Thank God It's Friday

BC Pires

THE THING about hope is you keep on doing it, even against all the evidence that there’s no point in hoping.

It’s this hopeless kind of hope that keeps so many sports teams, marriages and governments staggering on long past their relegation/divorce/revolution use-by dates.

In the probably forlorn hope that we can reach enough of them to stop them taking us all with them, then, here is the BC Covid for Dummies, the Complete Guide to Deciding if You Should Take the Vaccine. (Short Version: Yes.)

Definitely take the vaccine if you fall into any of these groups, listed in increasing order of stupidity.

You don’t grasp that vaccines only work if everyone takes them/You think you can make a personal health decision in a public health emergency.

This line of non-thinking makes dunces say things like, “I am under age 65, not obese and am unlikely to die if I do get the virus. Why should I risk the danger of a vaccine that someone on Facebook said killed a man as soon as it was injected into his bloodstream?”

The only reason you’re not lower down (ie, for your benefit, actually “higher up”) this idiot list is that some allowance has to be made that you may be acting out of sheer selfishness rather than stupidity. You don’t take a vaccine for yourself but for others.

Yes, a vaccine will help you suffer less and perhaps avoid dying even if no one else is ever vaccinated, but your child will not avoid getting measles because she is vaccinated but because every child in school with her has also been vaccinated.

As with measles, so with covid. These vaccines are new but the vaccine principle is old and hasn’t changed.

You think that taking the vaccine means you somehow lose your liberty. The first step of authoritarian governments is to get their subjects to stop thinking about issues and start “feeling” about them.

In George Orwell’s anti-fascist primer, 1984, all work stops in every government department every day for the “Two Minutes’ Hate.” Everyone puts down pen and paper and gathers together to scream at “the enemy” on a big-screen TV for two minutes.

The only difference between you and Orwell’s two-minute-haters is you have been persuaded by ignorant people on Facebook, not the Ministry of Truth. Vaccine bad. Freedom good.

You think your Tantie Doris on Facebook, whose civil service career peaked at Clerk I after 40 years at the Ministry of Works, has greater knowledge of epidemiology than the WHO.

You would never stop taking your car to the mechanic and take it to Tantie Doris, because it’s so firetrucking obvious she knows bugger-all about fixing cars…But you accept and share every post she puts up about a virus she thinks is not real. Even if she misspells epidemiology.

You have used, sincerely, not sarcastically or ironically, any of the following expressions, set out in order of increasing stupidity:

Planned-demic. You believe the most preposterous conspiracy theory of them all (that doesn’t come with a Q-A-Nonsense label): that ev

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