A Meath doctor is worried anti-vax graffiti that was scrawled outside his surgery yesterday could discourage people from getting the jab.

Gardaí are investigating after the words ‘vax kills’ and ‘Zionist corporation’ were spray-painted outside the Summerhill Primary Care Centre in red paint.

On The Hard Shoulder, Dr Joe Clarke said the incident was “most unusual” for the quiet Meath town.

He expressed concern that the graffiti could discourage people from coming in for their vaccine.

“We have been very active in terms of running vaccine clinics,” he said.

“In fact, this morning we were running a clinic and we were doing over 16-year-olds so obviously this sort of message, with teenagers coming in for the vaccine, it would make you worry a bit you know.”

Anti-vax ‘Zionist corporation’ graffiti scrawled across a wall outside the Summerhill Primary Care Centre in County Meath, 28-07-2021. Image: Summerhill Primary Care Centre

He said anything that plants a “seed of doubt” could be damaging considering the current climate of online misinformation.

“I am well past the social media but my children tell me there are a lot of these conspiracy theories going about social media at the moment,” he said.

“Sometimes a little seed of doubt can enter a person’s mind and they start looking online and, as we know, there is a rabbit hole there with a lot of misinformation.”

He said the vaccine rollout has been going very well in the area – and expressed hope that parents will not be put off vaccinating their children in the coming weeks.

“The HSE and the government are targeting younger people now, over 12s in the next week or two, to try and get ahead of the Delta variant and it is going very well,” He said. “A very enthusiastic response.”

“Certainly, locally here we have done over 2,500 vaccines and it is really going well so it is just a shame that something like that would maybe put a doubt in people’s minds.”

He said Gardaí have advised him to leave the graffiti in place for 24 hours while they investigate; however, he will be out with the brush in the morning to clean it off.

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