Friends and family with MAs and MSCs and MDs (I’ve not heard from any PhDs) have urged me to take the vaccine. It’s quite wearing. Younger ones, batchelors perhaps, have said they want me to be around to see their unborn children – as though the vaccine would make me immortal, invulnerable to every other ailment as well as Covid. These people are highly intelligent, capable, loving and hard working. I try to engage them in discussion. Most don’t really want to know but some have promised to come back to me when they have considered my objections.

Part of the problem may be that I can be unduly long-winded so here, as succintly as I can manage are the principal reasons for my reservations (I don’t say ‘hesitancy’):

1. The new vaccines have not been adequately trialled and assessments of safety and efficacy based on such trials that have taken place are of dubious validity. We should be appalled that essentially experimental vaccines are being rolled out on a global scale.

2. The record of some of the pharmaceutical companies making these vaccines, notably Pfizer, is one of proven corruption and does not inspire trust. Nor does the past and current performance of the British government in this crisis inspire trust.

3. There has been no public discussion of the relative merits of the vaccines and no discussion that takes objections to any or all of them into account.

4. Questions have been raised about suspected adverse reactions to vaccinations, in particular questions concerning blood clotting, found in a small number of recipients. Concern about this clotting has led some countries to temporarily suspend their rollout of the Oxford Astrazenica vaccine. Further, in an open letter to the European Medicines Agency a number of doctors and scientists “question whether cardinal issues regarding the safety of the vaccines were adequately addressed prior to their approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA)” and suggests a mechanism whereby the vaccines might cause the blood clots reported.

5. Besides concerns about adverse reactions in the short term we might be concerned about the long term implications and possibly effects of a possibly long term vaccination programme on the natural immune systems of populations as well as individuals.

6. I have seen no evidence that vaccinations administered during the past three months have resulted in a fall in mortality, morbidity or the rate of infections.