Having no vaccine against idiocy is our biggest threat

As a young man during the dark apartheid years, it often irritated me to see how unwilling people were to question official information fed to them.

Nowadays, I have a bee in my bonnet about their reluctance to accept some of the facts on offer, particularly about the not-so-novel coronavirus.

“They can shoot me before I will allow anyone to vaccinate me,” an otherwise intelligent old school friend told me the other day.

“Did anyone threaten to shoot you if you don’t get vaccinated?” I asked. He ignored the question.

“These so-called vaccinations … they haven’t been tested sufficiently. We don’t know what the long-term side-effects are.”

“I’m no scientist,” I told him. “I haven’t seen any peer-reviewed clinical testing on being shot, but scientists agree that it’s not very healthy in the long run. Definitely worse than vaccinations.”

“I have done my research, and I know what I know,” he replied stubbornly.

And that’s exactly my problem with our new generation of instant mad scientists. They may think they know what they know, but in reality they don’t know what they don’t know.

This particular friend abandoned science and biology at school after Grade 9. Now he fancies himself as a researcher.

“Research?” I asked. “In a laboratory with rats and white coats?”

Apparently not. His “research”, he explained, consists of reading unchecked info littered with words written in capital letters and dozens of exclamation marks on social media. Sigh.

The funny thing is that the same friend has no issues with using ivermectin, which has been subjected to far fewer clinical tests as a Covid medication than any of the vaccines. I really hope that current tests prove ivermectin’s efficacy.

Our country – no, our continent – needs an affordable, effective treatment for this disease. Fake news about the biggest medical crisis of our lifetime is abundant, yet easily to disprove. But the uncomfortably wide lunatic fringes of society still cling to it for dear life.

I have very little hope that we will ever see a vaccine against idiocy. Which may very well be our biggest threat.