Mary Killen Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should we exclude our friend for not having had his Covid vaccine?

[iStock] 
issue 29 May 2021

Q. Once restrictions are lifted, our annual walking group has planned a week’s walk with after-walk gatherings in a different pub every evening. The group is composed of people all of an age to have been doubly vaccinated.

We always invite friends along the route to walk a day or two and join us for dinner. One couple invited this year — long-standing friends of some of us and otherwise sensible and interesting people — consists of a husband who, it emerges, is a fierce anti-vaxxer and his embarrassed, vaccinated wife. There are people in the party who do not know this, or him, and might be unamused to discover it when snuggled up with him on the pub bench. What should we do? Say nothing, trusting to our antibodies? Put him on a separate table? Ask him to test negative before coming?

— C.M., Coldwaltham, West Sussex

A.

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