I hate to be cruel. I’m not generally an unkind person. Especially in my post-Yom-Kippur, ‘be a better person, less of a total muthafucka than last year’ glow. But I was gladdened to read of the death of Alan Steel. He was a personal finance guru and, from the sounds, an almost-all-round good guy. So why would I pleased to read his obituary??, you’d do well to ask. And so I shall tell you.

Because Alan Steel was that rarest of rare things, the one sacrificed to define an entire class of people. He was a total anti-vaxxer who died of Covid. It should have been Trump. Not so much an anti-vaxxer as just an all-round moron who chose to downplay the virus as it killed Americans in the hundreds of thousands. It should have been Bolsonaro, the imbecilic president of Brasil who was, if anything worse than Trump. Both of those men caught Covid but with minimal personal effect. Alan Steel ‘took one for the team’. Unfortunately for him, for the opposing team.

I don’t care what reasons people have against Covid vaccinations, whether its the ‘unknown’ (yeah, only about 400 million doses given this year), whether ‘it’s unnatural’, (dying is certainly natural) or whether the vaccines are made by conspiracy theorists from Jupiter, their reasons are invalid. They are stupid, reactionary obstinacy in the face of all and any logic and commons sense. And medical sense.

And much as I hate to generalise about classes of my fellow man (whatever their pronouns), anti-vaxxers are the worst kind of tossers. All of them. Because as well as the personal massive benefits and freedoms that the vaccine imparts, it is an act of altruism too. Society benefits by as many as possibly being vaccinated.

So the inevitable is happening. No-one has to have a vaccine. Its a free country. We’ll never have ‘vaccine passports’!!! They’re discriminatory. But without the jabs, football matches, concerts, travel, even possibly work, tube trains and almost every facet of life will only be easily available to those known to have antibodies.

Therefore if you know anyone who is eligible but not yet vaccinated, help them, coax them, influence them, beat them with fucking great wooden planks with nails sticking out, to get the jab. It’s you duty!!

RIP Alan Steel, you did a good thing for all the wrong reasons.

A xxxx