Roddy Ashworth says vaccine conspiracy theories are 'tripe'

WOW. My first column was last week and I got unceremoniously thrown to the lions.

Apparently, I made what used to be called a schoolboy error (I don’t know if it’s called a schoolboy error anymore; perhaps it’s a schoolchild error or even a schoolperson error. It’s hard to keep up these days).

My terrible mistake? It was simple. I put the words “5G” and “hospital” into the same sentence, referring to the roll-out of 5G in Colchester.

Anyway, someone I know – now a former Facebook “friend” - took great umbrage at this and before long, after being scanned, it was posted into several of many Facebook groups.

Facebook groups of what you might charitably call “the doubting” variety, or, more uncharitably, the “completely-paranoid-nutcase” variety.

My now ex-friend then forwarded me some of the responses from these groups.

I don’t think I’ve read anything so bizarre in my life.

Anyway, now I’ve been well and truly told.

According to some of the most dedicated fruit-loops, 5G is many things.

It was designed to give us Covid.

Or Covid doesn’t actually exist (try telling that to the families of the 128,000 who have died) or, alternatively, a way of allowing Bill Gates to sneak silicon chips into our brains.

And this one really takes the biscuit – Covid can’t be real because viruses don’t exist.

As for putting 5G anywhere near a hospital, how dare the “system” allow this?

Before Covid came along, the only mad theories about 5G involved a couple of hundred birds falling out of trees during a 5G test in The Hague.

But, dur, no tests were actually being conducted at the time.

Oh, it’s also on a frequency that will fry your brain.

Conspiracy theorists must be the only group of people who see Covid as a positive.

Monetised sham websites have raked in cash by putting pseudo-scientific bozos on screen to spout this absurd nonsense.

Columnist - Roddy Ashworth

The gold-diggers wave their hands at some phoney graphs which bear about as much relation to the truth as EastEnders (Why hasn’t Albert Square been gentrified? Why hasn’t the café been turned into a shop selling 1,000 different varieties of pineapples to gullible city workers?)

Personally, I put conspiracy theories into two baskets.

There are the safe-but-stupid ones and the dumb-but-dangerous-ones.

I mean, who cares if some people insist that the moon landings were faked?

That idea, cooked up by munchkins, didn’t seriously take off until a second-rate film called Capricorn One, which featured OJ Simpson prancing around a desert with some astronaut pals, having failed to travel to Mars.

And who cares if some people think we are being ruled by a load of slithery lizards? (credit for that one goes to a ludicrous 1980s miniseries called V, which was later capitalised on by the ever-more fanciful David Icke.)

Or that the Earth is flat? Obviously true, natch (sigh).

But there is one conspiracy theory we should all care about.

This is the one propagated by the anti-vaxxers.

Some of these people are, frankly, a menace to the way we live – or will live.

Nobody should pay any attention to this conspiracy theory.

It’s opportunistic tripe which makes cynical donut-heads money.

Only the gullible believe this cobblers and you really shouldn’t. Please.

I’ve had my jabs. I felt a bit feverish after the first.

After the second I felt like someone had given me what we used to call in the playground a “dead arm”. Now I’m fine.

Now, there are many doolally people in our current Government.

But in this specific case, they’re right.

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