“Well nothing I do don’t seem to work
It only seems to make matters worse, oh please.”– Mick Jagger
Last night I witnessed one of those maddening conversations and I couldn’t suppress the urge to get involved. It started with the usual arrogant misinformation that we have been seeing forever. However, this time it was a former student. I had the same sort of feeling that you have when hear about a family member going to jail.
It was the usual anti-vax stuff. In this case, it is a fake conversation that has been making the rounds when a restaurant asks a patron for their vaccination card. The equally smug and misinformed speaker spews a bunch of crap about hepatitis, HIV, and other nonsense to somehow make a point. It was equal parts ignorance and arrogance all at the same time.
By the time it was all over I had heard it all. COVID was no different than the flu. Two people had died from taking the vaccine. Somehow, the transfer of HIV and Hepatitis was exactly the same. You shouldn’t take the vaccine because it’s experimental. You don’t know what’s in it. It’s the stuff we have been hearing for months and attempting to tamp down.
What made this different is that another former student piped in to squash the misinformation. She came from a position of authority. She announced to the group that she was a physician. I follow ex-students for one primary purpose. I love to hear the great stuff they are doing with their lives. It makes me feel like I had a small part in that success. In most cases, I probably didn’t. It’s just something I allow myself to feel for a little while to feel a jolt of positivity.
Well, it happened. An older gentlemen challenged her and asked her if she had done her research. I couldn’t stay in the background anymore. It was insane. Believing that a disease is the same thing as the flu is one thing. To believe that the vaccine is purely experimental and does nothing for you is another thing. You can believe they are inserting a tracking device in the miniscule amount of fluid being shot into your arm. You can believe all of this while sending these messages with your IPhone with the GPS locator on.
You can spout off all kinds of drivel about masks and what they do and don’t do. You can come on and assert all of the people you know that have been harmed by the vaccine. You can preach from your soapbox about the tyranny of being asked to wear a small piece of fabric on your face. All of these things are things we have seen before and will see again. What beats all of that is taking someone that has studied the body and disease for much of their adult life and telling them they are ignorant about the very thing they have spent a lifetime doing.
It’s not that it is incredibly stupid. It’s incredibly insulting. This kind of behavior is the kind of behavior that threatens to rip apart the very fabric that has made society run for thousands of year. You could argue a lot of things in terms of history, but specialization is one of the most important developments in the history of civilization. It allowed human beings to advance themselves from caves, hunting and gathering, and drawing on walls to create civilizations that boggle the mind.
We needed some to specialize in medicine in order to survive. We had people that specialize in engineering. We had people that specialized in all kinds of sciences. We also had business people, tradesman, and other specialists. When we distrust them then everything breaks down. It’s just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
halloffameindex 