Vaccination as the price for taking part in society | Letters

Guardian readers respond to John Harris's piece on understanding the reasons behind vaccine hesitancy

John Harris may be correct to frame the avoidance of vaccination by a significant portion of the UK population as the consequence of mistrust in authority or government (Understanding, not judgment, should shape our response to those who remain unjabbed, 2 January). However, I and many millions of others do not trust this government at all, but we still accepted vaccination. Social factors may explain the existence of vaccine avoidance, but they do not justify it. Under UK laws, no degree of inequality allows a car driver to transfer to the right side of the road in protest against a mistrusted government.

True freedom is the liberty from being harmed by others, regardless of whether those actions are deliberately harmful. The freedom to innocently" spread disease is not a fundamental right. The enormous human cost of supporting unvaccinated and seriously ill patients in hospital is having a direct impact on all our lives. It is time to take the moral high ground: celebrate the vaccinators and publicly avow that vaccination is good, that being vaccinated is a public duty and that failure to comply by any citizen without adequate medical reasons is a dereliction of that public duty.
Dr Patrick Byrne
Bermondsey, London