Mischief and falsehood; the companions of pandemic

When the disastrous plague known as the Black Death swept into Europe in the mid-1300s the state of human knowledge about the nature of biological infections and diseases, their transmission and their remorseless and deadly progress was largely non-existent.

The responses of individuals and communities to the waves of deadly infection which resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths saw a retreat to superstition, appeals to religious faith, and a desire to flee to safe havens. As the pandemic surged, fell away and surged again over the decades which followed some fortunate groups learned that isolation and quarantine provided a measure of protection against the invisible enemy.

In this case the carriers of the killer bacterium were fleas hosted by black rats.

Who knew?

The search for causes of the plague led many communities of the period in the wrong direction and, once again, the consequences of such investigations were also dreadful.

The stranger – or strangers – in our midst, the people of different ethnic or religious belief, the little old lady who lived by herself in a hut on the edge of the forest were ready-made scapegoats and gave rise to the good fortune of ruthless and unscrupulous blame-layers and witch-hunters.

The focus on blaming the ‘others’ or witches for the plague gave rise to a well-established body of ‘evidence’ and laws as the decades passed which ultimately saw the deaths by drowning, fire or mob murder of hundreds of otherwise innocent people,

It’s fortunate, isn’t it, that we no longer live in such a time of ignorance and superstition.

We have another pandemic to deal with (this time the culprit is a virus) but we now live in an age where fact-based science, deep knowledge of disease-causing agents and vectors, and informed expert research which can help us curtail, mitigate, and even eradicate diseases of all types.

But, the reality of the past 20 months or so as COVID-19 and its variants around the globe have given us a pandemic which has already killed an estimated 10 million people demonstrating that humankind is still quite susceptible to the vagaries of nature.

Not only have most advanced nations found that their progress in economic and social terms have been stalled or set back by the COVID threat but it is evident that some characteristics of the human response to the current crisis have the same DNA as inhabited the bodies of those 14th century witch-finders, potion and cure-all makers, religious zealots, and blame-laying agitators.

Today, against a background of fear and uncertainty such individuals weave their spells of falsehood and misinformation and publish them via the many avenues afforded by social media which may be more interested in advertising revenue than journalistic truth.

It matters not whether governments or health authorities have been trying earnestly to inform the public, or institute measures designed to protect their communities; mischief makers and conspiracy generators have been very busy from the outset of the pandemic. Even in the allegedly best-informed, best educated societies the new witch-hunters and fraudsters have set up their self-serving campaigns which are designed to mislead and worry ordinary people even further.

The slow roll out of anti-COVID vaccines; the supposed lack of efficacy in one, the shortage in supplies, and the problems of who and when in the distribution process, are just some of the problems that authorities have faced world-wide.

Then, in our supposedly-educated and informed societies, the problem of vaccine-hesitancy raised its head. People with genuine concerns about vaccine safety became easy targets for those with political and more crackpot reservations about the value of widespread immunisation and many became even easier targets for the peddlers of the conspiracy plots.

A major US study called ‘The COVID States Project’ conducted in June and July this year by five key US university medical schools found that the following claims had been debunked:
1 The COVID-19 vaccines will alter people’s DNA.
2 The COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips that could track people.
3 The COVID-19 vaccines contain the lung tissue of aborted foetuses.
4 The COVID-19 vaccines can cause infertility, making it more difficult to get pregnant.

Despite the debunking of the above claims the report found that 11 per cent of Americans believed COVID vaccines cause infertility while up to 20 percent falsely believe the others.

It may be noteworthy that even among the best educated groups the lack of certainty about one or more of the claims made above led them to accept that a false claim may be true.

Disturbingly, other research by three academics in the United States has found that that while people have been increasingly prepared to trust science, science funding and science education as the COVID crisis has unfolded the rise in such levels of trust has ironically had the effect of making people more open to trust ‘pseudo-science’ articles which have also proliferated in the past two years.

Pseudo-science presents false information masking as science. Such information can have the hallmarks of being a well-researched account, say, of the origins of COVID, the efficacy of vaccines, or the protective ability of masks. The authors of the study suggest that while ‘trust in science’ is a worthy thing, it is important for people to become more ‘critically-minded’, adding that ‘scepticism is a healthy, essential part of science.’

So, rumours or supposedly-authoritative claims that circulate or may appear on a screen about COVID, its dangers, vaccines, and related matters should be assessed carefully by ordinary, intelligent people.

Checking such claims through multiple sources may be time consuming but in the current environment where we are awash with news from many sources such a prudent ‘critically-minded’ approach may well be justified.