How to wrongfoot an anti-vaxxer

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic.

But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart. Ronson looks into the rise of the weird and shocking ‘QAnon’ phenomenon in America — a movement persuaded that the United States is in the grip of a vast, hidden paedophile conspiracy, in which powerful figures from the country’s ruling elite are believed to be complicit. We had something similar here — remember Operation Midland? — though only a tremor: you’ll recall the alarming potency of a cock-and-bull heap of nonsense about a ‘top people’s paedophile ring’ at Westminster, and the alarming credence given it by senior police officers and some respected journalists too.

But my interest in all this goes back further, to my first year as an undergraduate at Cambridge. I was friendly with a struggling and lonely Arab boy occupying rooms near mine. One night in the small hours he hammered on my door and begged me to come and witness something, pulling me to his bedroom window. ‘It’s a death ray!’ he exclaimed. I saw a hedge through which one could just discern the glimmer of an outside porch light. His glance showed his horror at my incomprehension. ‘Matthew,’ he said, ‘can’t you see? This light is disguised as an innocent light, or the plan to kill me would be obvious.’