The vaccine saved millions, but doubters should never have been branded doolally

The big problem with taking strong and decisive action to prevent the spread of harmful conspiracy theories is that sometimes those theories turn out to be at least partly correct. In fact you might say that the word “conspiracy”, when used in this context, is largely a signifier that the wrong sorts of people adhere to the theory and that it should therefore be discounted — and “harmful” is, again, in the eye of the beholder.

It is probably right to say that people sign up to conspiracy theories because the idiocies within chime precisely with their own monomaniacally warped view of the world, but that is also true of those who sign up to theories that are not thus designated, and often have the imprimatur of the establishment. In a democracy we should let a million flowers bloom, even if some, perhaps many, of them are giant hogweed, or maybe triffids.

You may have seen that AstraZeneca is ceasing the sale worldwide of its Covid-19 vaccine as a consequence of — the company says — the widespread growth of variants of the virus that are more susceptible to newer vaccines. I’m sure that is right, but I suspect the fact that we now know the AZ vaccine can, in rare cases, produce blood clots that can kill, and that the company is facing lawsuits, possibly sped it a little towards this denouement.

I have nothing but admiration for the scientists who produced that vaccine and for the rapidity with which it was made available (perhaps the only visible benefit from Brexit so far). That vaccine saved an estimated 6.5 million lives during the pandemic, and the European Medicines Agency reported that it was linked to “62 cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and 24 cases of splanchnic vein thrombosis … as of March 22, 2021, 18 of which were fatal”. We might say, a little callously, that the way those figures stack up renders our worries about the vaccine otiose — but it does not, of course, for the relatives of those who died.

I was a very compliant lab rat back then and did exactly what I was told to do. An “obedient little cuck bitch”, if you like, which was the phrase used by my rather more radically inclined wife during one of several heated discussions on the matter. But the truth of the whole shebang is this.

We knew then, from very good sources, that the vaccines were linked to the formation of blood clots, but that news was not for public debate. The BBC would not entertain it, and social media sites would remove posts that posited adverse reactions to the vaccine. In other words there was a sort of conspiracy to control information — much as there was on a whole host of Covid-related business, from masks to the usefulness of social distancing and the efficacy of lockdowns. Oh — and on where the virus came from: definitely not from a lab in Wuhan!

The trend in the past couple of years has been for those doubts, which were vigorously suppressed at the time, or at least not given the oxygen of publicity, to have been proven at least partly correct. Maybe not the bit about us being injected with stuff that made us slaves to Bill Gates or the Zionist Occupancy Government, or that it was all linked to 5G, the Chinese Communist Party and probably Al Gore: that stuff was believed by some wackos and was used to smear all those who had vaccine doubts as doolally antivaxers.

I understand that the world was in the grip of a panic and that, much as with vaccinations generally, the take-up must be as near to universal as possible for it to have any great effect. But the fact remains that the risk to some sectors of the population from the virus itself — especially women under the age of 60, who were the most susceptible to those possibly lethal side effects — was negligible. It is also true that on the basis of highly contentious evidence we locked everyone in their homes for an age and once again persecuted those who objected, or banished them from the airwaves.

As a Social Democrat I have always been fairly comfortable with the notion of the big state, but this was a side of the big state I had not expected to see, and it worried me somewhat. One moment it was possible to debate things; the next moment it was not. And I say this as someone who, by and large, was on board with most of what the government was doing, even if the government had Matt Hancock in it.

It all suggests to me that our belief in openness and democracy is as thin and fragile as the surface tension of blood. No good ever comes from suppressing views, no matter how berserk you might find them to be. No good came from it in 2020 — and it’s something we might bear in mind the next time the Chinese come up with a cute little virus.