The large crowd protesting in Valletta last Saturday about the way COVID is being handled was not a homogenous bunch. Their grievances were varied, ranging from reasonable annoyance about the inconsistency of restrictions to genuine and contrived fears about vaccines, to irrational ravings about a plot to take over the world.

A common thread seems to run through many of their arguments though. This is the belief that their rights and freedoms are being denied. They depict themselves as the victims of manipulation and abuse of power exercised in the name of the pandemic. Someone is trying to control them. Depending on who you speak to, it’s the WHO, the government, the health authorities, scientists, vaccine makers, epidemiologists, doctors, Bill Gates or the ‘fake’ media.

Luckily for Malta, the protesters represent a small minority of the population. Fortunately, the vast majority recognise that with rights come duties – that individual freedom must be limited by the obligation not to harm others. That’s why we have laws. That’s why we have pandemic restrictions.

The majority recognised a long time ago that COVID is not some hoax but is a very real and devastating disease, that the restrictions are imposed out of a desire to safeguard our health and our national health system and that the vaccines save lives and protect society.   

The majority are not ‘sheeple’, as some among the protesters are wont to call them so insultingly. Rather, they acknowledge that wearing a mask is a simple and logical way to protect themselves and others from the virus and that they have no right to endanger the health of others by failing to wear one. Neither do they have a right to overburden the hospitals, put doctors and nurses at risk and endanger the lives of the vulnerable by ignoring other measures under the guise of individual rights.

Granted, the government has made mistakes, as has every other government in the world. It has enacted measures that at times seem contradictory. It sends confusing messages and performs U-turns. Put that down to the learning curve though, to lack of experience with a pandemic, even to sheer incompetence.

But do not, as COVID sceptics and anti-vaxxers tend to do, attribute malicious intent to the well-meaning scientists and policymakers who are struggling, just like the rest of us, to restore order from chaos. It is despicable of those who foment protest and vaccine hesitancy to do so. The right to express views does not include the right to spread false information and poison minds.

Doubts about the reality of COVID? Ask someone who has struggled to take a breath in hospital about how serious it really is. Ask one of the millions of family members whose relatives have died from the disease. Ask a doctor or nurse who has tried in vain to prevent a hospital bed from becoming yet another death bed.

And, for heaven’s sake, take the vaccine. The evidence that it works is clear, both in Malta and abroad.

“This is an outbreak among the unvaccinated,” US presidential advisor Anthony Fauci said earlier this week. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned that the one million Israelis refusing to get vaccinated are “endangering the entire population”. Vaccine holdouts, he warned, could prompt yet another national lockdown. Ironic, isn’t it, that COVID sceptics and anti-vaxxers also rail against lockdowns?

The restrictions and vaccines do not encroach on individual rights or ‘take power from the people’. They give power – the power to enjoy the right to live a COVID-free life.

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