Anti-vaxxers will take us all down with them
AFRIEND of mine is obsessed with ‘ flat earthers’, is always on at me to watch some of their videos on YouTube. In case you didn’t know, a ‘ flat earther’ is someone who believes the earth is flat.
And there are millions of them. Furthermore, not all of them are wild-eyed, middle-aged men with long grey hair and a wardrobe full of tie-dye t-shirts.
In fact, a lot of them are just like you and I. They are normal people with normal jobs who just happen to believe you’d fall to your death if you walked too far into the Antarctic.
As I watched their videos, watched these people attend conferences, give speeches and denounce the moon landings, I wondered what was at the root of it all. I wondered why one chap had travelled from New Zealand all the way to Denver for the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference, why another had dedicated his entire life to proving the earth is flat, and why all these normal people were behaving so abnormally.
It led me to form a theory of my own, one not quite so radical as believing the earth is flat, but one which everyone at that conference would hotly dispute.
There’s something missing in these people’s lives, there’s a void which must be filled. Maybe their job’s a joke, maybe they’re broke, maybe their love life’s DOA.
Whatever it is, being part of this group, this much-maligned band of outsiders gives them a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. Chances are, most of them know the earth is a big, lovely sphere, and they’re just tagging along for the craic.
And who among us doesn’t feel a bit empty at times, feel like our lives lack meaning and we’re slowly marching towards the inevitable conclusion of an unremarkable existence? Just me? Oh well.
We fill that chasm with sport, with alcohol, with anything which might temporarily make us feel alive. Look at religion, Catholicism, The Bible, is that any less far-fetched than believing the earth is flat? Magic men in the sky, eternal life and immaculate conceptions?
Even more people go to Church, to mosques, than attend Flat Earth International Conference, so if the flat-earthers are crazy then they’re in good company.
Which brings me to the modern-day naysayers, the anti-vaxxers. These lads have been around for a while, and they oppose all vaccines, including the one which will eventually bring an end to the Covid-19 pandemic. They point to cases where mass immunisation didn’t work, to the US polio vaccine trial in 1955, to the alleged links between the MMR jab and autism, as proof that vaccinations are dangerous and you should not take them under any circumstances.
Some of them also claim that Covid-19 was created by the UN and that this vaccine contains a microchip which will track all our movements, but the less said about that the better. For the most part anti-vaxxers are an anti-establishment group, a cohort with a deep mistrust of authority and government. It’s natural to be a little concerned about a vaccination, about the contents of a needle which is going straight into your arm, but it goes deeper than that for the anti-vaxxer brigade.
Not only do they believe the Covid-19 vaccination is harmful, but that it is intentionally so. For them, this is the latest in a long series of underhand manoeuvres by the leaders of the free world, another attempt to control and corral the uprising and hide the truth. If it were a Hollywood movie I would definitely watch it. In real life however, it has no merit. And whereas the flat-earthers are mostly harmless, the anti-vaxxers are the complete opposite.
Their theories, their protests, carry weight. Their rhetoric strikes a chord, makes sense to those who have long since lost faith with ‘ the system’ and those at its helm. A recent survey carried out by the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association found that just 55 per cent of us would take the Covid-19 vaccine if it were available today.
Some of that uncertainty can be attributed to how new the vaccine is, how little we know about it or its efficacy. But a lot of it is down to the antics of the anti-vaxxers, to the ramblings of a group of people who are just trying to add meaning to what are otherwise empty lives.