Editorial To Vima: The campaign for salvation

Our experiences from the management of the COVID-19 pandemic are not the best.

The virus has proven extremely dangerous and capable of making headway in human communities, constantly testing our endurance and discipline.

Moreover, it is evolving dynamically, adapting and exploiting human frailty, complacency, and inhibitions. It always appears in the fissures of health systems and of epidemiological controls and thus it makes its way into the community and constantly demonstrates its capacity to spread.

Whatever measures may have been implemented at various points proved inadequate in checking its pervasiveness and the ability of the COVID-19 to attack even advanced countries with strong health systems.

Until now, the pandemic has unfolded in three waves and despite any successes of public health authorities globally, we are confronted by a fourth, exceptionally transmissible and dangerous wave of the pandemic, as it has demonstrated that it also attacks the younger generation, including children.

The Indian variant, or better yet the Delta variant as the medical community has referred to it, became predominant in the UK, is threatening Portugal, and is spreading rapidly throughout Europe.

The spread in our country – which is favoured by the expected tourist wave and trips – is most dense on the islands of Crete, Mykonos, and Santorini.

As time goes by, almost certainly super-spreading loci emerge, threatening to demolish everything on their path, including the basic wall of immunity that citizens have built with great effort through vaccination.

Obviously, there are no magic solutions. Restrictive measures cannot be reinstated more intensely, but masks and other public health measures should be retained as a minimum shield against COVID-19.

The only internationally-proven, effective way to stem this especially transmissible variant is vaccination.

There can no longer be any doubt that vaccines literally save citizens, societies, economies, and countries. Fully vaccinated citizens do not easily fall ill, but when it happens symptoms are manageable, hospitalisation is limited, and intubations are almost non-existent.

Along with lives, vaccines save our jobs, our goods and services, and our liberties.

The more massive the number of people vaccinated the safer we all will be. This principle is politically non-negotiable and scientifically indisputable. There is no room for games or discounts on this issue.

On the contrary, at this critical juncture an information campaign is necessary in order to explain public health conditions, to dispel lingering doubts, and to demolish any hotbeds of conspiracy theories which do not befit us and do not suit us but instead create damage.

This work should be assigned without reluctance or reservation to our most prominent and trustworthy scientists.

People like professors Sotiris Tsiodras, Anastasia Kotanidou, and Antonia Koutsoukou, as well as others have for nearly a year-and-a-half fought the virus day and night with toil and sacrifices. They should literally be recruited. The state, political parties, and the media should lead a campaign to inform people of the value of vaccination.

Citizens must be persuaded to transcend their inhibitions and to hasten en masse to be vaccinated so as to save themselves and the country from the threat of yet another disaster.

Now, all the approved vaccines are available in every corner of Greece.

There is no excuse or adequate explanation for being a vaccine denier.

It is now exclusively a matter of persuasion.