Comment: When is an anti-vaxxer not an anti-vaxxer?

So, it turns out that Novak Djokovic is a bit of a twat.

In the highly unlikely event you’ve somehow missed it, the story of the year so far – apart from the one about the parties – is that the world’s top male tennis player thought he could get into Australia without being vaccinated against Covid first. 

So far, so what – Australia does, after all, allow exemptions to its strict ‘no vaccine, no entry’ policy and at first it seemed that Djokovic qualified.

But after the Australian authorities found his ‘I’ve had Covid so you’ve got to let me in’ argument starting to wear a bit thin, it emerged that the Serbian national had not only failed to isolate after receiving his diagnosis but had posed maskless for photos with a group of kids and taken part in a face-to-face interview with a French journalist too.

Sure, Novak, we get that you wanted to defend your Australian Open title so you could become the Most Successful Male Tennis Player in the World Ever, but with all this bending of the coronavirus rules you’re really starting to look like one of those anti-vaxxer types.

An anti-vaxxer type – how’s that for a loaded term? Anti-vaxxing has become a hugely emotive subject in the age of the Covid pandemic, with a person’s vaccination status enough to ruin friendships, rip families apart and set neighbour against neighbour.

Yet, as with so many things, it seems clear that there are anti-vaxxers and then there are anti-vaxxers. 

On the one hand there are the Piers Corbyn-esque vaccine refuseniks, who peddle conspiracy theories, make unsubstantiated and misleading claims about the safety of vaccinations, say they are proponents of freedom of choice while trying to railroad others into following their example, and liken the efficacy of mask wearing to “trying to catch a fart in your trousers” (seriously, Google it).

Those anti-vaxxers, who appear to want to wilfully facilitate the spread of Covid, are difficult to make sense of, let alone sympathise with.

On the other hand, there is a great swathe of people who, for a range of perfectly valid reasons, have chosen to either not be vaccinated at all or to refrain from having a follow-up shot. Their hesitancy may be frustrating for those of us who joined the vaccine queue without a second thought, but genuinely held fears that could well emanate from a mental health condition, the inability to talk things through due to social isolation or a bad experience with a previous jab cannot be so easily dismissed. 

Plenty of us seem to have lost sight of that, though - politicians included.

Quite what the Austrian government thinks it will achieve by forcibly excluding only the unvaccinated from society is anyone’s guess, but it seems unlikely its use of selective lockdowns for the unjabbed will send many rushing to the Covid clinic any time soon. 

And First Minister Nicola Sturgeon can’t have assuaged many people’s fears when, in the pre-Christmas Omicron melee, she rattily said in an address that those choosing not to be vaccinated were not just “deeply irresponsible” and “selfish” but were “putting the life of everybody you come into contact with at risk” too.

Where Djokovic sits on the anti-vaxxer spectrum is not entirely clear. His well-publicised arguments about not wanting to be “forced by someone to take a vaccine” and finding it “unacceptable” that anyone should have the right to “put something in [his] body” could, depending on interpretation, put him in either camp.

What does seem clear, though, is that the genuinely vaccine-hesitant are all too aware of the socially unacceptable risks they are taking and modify their own behaviour as a result. Flying into a country whose citizens have endured an extended period of highly restrictive Covid restrictions in order to become a Grand Slam god likely wouldn’t feature on many of their to-do lists.

Just because Djokovic has behaved like a bit of twat doesn’t mean every unvaccinated person has. We should all try to remember that.