I’ve booked my Covid and flu jabs this morning. The invitation arrived by text and I booked within seconds. I don’t understand the science behind vaccines, nor how they work, but I trust the experts who do understand and explain to me that they do work. This is despite a warning in a new anti-vax movie called First! Do No Pharm by the discredited fruitcake – sorry, Doctor – Aseem Malhotra, which premiered last night, presumably in some fleapit or other in London. Anyway, the bad doc had some serious intellectual heft with him in terms of celebrity endorsements. Just look at this stellar list:
- Leilani Dowding, former Page 3 model
- Laurence Fox, former actor, now far right activist
- Tonia Buxton, TV cook
- Annabel Croft, former tennis player
- Pat Cash, former tennis player
- Anthea Turner, former TV presenter
- Jenny Powell, former TV presenter
- Some other people I’ve never heard of
That’s as impressive a list of vaccine experts as I have ever seen. I mean, who wouldn’t take the word of, say, (former) TV presenter Anthea Turner, over an actual virologist, or the Chief Medical and Chief Scientific Officers. Or in fact nearly every other medical expert and scientist on the planet. No. Anthea knows best. So do (Far) Right Said Fred, born again Christian Russell Brand and just about every presenter on the crank TV channel GB News.
These are the anti-vaxxers who, free of all evidence, have declared that far from saving millions of lives, actual vaccines kill people.
Well, it is true that vaccines do kill people. All kinds of medical practices can have fatal consequences. 261 people died in England and Wales after taking Paracetamol . But they also save lives, millions of them, all year round. This is dangerous nonsense peddled by discredited medics and, frankly, thick minor celebrities.
The anti-vaxxers are the same people who think the decline of cash is some kind of worldwide conspiracy, that like David Icke they believe that the world is secretly controlled by lizards, the same people who genuinely believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, that 9/11 was an inside job and so on and so on. If you believe in one of these things, you will likely believe all of them, even if they are patently untrue, lacking even a shred of evidence.
They walk among us, too. I personally know two people who have cancer who have been told that it was caused by the Covid vaccine. One anti-vaxxer told me that the vaccines I had taken would likely kill me within 12 months. That was about three years ago. Very helpful and encouraging advice from someone I wouldn’t trust to run a bath successfully.
We have been here before, when another discredited medic, one Andrew Wakefield, announced that the MMR vaccine caused autism. For us, it was at a time when we were about to book MMR vaccines for our children. Even we, strong believers in medicine and science, were made to doubt for a short while until people who actually knew what they were talking about assured us that the vaccines were safe. If you are thick, prone to believe crackpot conspiracies or even both, Wakefield’s lies could have had serious, sometimes fatal, consequences. I am not saying I am not thick – it has, after all, been said that I am – but I do accept the science, I do believe that Man has landed on the moon, that 9/11 happened as a result of the actions of Islamic fascists and that cash is dying out because most of us prefer not to carry it around anymore.
I know that for many, a simple explanation can never be enough. “There must be more to it than that,” I have heard people say. But more often than not, a simple explanation is the right one. And to argue that conspiracy stories are true suggests that every single doctor, politician, journalist – in fact, anyone who holds any kind of power at any level is all part of it. This, despite the fact that Bill Clinton could not even keep it a secret that he’d been given a blow job in the Oval Office by someone who wasn’t his wife.
If I drop dead straight after my Covid jab a week Saturday, I will of course apologise, perhaps by way of pre-recorded video. In the meantime, I’m quite looking forward to my jabs helping me get through another long winter. I had long Covid last year, after a bout of Covid that actually wasn’t too bad. It’s still a horrible disease. Last week alone,12.2% of registered deaths in England and Wales involved influenza or pneumonia (1,203 deaths), while 1.0% involved coronavirus (COVID-19) (96 deaths). I would rather not be in those numbers, thank you very much, because there’s enough other things out there that could and eventually will do me in. If it means making the odds of me being around in 2025 a bit better, I’ll take a chance with the vaccines. Good luck if you don’t and won’t. You might just need it.
