection to immune-suppressed relatives.
There are consequences for other, sensible patients whose care and treatment are deferred, and whose diseases progress as a result.
A large environmental cost is generated in terms of the protective equipment and clothing their care will consume.
Last winter this seemed acceptable as the vaccine was only becoming available. It no longer seems acceptable. It is, at least, bizarre for anyone to characterise as an “individual choice” a refusal to care for their own health underwritten by an assumption that a crew of strangers will risk their lives to bail them out when the entirely foreseeable consequences arise.
It is inappropriate to compare this attitude to “alcohol intake”, as Ms Forsyth does. It is more like drink driving or speeding. Many of us would fervently defend the right to make stupid or poor health choices – to be lazy, to smoke, to take chances. But it shows astonishing self-regard, and an absence of empathy and social cohesion, to not even consider the casual endangerment of others that vaccine refusal entails. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.