Paul Fidalgo of the Center For Inquiry, a free-thinkers organization, has begun to document and, er, ridicule the coming anti-vaxxer hysteria:
Anthony Fauci says we’re probably not going to achieve herd immunity in the U.S. even if we get a vaccine because too many people will refuse to take it. CNN reports:
“The best we’ve ever done is measles, which is 97 to 98 percent effective,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “That would be wonderful if we get there. I don’t think we will. I would settle for [a] 70, 75% effective vaccine.” …
… In an interview Friday, CNN asked Fauci whether a vaccine with 70% to 75% efficacy taken by only two-thirds of the population would provide herd immunity to the coronavirus.
“No — unlikely,” he answered.
Case in point, anti-vaxxers in California who are, of course, anti-mask, as reported by Hannah Wiley at the Sacramento Bee:
At every stage of the pandemic, California’s anti-vaccine activists have foreshadowed what their fight against a future vaccine to prevent COVID-19 could look like.
“If we can’t win the mandatory mask argument, we won’t win the mandatory COVID-19 vaccination argument,” Larry Cook, founder of the Los Angeles-based group Stop Mandatory Vaccination, wrote in a June 21 tweet. “They are 100% connected.”
At this juncture, I must stop and say that this Mr. Cook, whoever he may be, reminds me of a character in Inferno. No, not Dante Aligheri‘s, but the Niven & Pournelle rendition. At some point, the characters making their way through the rings of Hell run across a dude riding a stationary bike; when he slowed, he was enveloped in thick clouds of smoke, so he was forced to ride, and ride hard, in order to breath. After a bit of conversation in which he explains he was an environmentalist, one of the members of the party spies a briefcase on the bike, opens it up, and reads a letter inside, which is the plaint of the rider’s former organization’s scientific advisor, informing him that, yes, nuclear power is safe, and what does he think he’s doing, anyways?
At this point, the guy yells, But I was in charge! Or something like. I’m too lazy to go look it up. One has to wonder if these anti-vaxxer leaders are sincere, or just on ego-trips.
Speaking of the anti-vaxxers, Derek Lowe at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has his own thoughts on the matter:
As the prospect of these become more real in the public mind, I’m noticing more and more anti-vaccine takes, from a variety of directions. First, there are the more traditional anti-vaccine activists, who most certainly haven’t gone away. This is the vaccines-harm-our-children faction, the group that’s been associated with (unfounded, unfounded, unfounded) concerns about autism. But it’s worth remembering that they were around long before the Wakefield autism scare, and that even though many of these people are still pushing that (unfounded!) connection, they could drop it tomorrow and still be anti-vaccination. I well recall being ranted at on USENET in 1993 about how vaccines were destroying our children’s immune systems, and this point of view is a lot older still than that – there’s a C. M. Kornbluth science fiction story from the 1950s that has an argumentative crank in a bar going on about how modern medicine is ruining the children, not one of them is healthy like they used to be, etc. At any rate, I certainly did not expect this bunch to be in favor of a coronavirus vaccine, and they are not letting me down.
We have a newer group, though, who combine dislike and fear of vaccines with a dislike and fear of Bill Gates (and the WHO, and the Powers That Be in general). As I mentioned the other day, there’s a strong overlap here with anti-mask sentiments, often phrased in the form of loud statements about personal liberty and pledges never to take the “Gates vaccine”. From there, it branches out into various crazy tributaries: some of these folks are sticking with the good ol’ poisons-in-the-vaccines line, but others seem to be convinced that the coronavirus vaccine will feature “nanochips” of some sort (“I refuse to be ‘chipped’ like someone’s pet!“) which will. . .well, depending which lunatic you listen to, they will track everyone (need I add that the 5G tower conspiracy people are well represented in this bunch), or somehow control their behavior, or (5G towers again) be used to target and kill them if they “get out of line”. There is a long, long history of pathological paranoid ideation about radio waves, TV broadcasts, and wireless transmission in general, and the 5G people are just the latest version. It was too much to expect this not to end up in the blender with the vaccines and the coronavirus. The list of ways in which all of this is nonsense is a long one, but the sorts of people who really believe this stuff are impervious to any such attempts at persuasion.
They remind me of trolls, or, more distantly, the ruggies (rugrats, people of no ethical or moral persuasion) of the BBS (an early form of social media) days. They’re looking for attention as well as for control in their lives.
It’s painful knowing they exist, and they often hide in religious exceptions in order to avoid doing their part of the social good. Will this continue to be permitted if & when a coronavirus vaccine is invented? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
