Robin Swann is right to focus on driving up vaccine rates in young adults in Northern Ireland

The vaccine rollout across the UK has been one of the success stories of the pandemic response (a response which has had a fair share of bungling).

The impact of the very high levels of vaccination rates have been clear.

Even now, with Covid infection rates high, the impact of the virus is far less dramatic than it was 18 months ago.

But the vaccine programme has not been without its own problems.

Young people have, in a sense correctly, not felt at risk from Covid. In terms of fatalities, they are at extremely low risk, akin to the likelihood of being killed in a car crash — and few young people would hesitate getting into a car.

But in terms of the spread of the disease, young adults are helping to keep it alive (unlike young children, who are still thought to pose a low risk of spreading it to adults).

The Big Jab Weekend that has just finished, led to thousands of people – mostly young – getting their first does.

The health minister Robin Swann seems to think it has been a success, and it is encouraging to learn of that assessment. Now there will be further initiatives, including pop-up clinics, to encourage yet more people to get their doses.

There has been heated debate over anything that smacks of pressure on people to get vaccines, or even to prove that they have them to be able to do certain things.

But there is a powerful argument to be made in favour of first making it easy to get jabs, and then applying pressure on people to do so, while falling short of general compulsion.

Vaccine taking, like mask wearing, in non vulnerable groups of people is far from essential for the people themselves, who might have good reason to feel that they can take comfortably the risk, but is a communal act, to try to bring down the overall infection levels.

The battle against Covid has been a much longer haul than almost anyone expected and we need to focus on the responses that work, so we can continue to reopen society.

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