It is disturbing to read that doctors and nurses are blaming the unvaccinated for filling up intensive care units and preventing them from treating “seriously ill patients”?  If large sections of the NHS had not shut up shop during the pandemic, then we wouldn’t have a waiting list of more than 5.8 million people. It is hardly patients’ fault that some criminally inadequate NHS managers chose to become a Covid-only service, a panic-stricken mistake that was not made by other countries.  

For doctors to warn that, due to selfish anti-vaxxers, “complex cancer surgeries are being delayed, risking some tumours becoming inoperable” is a travesty. Radiographers tell me that, tragically, they are now seeing many younger people with Stage 4 cancer, who are put straight into palliative care when, pre-pandemic, they would have been picked up earlier with Stage 1 or Stage 2. That catastrophe was unfolding well before the vaccine rollout began. If some tumours are “now inoperable”, that’s not because of vaccine hesitancy; it’s because there was a record drop in urgent cancer referrals from GPs.

Besides, the vaccination status statistics on which the story was based only date from May to July 2021. That was when the age groups with the highest reported percentages in ICU had barely even begun to be offered their jabs. A lot of patients in that maligned “unvaccinated cohort” were almost certainly not people who had chosen not to have the jab.

Nicki Credland, chairwoman of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, says: “All nurses understand they have to provide non-judgmental care. But what we find difficult is that giving care to patients who have chosen not to be vaccinated has a knock-on effect on other patients.”

I wonder, do Ms Credland and her members take the same dim view of Covid patients who are overweight? Far more Covid patients are in ICUs because they are obese than on account of being unvaccinated. In fact, you have a 40 per cent greater chance of being admitted to ICU with Covid if you are obese, but that goes up to a fourfold chance if you are severely obese.

You won’t see any nurse or doctor rushing to call out that particular elephant in the room. Nor, quite rightly, would they suggest that obese people were preventing more deserving patients from getting an emergency bed. Nor, I hope, would they stigmatise alcoholics, smokers or anyone else who had made poor health choices which resulted in them being hospitalised. Yet, somehow, it seems acceptable to forget all medical ethics and pick on the unvaccinated.

I would urge anyone who is in a vulnerable group to protect themselves against severe disease by getting jabbed. Although, personally, I remain unconvinced that redeploying GPs to the booster programme, giving vaccines to healthy young adults while cancelling health checks for the over-75s, is a sensible use of scarce resources. But to claim that people who, for whatever reason, decided that vaccination was not for them are to blame for a crisis in ICUs is both wrong and immoral. Stop blaming patients for a sick health service.