This week I’m celebrating all that’s wonderful with our vaccination programme.

For the best part of a year every scientist the world over has been trying to find a safe vaccine and despite all the odds we now have several in production.

Tested and ready to use, non live vaccines are being rolled out and it’s a miracle for once that this country has had a promise delivered on time.

In some parts of Norfolk we are even ahead of schedule!

It wasn’t another Track and Trace fiasco or a dithering decision that has left us in a worse position than we began.

It wasn’t even an ill thought out plan to boost the economy, encouraging us to do the very things that put us back to square one.

This time when the government said we’d have vaccines given to our most vulnerable by February we have largely been gifted just that!

Of course it’s down to the care and programmes being administered by the NHS despite it being on its last legs, clinging on like the tooth of a seven-year-old attached to one last dangly bit of gum while the child continues to wiggle and niggle it a bit more each day.

Despite it all the staffing and infrastructure of our NHS have pulled together to make it happen with swift execution.

Everything else we have been promised to fight this pandemic has been badly trusted to private companies often with more than a vested interest in money making for the Conservatives.

The party who wish to chop up and sell off the NHS in a similar way to Margaret Thatcher dismantling the mining industry.

But they haven’t (yet) and we still have our public-funded health services devised to help the masses, not just the few, which was implemented in 1948 by a Labour governing body. Thank God!

Now, we just have to convince those who are anti-vax, or rather stop the anti-vaxxers with their deeply dangerous views from influencing the hestitators.

We don’t have time to be arguing their ridiculous points of simply not “believing in it” and need to share far and wide with our friends, on social media and anywhere we can, taking the vaccine is the right choice.

With people like Lauren Goodger, an ex-The Only Way Is Essex star who has publicly reported to be frightened of taking medicines sharing her views with her thousands of impressionable followers, some sense needs to readdress that balance elsewhere.

We also have to convince those who believe vaccines to be harmful.

One hundred years ago children regularly died from entirely preventable illnesses such as measles. They don’t now. That’s down to vaccinations.

Yet there are a lot of parents who still fight against the programmes believing them to potentially cause other issues like autism, a fact which has been 100% disproven with the Dr who initially mooted this side effect having been struck off.

These people have been lucky enough to have benefitted from a herd immunity instead. Unfortunately that relied upon (whether they realise it or not) herd immunity is now on the wane with young adults who were not given the MMR in childhood, catching and spreading disease again.

Through this selfishly made choice by parents who still regularly take their unvaccinated and potentially infectious children to play groups to mix with other children (who may not yet have reached the age to be given the vaccine themselves), the UK lost its measles free status in 2018. This was after a declaration the year before that we had eliminated the disease.

BY VACCINATION!

I once fell out with a natural parenting group where I lived because I argued the point with one mother who believed her children were gaining natural immunities by not being vaccinated.

I told her in order to gain a natural immunity to measles one needs to get measles and getting measles can cause all sorts of on-going conditions. Some of these conditions, though rare, could be blindness, nervous disorders or even death.

Now, even if autism was a vaccination side effect I’d choose an autistic child over a dead one – wouldn’t you?

So, we are already mucking up vaccination programmes that have long been held in high regard and provided us with a population who survive childhood as the regular and norm.

The thought of people choosing not to take the Covid vaccine through fear needs to be eradicated before it can really begin.

So far none of the vaccines, developed in record speed but with as much due diligence and care as they would have been if years in the making, have shown any serious safety concerns and they have had fully independent safety monitoring boards looking over them with an on going eye.

The risk of not taking theses vaccine is of by far greater detriment - we simply cannot afford to ignore the science.

So please, take the vaccine when it’s offered to you like my 71- year-old Mum did last week and give all our children a brighter, Covid-19 free future.

Ruth Davies has a parenting blog at www.rocknrollerbaby.co.uk