The woman two tables from me at a branch of Pret in the City was talking about her chemotherapy. Her male companion asked her how her treatment was going, and she replied that it was gruelling. She was on a short break and was dreading the next round.
I have leukaemia, and know the pattern of these conversations. What usually follows is sympathy, or empathy if someone has been through it themselves or knows someone who has. But there was no sympathy or empathy offered. Instead, the man launched into a diatribe. A diatribe of all the most idiotic and dangerous health conspiracies rolled into one. To paraphrase, he told her: ‘They are putting poison in you. The pharma companies need people to die to keep their profits up so they can sell more drugs to pretend to treat people. Secret studies show that your diet is what matters.’
It went on longer than that, of course, but that was the gist of it – all the usual tropes of the anti-vaxxers but this time focused on chemo. Instead of protecting us, chemo destroys us, it’s all about Big Pharma, there are easy ways to treat cancer but they are being hidden from us by doctors in the pay of the drugs companies. Blah, blah, blah.
Anyone who uses social media has seen all this many times. The lunatics dominate the asylum. One of them is now the American Health Secretary, for God’s sake. It’s easy to jeer at these Grade A idiots who credulously repeat the gibberish they’re fed online. But jeering doesn’t cut it, because the Grade A idiots aren’t just an online phenomenon, they’re doing real danger to real people. A report from Johns Hopkins University published on Monday, for example, revealed a sharp decline in the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination rate among US children since Covid and the attendant vaccine conspiracies took off online. The rate is now down to 91.3 per cent, significantly below the 95 per cent herd immunity threshold. In England, according to a study last month published by the House of Commons Library, the rate for the MMR vaccine is now, shockingly, just 88.9 per cent.
Listening to the man in Pret, I was confronted with an immediate dilemma: should I say something? I’m not just a fellow human being, after all, witnessing someone put the life of another human being in danger. I bring something else to the party: I am on chemo now (albeit a brilliant new targeted version of it in the form of a daily pill).
I have to confess to chickening out
I’ve faced a similar situation once before, many years ago, when I heard a work colleague talking about how she had refused to let her children have the MMR vaccine. This was pre-Covid, and was a result of the fake research pushed by the appalling Andrew Wakefield (who is, needless to say, now treated as a heroic figure by the anti-vaxxers). I couldn’t contain my anger. As I told her then: if she wanted to risk her kids dying, so be it, but I would be damned if I didn’t chastise her for endangering the lives of other kids by her selfish, ignorant refusal to get the jab. I think she was stunned anyone would say such a thing. In her bubble of idiots her views were, presumably, the norm.
This time, though, in a quiet café, with no one else around, I have to confess to chickening out. I kept shtum. None of my business, don’t want to make a scene and all that…
But it’s been gnawing away at me ever since. I feel ashamed that I let it go. Why was I so bloody British about it, so worried about what other people might think? This was someone’s life at stake.
I console myself by thinking that the woman has likely heard it all before and ignored it. It’s not as if he was espousing some hitherto unspoken idea. But what if she thought he might have point?
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