 A fit and healthy 42-year-old man has died of COVID after refusing to be vaccinated. John Ayers was a father of one from Southport, Merseyside, who worked in construction. Ayers enjoyed weightlifting and mountain climbing. In fact, he had been climbing in the Welsh mountains just four weeks before his death. Ayers passing leaves behind his mother and twin sister who have been warning others not to think that they are invulnerable to the virus. Since Ayers death, his sister has tweeted, the only pre-existing health condition he had was the belief in his own immortality. He thought if he contracted COVID-19, he would be okay. He thought he would have a mild illness. He didn't want to put a vaccine in his body. She also said that before he was ventilated, he told his consultant that he wished he had been vaccinated, that he wished he had listened. His death is a tragedy. It shouldn't have happened. He leaves a mum, a dad, and sister and a 19-year-old daughter. My two children have lost their fun uncle, the uncle who would always play with them, the uncle that dressed up as father Christmas on Christmas Day. My mum has lost her baby boy, my niece, her much-loved and needed dad. I think the reason why people do raise cases such as this and clearly why his family are happy to raise cases such as this is to encourage other people to get vaccinated. You don't have to be an anti-vaxxer to have not had the vaccine. It does seem like this guy was, though. At the time of his hospitalization, Jenny McCann revealed that her brother had been a staunch anti-vaxxer. She tweeted, to all anti-vaxxers, my staunch anti-vaxxer, non-mask wearing 40-year-old twin is now in hospital with COVID and pneumonia, rushed in an ambulance as he struggled to breathe. Quite simply, if he'd had the vaccine, he wouldn't be get the vaccine. He clearly was someone who had bought these false arguments, telling people not to take the vaccine. And also, to give us an idea of what these anti-vaxxers are about, the Daily Mail also reported that in a further tragic twist, the devastated Mrs McCann has now been targeted by anti-vaxxers on social media with some accusing her of being paid by the government while others said they were not buying the story. All quite despicable stuff. This is really, really devastating, of course. I think that it is really crucial that families who have experienced this come out with these messages, not because I think that it's going to sway the most, most ardent anti-vaxxers who exist in a world pool of conspiracy theories, but I think more that middle ground, the unsure people, particularly younger people who might think this isn't going to affect me, I'm going to be fine, I'd rather not. I think those are the constituency, which I think probably makes up the more people who aren't being vaccinated than the people who are sort of ideologically immovable, hardline. Hopefully, putting a human face to these stories will help to shift that kind of more uncertain group. We do know from the data, anecdotal evidence from the NHS suggests that, of course, as we would expect, the proportion of vaccinated people who are now dying of COVID is very small compared to unvaccinated people. We don't have the exact data from the UK, but we do know in the US that of the more than 18,000 COVID-related deaths that happened in May, just 150 of those were fully vaccinated. This means that there are so many deaths that are avoidable through vaccination. It's also why you have to bring it up. It's also why the fact that for many big pharmaceutical companies, the fact that it's devastating that the vaccination program is being seen as a money-making exercise using intellectual property laws in order to prevent the vaccine from being reproduced cheaply and en masse, rather than seeing it as a program that needs to get as many people in the world vaccinated as possible, it's being seen as a money-making exercise. We have vast parts of the world where because of corporate profiteering, people who desperately want the vaccine can't get it and so are at similar risks to the story that we've just heard. I also think, of course, anti-vaccine propaganda is a huge part of this. Actually, it made me think of how when I was going to get my second vaccine, there were people outside picketing trying to give me a leaflet telling me that the vaccine was more likely to kill me than COVID. I was like, sorry, guys, it's already way up in my bloodstream, so too late. But it's also, I think, a consequence of consistent messaging both in the media, across mainstream media, and at times, even from our own government, that this is somehow an illness that you only need to worry about if you're older or if you have underlying conditions. Now, of course, even if that were true, even if this were an illness that exclusively impacted older people, people with underlying conditions, we still would all have an urgent collective duty to wear masks, to get vaccinated, to protect those people. But it's actually not even true. We know that, of course, COVID does cause deaths amongst younger, healthy people, but also that more commonly, we know that it has unpredictable and as of yet incurable long-term impacts on the health of young people. I know three separate people, one of whom has had diabetes triggered by getting COVID, one of whom has permanent lung scarring as a result of COVID, and people who are still months and months later experiencing debilitating fatigue and breathlessness that stops them from going about their everyday life, all of whom are under 30, lead an active lifestyle, lead a healthy lifestyle. We still don't know why those impacts manifested in the way that they did, and yet how many times have you and I sat on this show and pulled our hair out at people who talk so nonchalantly about the idea that there's no reason why young people should get vaccinated because it's an old person illness, or saying that, oh, so few people who are under 60 die from this, so why are we all having to restrict? It only affects people who are over 60, so that is a message. And we know from the leaked texts that Dominic Cummings leaked, where Boris Johnson was talking about again, oh, this doesn't matter because it only affects older people. That message is not only unethical because it sends this message that older people aren't worth protecting, but it also sends this really wrong message that young people have nothing to worry about. And that's also legible in policies that have sent the largely younger workforce back to these high-risk jobs in hospitality, in bar jobs without them necessarily being vaccinated, and also dropping things like the mask mandate in sectors where a lot of young people are working, and not to mention the fact that many young people who work in these kinds of high-risk jobs don't have access to sick pay. So at these multiple levels, this myth that young people don't have anything to worry about, that if you're young and healthy, you have nothing to worry about, which we also heard from Joe Rogan, it's actually not just in the confines of conspiratorial internet corners. It actually is also a myth that is commonly perpetrated across mainstream outlets as well, despite scientists and doctors trying to communicate the exact opposite message that we all have to be concerned and we all have to take measures to protect ourselves and other people.