THESSALONIKI — Even as rabid anti-vaxxers are refusing to be protected, a 20-year-old unvaccinated man died from COVID-19 in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city and a major center of resistance against the shots.

He was not identified but Deputy Health Minister Mina Gaga, a physician, said the case should alarm people about the dangers of not being vaccinated, with only about 61 percent of the population fully inoculated.

“We do not want to have such deaths, it is very easy to prevent them with vaccination,” she said at a press event, reported Kathimerini.

Anti-vaxxers don't believe it, thinking that the vaccines aren't safe or effective or are part of an international conspiracy to control their minds or alter their DNA without saying for what reason or to what end.

Presenting the latest data from the country’s 4th Health District (Macedonia and Thrace), which has the highest alert level in the country, Gaga said that of 225 patients being treated for COVID-19 and 55 in public hospital Intensive Care Units – some 270 – that only two had been vaccinated.

Gaga said the vaccine does not mean people will not be infected, but that probability of getting seriously ill is some 0 times lower. “There are fewer deaths, less suffering,” she said.