It’s time to come clean.. are you sure this Dr Baloney you found on the net is fully qualified to tell people that the government wants to kill you with a vaccine?
Won’t anyone spare a thought for the real victims of the pandemic? By which I mean those who are having to fire their antivaccine domestic staff.
I heard a bit of a radio programme the other day where this very topic was being discussed: middle-class professionals caught in a difficult position as their cleaners and au pairs were refusing to take the vaccine.
But of course, as we know, nothing is real until it happens to you or someone you know. And so it proved last week, when I caught up with an old golfing friend – we’ll call him Mike – who had just had to sack his cleaner for this very reason.
His cleaner is (was) a woman – we’ll call her Margaret – who had been with him for years and was very good at her job. Margaret had been furloughed for a long time on half pay but, as my pal and his wife had both recently had the vaccine and Margaret was in her mid- 40s and would surely be getting hers soon, he’d texted her to say: “We’re both vaccinated now, so hopefully you can come back to work soon.”
But he was nervous. He remembered overhearing a couple of dark mutterings from her about masks and lockdowns back in the early days of Covid. His fears proved justified when she texted back: “I won’t be getting the vaccine. Is this a problem?”
He rang her and the predictable lunacy ensued.
She began with: “As you know, Mike, I’ve always been against vaccines generally.”
Ah, no, he thought, I must have missed your column in the Lunatic Times on that one but, please, go on.
“I blame my son’s autism on the MRI jab,” she added. This was the first time in all those years Mike had heard of Margaret’s son being autistic but he listened on. “I don’t trust governments,” she said. “Did you know that the British Army put smallpox on blankets while in Africa in 1802?”
OK, Mike thought, we’re veering away on to a different kind of argument here but let’s see where it goes. “I won’t put something in my body that hasn’t been properly tested.” Here, Mike reflected on his cleaner’s profound love of smoking cannabis undoubtedly knocked up in some dealer’s garden shed but he let it go. Finally, she finished.
“OK, Margaret,” he said, “you’ve given me three or four quite disparate reasons for not taking the vaccine. Let’s break them down.”
He proceeded to go through the rational arguments against all of her points, freely using things like science, statistics and logic.
Margaret was unmoved. Still didn’t trust the government.
Mike softened his stance… “I agree governments do terrible things sometimes. But Margaret, how did you get here? Where are you getting all your information?” (Thinking to himself – Facebook.)
“Uh, the internet?” Margaret said. “And… history books.”
Mike perked up. Maybe he’d missed a definitive study on vaccinations…
“Really? Which books?” he asked.
“Uh… you’re putting me on the spot, here.”
“Just a couple of titles.”
“Oh, I can’t remember.”
“OK,” Mike said, moving on. “Where on the internet? Which news sources do you trust?”
“Well… (finally) Facebook. There’s this doctor called Rashid Baloney.”
Mike typed the name into Google and was led to a Facebook page. Which had been disabled due to Covid misinformation rules.
“Ah, Margaret,” he said. “Most of his posts have been disabled.”
“Yeah, a lot of his stuff gets censored!”
“Yes. And why do you think that is?”
Margaret talked on for a bit about conspiracy theories. Finally, he had to stop her. “Margaret, you know a lot of the stuff you’re spouting is pure Russian disinformation, right?”
“Eh?” She sounded genuinely puzzled. “Now you sound like the conspiracy theorist, mate! Why would they go and do that?”
“Well,” Mike patiently explained,
“Putin generally wants instability and conflict in the west. Like you and me having this very ‘argument’. (And here Mike surely pictured Aristotle weeping at the misuse of this term.)
“He also wants to flog his Sputnik vaccine in the developing world, so rubbishing ours is a thing.”
Finally, Mike tried to phrase what he had to say delicately…
“Look, Margaret, a few of my friends are doctors and scientists. They’re all getting their vaccine. Did you know that a belief in vaccine, mask and lockdown conspiracy theories is strongest among the non-college educated?”
She did not know this.
“So do you not think it’s possible,” Mike went on, “just possible, that you are on the wrong side of this?”
There was a long pause. “Well, maybe,” she conceded. “But I’m not willing to risk it.”
“Again, it’s not a risk.” Wearily, Mike started to go through the safety statistics of the vaccine again.
But she interrupted him. “Look, I get it. I totally understood that telling you I’m against the vaccine might mean I got fired.”
“So, you’re willing to die on this hill?”
“I am,” she said proudly.
His wife stared at him in disbelief and said, ‘Unfire her! Now!’
“Well, I admire your commitment to your beliefs, Margaret. I really do. It’s just a pity everything you believe is utter garbage.”
And that was the end of that. Mike told me he went through and retold the conversation to his wife.
“Hang on,” she said. “You fired Margaret?”
“Pretty much. We can’t condone anti-vaccine people, darling.”
His wife stared at him in disbelief. “Are you out of your mind?” she said. “She’s brilliant at the laundry!”
She held their toddler up with one hand and pointed to the Mount Everest of laundry in their (f)utility room with the other. “Unfire her! Now!”
Mike’s life then descended into pure Larry David territory as he called Margaret back and morphed the conversation into a “Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree and practise social distancing” kind of thing.
They do say principles only mean something if you stand by them when they’re inconvenient. But whoever said that obviously never had a cleaner who was really good at the laundry.