Unending conspiracy theories

My covid19 vaccination card says my second dose of AstraZeneca vaccine is due on 5 July.

Now, I understand it will be given next week. This is most probably because the Grenadians and Vincentians are as resistant to being vaccinated as people here and we generously received their rejected supply, which expires this month.

I should be pleased that I am guaranteed a second shot, especially given the profound difficulties the developing world has encountered with accessing adequate vaccine supplies.

The issue for me, however, is that AstraZeneca has one of the lowest efficacy levels of all the existing vaccines – an average of 70 per cent against catching covid19 in the first place – and I wonder if that could be lowered still by shortening the period between the two shots to eight weeks, from 12.

To be clear, by reducing our capacity to be infected, all the vaccines work optimally in preventing contagion, and also protect us from serious illness and even death if we are infected.

Yet I feel rather put out that my life is further distressed by people who are idly wedded to conspiracy theories.

I questioned someone about her reluctance to take the vaccine and she said she thought it was a definite attempt at world domination and people control. She had absolutely no facts, only a hunch based on all that she had read on social media, of course. Questions such a :who wants control, and to serve what end precisely if control were achieved were left unanswered.

I would guess she had practised what social scientists call selection bias, essentially choosing information sources that provide a predictable outcome in order to confirm one’s own ideas.

I put my hand up with regard to theories around this extraordinary virus and declare that my preferred explanation for the origins of covid19 is the one which makes the most sense to me, which is the cover-up of a poorly secured scientific investigation being carried out in a laboratory and an accidental leak happening. Experiments are going on all the time and we hear little or nothing of the failures and accidents, unless a scandal is involved. Why could this super-adaptive virus not be just the result of one of those too clever advanced experiments about which we might have been forever ignorant?

In it I do not claim that the experiments were for malevolent reasons, just scientific research.

It makes more sense to me than the bat contamination story. And it must be so for everyone, ie, that people are trying to make sense of the complex world in which we live.

Where I part company with my guinea pig is that she had not asked any further questions but accepted the theory at face value.

It caused me to remember my son mouthing off, as a young teenager, about saving the whale. He was taken to task for not knowing why and for empty-heafedly echoing received opinion. He tells me now it was a pivotal moment in his education.

All over the world, people believe without examination, and so spreading conspiracy theories is not difficult, especially in the time of the internet, but there seems to be a correlation between the aggrieved and the tendency to believe conspiracies, in this case, the outlandish claims against the vaccines, such as embedded microchips.

The coincidence of the novel coronavirus and dishonest, mash-up-the-place politicians such as Donald Trump in particular in the influential US, a country with extremes of inequality, has produced mass negative reaction to the vaccines that would significantly retard the spread of the virus. Various studies have shown that immigrants, minorities and oppressed people such as African Americans are prone to believing that others are plotting against them, and for good reason.

Last week we commemorated the centenary of the murder of 300 people and the obliteration of the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for which no racist hooligan was ever held responsible and no black victim ever compensated. The conspiratorial silence was loud, down the century.

Examining who generates and spreads conspiracy theories, it appears that it is anyone who feels marginalised in some way, including from the possibility of achieving their potential and the exercise of their freedoms.

Here in TT, we have a microcosm of what Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning development economist, would have seen as fecund territory for his theories. He influenced the UN Development Programme redefining human well-being as more than just GDP and income levels. People need “to lead lives they have reason to live.”

Our well-endowed but half-good education, our rich but dysfunctional economy, our promising but disappointing society and the unfulfilled expectations all feed the distrust, so that we indulge in irrational preferences that are incompatible with more advantageous choices, making us our own worst enemies. And sadly, until the facts change we will not reform our manner of thinking. As Immanuel Kant gloomily wrote about the Enlightenment, “...instead, new prejudices, like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.”