Are you going to have the vaccine? There are several, some of which have already been approved and are being “rolled out” (no doubt we will soon be told that the vaccination programme is being “ramped up”, another tiresome coinage of the covid era).
According to experts in boffiny things like epidemiology and virology, these vaccines will confer not total protection, but at the very least a much-reduced chance of catching the virus, and if caught, the effects of it will be considerably less nasty. What’s not to like?
Ah, but who exactly ARE these so-called ‘experts’, and what gives them the right to make such lofty pronouncements about these so-called ‘vaccines’? Medical degrees, doctorates, diplomas, membership of distinguished scientific bodies – but how do we know that all these ‘credentials’ are real and not just a lot of elaborate flim-flam, designed to bamboozle us, the ordinary people, ‘blinding us with science’ [sic] in order to ‘big themselves up’? They probably have shares in AstraZeneca anyway; everyone knows that ‘Big Pharma’ has taken over the world and is probably slipping deadly chemicals into the very air we breathe.
Where do these notions come from? The Internet, of course. But the Internet is just a way of propagating them – why do the people who promulgate these paranoid suspicions conceive them in the first place?
There is a virus stalking the land. It is unseen. It is highly transmissible. Its effects can be highly debilitating, causing crucial parts of the brain to shut down. And its name is Stupidity.
“We are the two stupidest stupids in the whole History of Stupidityness,” proudly boasts Lieutenant George in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, the one set in the trenches. “Stupidy, stupidy, stupidy,” chants Private Baldrick, skipping up and down as they court death from a barrage of German machine gun fire. But Baldrick and George have got competition. The History of Stupidityness just got a whole lot Stupiditier.
We are often told how much better life has become, that there was never a better time to be alive. And that may well be true: we are all materially far more comfortable, warmer, safer, more educated, than humanity was a hundred or even fifty years ago. But in recent years there seems to have been a countervailing movement, a deep and growing mistrust of anything difficult or ‘intellectual’. After all, why would you trust an ‘expert’ like Sir Chris Whitty when you can make your own mind up?
Watching this depressing phenomenon, I have seen this tendency among quite large sections of the population to distrust anything vaguely sensible or reasonable told to them as being akin to a kind of minor brain injury. To the casual observer, people suffering from it seem to be outwardly OK. They can feed and dress themselves. They can perform ordinary activities such as driving or web-browsing. They can learn and pronounce simple phrases and sentences such as “Take back control”, “Get Brexit done” and “Project Fear”.
But when faced with something that to most rational beings seems – well, rational – their minds close up and they refuse to accept it. They scrawl ‘COVID IS A LIE’ on the sides of buildings. And they flatly refuse to take a vaccine which could save their lives and those of other members of their family – and the lives of the rest of us, who still inevitably must come into contact with these ‘anti-vaxxers’ in the course of daily life. Because for those who DO take the vaccine and who do ‘trust the science’, it does not confer total immunity, so those who refuse to take it continue to pose a risk to their fellow citizens almost as severe as the blasé antics of the likes of Rita Ora and Kay Burley (but perhaps I will write about their ilk another time…Or perhaps not).
Because it is mainly (though by no means exclusively) people who tend to be (ahem) less educated who assume that their own native acuity trumps the experts’ boring old qualifications and experience, my theory is that rejecting the advice of experts, even when it would seem to be in one’s own interest to accept it, gives these people a spurious sense of their own superiority.
In an uncertain and frightening world, somehow an assertion of one’s own moral rightness in the face of baffling evidence to the contrary (those graphs Sir Chris and Sir Patrick used to explain things were a bit tricky) lends one a specious feeling of having cleverly seen through the boffins’ fiendish web of deception, using one’s own innate refusal to be hoodwinked by the enormous con-trick known as ‘Science’.
My question to Sir Chris Whitty (or Jonathan Van Tam, as Sir Chris seems not to be getting wheeled out as much these days) is: Great news about the covid-19 vaccine! Can we expect a vaccine against Stupidityness anytime soon?
Photo credit: Nick Fewings