ON MY MIND
MY brother-in-law is a Russian spy. The evidence is quite clear: he has a beard, likes his vodka ‘nyet’, reads Dostoyevsky, claimed he worked at MFI (surely MI5), says he’s a food guru (no doubt ‘GRU’) and his favourite song is ‘Crimea River’. The evidence is as irrefutable as the claim that the Covid vaccination programme is a covert mass chip implantation. So, erm… perhaps not that irrefutable.
Yet as we roll up our sleeves for another blast at our immune systems we hear the same old bizarre claims of some global conspiracy to control us all by inserting something nasty into our bodies. This is often accompanied by a distrust of science by those who communicate their views endlessly on a sophisticated device which they presumably found growing on a tree in their garden.
There seems to be a spectrum of scepticism from a small minority of hard line antivaxxers, with a chip only on their shoulders, through a large swathe of anti-lockdown zealots to a larger corpus of libertarians, the latter normally believing in ‘liberty for me but not the rest of you’.
The link between such libertarianism and political leaning is fascinating. In the US the death rate from Covid is three time higher in the Trumpist states. Trump had originally been in denial and did not encourage vaccination. American writer Robert Reich explains the phenomenon simply in terms of selfish individualism and no interest in the common good.
Recent studies in a number of countries show political ideology to be a factor in how people respond to the virus, something we have seen in the mask wearing behaviour and social distancing in different sides of the House of Commons and the early hand shaking of the PM. They found that conservatism and populism tended to result in a belief in less personal vulnerability to the virus, fewer restrictions and less discernment in media information. It seems what most people want is competence and clear policy at the top, something as likely as ‘a lobster whistling on the top of a mountain’, as my brother-in-law would probably say.