https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/irrationality-and-the-covid-vaccine?token=e
In my Times (£) column this week, I wrote about the dangerous irrationality of those implacably opposed to the Covid-19 vaccine.
I wrote that while some concerns about the Covid vaccine were understandable — due to the acceleration of the normal testing regimen, or concerns about civil liberties if vaccination is made a condition of someone’s job or entry into a venue — there had been a significant loss of rationality and any sense of proportion.
You can go online and find people with scientific qualifications saying in terms that the state is actually trying to poison people with the Covid vaccine. But there’s no evidence whatever for this fantastic and paranoid claim. Many who assume that a doctoral or professorial handle confers intellectual authority tend automatically to believe such claims. Under serious and informed scrutiny, however, they fall apart.
Vaccination always involves a balance of harms. But all the available and reputable evidence indicates that the harms resulting from this vaccine are rare and vastly outweighed by its benefits.
It’s claimed, for example, that tens of thousands are suffering serious vaccine side effects. But this is based on statistics showing merely the number of those who subsequently died of other ailments; it doesn’t prove cause and effect. It’s claimed the vaccine may affect women’s fertility; there’s no evidence for that. And so on and on.
Yet anti-vaxers in Britain have even been abusing and intimidating children at their school gates over taking the vaccine. Such an unhinged set of fears is coming from both ends of the political spectrum.
Elements on the right have latched onto every single government response to the pandemic to claim a world-wide conspiracy to enslave and poison people, involving globalists, paedophiles, the “deep state,” Jewish financiers — and Bill Gates working with all of the above to control the world through microchips.
However, vaccine hostility has long roots in liberal “back to nature” movements too which for decades have used homeopathy, eaten only organic food and shunned all vaccinations for their children. The belief that “Big Pharma” drug companies were evil was previously a left-wing mantra. And now, as reported in the Observer, vaccine hostility is associated with the “wellness” industry and alternative lifestyles including ayurvedic healing, meditation and something called “conspirituality”. This turns out to be the intersection of yoga, juice cleanses, New Age thinking and online theories about secret groups controlling the universe.
