?If I?d known, I would have got it?: on the frontline of Australia?s ?pandemic of the unvaccinated?

An unvaccinated patient lies on a hospital bed. Sick, dying of Covid, realising too late they should have got the jab.

Another, ill and panicking, asks if they can get the vaccination now. It's too late, the doctor has to tell them.

Yet another, gasping for air, can't even find the breath to ask.

This is what Australia's doctors and nurses are dealing with, on the frontline of the "pandemic of the unvaccinated". People realising the severity of their error, the outcomes of believing the misinformation that has been spread about vaccines, and the existence of Covid itself.

Others are too far down the rabbit hole to even have that Damascene conversion. A Sydney nurse tells Guardian Australia of a man who didn't believe Covid was real even as he lay in a hospital bed.

"This guy just kept trying to escape, he wasn't on the breathing machine yet, he was like, ‘Covid is not real. I don't know why I'm here'," the nurse says.

"He would go to walk out, he would make it five metres and he would have to sit on the floor. And we'd offer him oxygen and say, ‘maybe you don't believe in it, man, but you're not well,' and while he was feeling defeated we'd get him back to bed.