On 20 August 2021 I got vaccinated.
I asked the doctor at the vaccination centre about adverse reactions. The doctor hastily explained the potential side effects to me. I was far from being satisfied but then again I am quite the realist. In 2006 I was run over by a car while crossing the street on a zebra crossing and with the pedestrian green light on – as a result, I think I have an intuitive grasp of the unmerciful nature of statistics. In any case, it’s not rocket science: better to bet on a vaccine doing its work than risking death or some lifelong organ damage by catching a nasty bug. I gave my consent and the nurse proceeded to give me three jabs on both arms that granted me immunisation against diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, and chickenpox.
Three days earlier, a 20+ year high-school friendship crumbled and disintegrated because the friend in question had embraced nasty no-vax beliefs.
One month earlier, I had my second Comirnaty (Pfizer BioNTech) Covid-19 vaccine shot.
Two months earlier, a relative told her oncologists that she did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 because she “wasn’t ready to die.”
And then, I suffered a complete breakdown.
But let’s start from the beginning, shall we?
Between two Covid-19 lockdowns and right before the implementation of the Brexit protocol that consigned to the dustbin the free movement of people, goods, and services between the UK and the EU, my wife and I had to travel abroad to save an ailing member of our family from the downward spiral of ‘alternative’ medicine, religious pseudoscience, fundamentalist prayers, and no-vax beliefs that held her captive. Once there, I discovered that this relative wasn’t held captive: she was willingly ditching science.
This member of our family is a converted, proud, and active member of a fundamentalist Protestant church. When the pandemic was ravaging Europe, she was diagnosed with an aggressive metastatic cancer. She kept their diagnosis secret for months and did not tell us anything. Meanwhile, her church’s entourage and her family (among whom an unrepentant ‘reflexologist’, no-vax/no-mask supporters, and improvised conspiracy theorists) were filling her head with blatant nonsense. For months, this relative of ours remained in denial about her illness, and I doubt she did have a clear understanding of the whole situation.
“Will I be an X-Men?” or, the modern art of trolling the trolls. Photo by Cory Doctorow from Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
She started following phony advices from friends and family. She began a ‘treatment’ with essential oils and massages to ‘prepare’ her body to receive the forthcoming (and procrastinated) medical cure, because someone told her that oncological treatments are nothing more than killing chemicals. This was just the tip of the iceberg. While we were being kept in the dark, all her friends, family, and acquaintances, knee-deep in pseudoscience and folklore, outdid themselves insofar as phony suggestions were concerned. I’m talking about things like drinking sodium bicarbonate and adopting a strict diet consisting of expensive, and worthless, vitamin supplements imported from the US and raw veggie smoothies. Sugar, salt, and meat became absolute taboos. Soon afterwards, she started popping essential oils in gelatine pills like crazy. She also ate raw, uncooked rice to cure an infection probably caused by an intestinal bug which – quite expectedly – wreaked havoc in her already debilitated system. As she was lying unconscious in her bed, her closest family members let a 40°C fever run its course without even putting some ice or a wet towel on the forehead. While praying – of course. This was a textbook example of how ignorance can kill.
What a shambolic situation. What a bloody mess.
Then, a series of devastating phone calls revealed the sheer gravity of the situation to us. In late August 2020, my wife took the extraordinary decision to challenge fate and travel by airplane to reach this relative of ours. As soon as she got off the plane, she found a walking skeleton: this relative of ours had already lost 10 kilograms and was forgetful, sleepy, and affected by brain fog. She was also limping and in pain. They stayed together one month. In that short period of time, my wife did the impossible: she managed to put this relative back together, teaching her the most basic stuff about hygiene, Covid-19 prevention, healthy eating, and medicines. They went to the oncologists together. Our relative was on the mend now. What my wife achieved there with infinite patience and understanding was nothing short of miraculous.
When my wife came back home in the UK in late September she had already made up her mind: we needed to relocate abroad as soon as possible to help this relative of ours. Basically, she didn’t have faith in the other members of her family (i.e., those living closer to our ailing relative): she thought they knew nothing and any help coming from them could potentially make everything worse. Initially, I objected. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I told her that another lockdown was to be announced soon by the government. And with the looming Brexit protocols, and the ensuing confusion, the situation could have easily got out of hand. Remember: while at least a couple of vaccines showed astounding preliminary results and were on the verge of being authorised for international rollout, no vaccine against Covid-19 was available yet. (Astra/Zeneca and Pfizer-BioN-tech were finally approved at the very end of December 2020.) My position was simple: wait for lockdown restrictions to come and go before moving abroad indefinitely. Meanwhile, let’s instruct remotely other relatives to provide help and assistance, and maybe plan another short trip to go there and check the situation if needed. Most of all, don’t rush this. For the sake of everybody’s health, I said, let’s wait for the vaccine to be rolled out in a couple of months. Only then will we be able to travel or move with ease. In the sheer chaos of 2020, we couldn’t risk passing on even the most ‘harmless’ common cold strain to that relative of ours, and while my wife had already successfully followed every health protocol to travel without risks, moving with all our stuff during a pandemic was way too risky for all parties involved. (There were other important issues at stakes there, but I won’t share them with you now.) To cut a long and sad story short, I failed to convince my wife, and after seven years and a half in the UK, I found myself on a shockingly full plane during a pandemic.
We followed all Covid-19 hygiene protocols to the point of paranoia – masks, gloves, hand sanitisers, behavioural vigilance, social distancing – and luckily enough, no one got sick. It was too good to be true.
Once in our new home, all hell broke loose. For a while, it was like being on the frontline of a raging war. The situation was almost an emergency 24/7. My wife and I rapidly became two sleep-deprived wrecks. The flat we had found in haste was located on the outskirts of one of the most polluted post-industrial cities in Western Europe. No surprises there, the flat was terrible: nighttime noise, an astonishing amount of car pollution, barking dogs all day long, people shrieking from their balconies…. Then, the dreaded winter lockdown came to pass and sealed our fate: we basically devolved to a zombie-like state.
As far as our relative was concerned, there were opportunistic infections unexpectedly flaring up again, like shingles (Herpes zoster) and an undiagnosed hepatitis. Quite surprisingly, the medications the GP and the oncologists prescribed her were ruthlessly efficient and she recuperated rapidly. With regards to her cancer, it wasn’t long before a groundbreaking EGFR inhibitor treatment started working its charm to the point that, after a couple of months, a routine MRI revealed that the metastases were not detectable anymore, while the core tumor itself had already significantly shrunk.
Science works. Photo by Adam Fagen from Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
That treatment – science – was successfully treating and controlling the cancer. She was OK – more than OK for the time being, better than she had ever been in the last two or three years. And yet, when it came to her being vaccinated, she refused to, because – and she told this in front of her oncologist with the most solemn tone of her voice – she “was not ready to die” (I frankly found this statement quite puzzling coming from someone who made her own life a sort of imitatio Christi, by the way). Weeks of unrelenting moral suasion led to her being finally vaccinated. However, despite talking to her and explaining everything in the most direct, clear, and simple way possible, her snake oil ‘cures’ that initially contributed to the rapid deterioration of her health were always lurking in the background. Furthermore, she thought this illness was something like a flu – there will be a point in which she won’t need any medication and she will be fine again, or so she was thinking (and still thinks).
It came to me as a shock that my wife didn’t want to take a clear stand against fundamentalism and pseudoscience. I can understand the reason why (she wants to avoid ruffle feathers among her relatives), but I cannot in good conscience accept the underlying logic: those toxic beliefs were providing the breeding ground for all sorts of deleterious and self-harming behaviours. So, after a family reunion and a lively discussion, we decided I was the one better suited to talk to this relative face-to-face and explain everything in the most simple and effective way. It’s not like we really had a choice. Someone had to do it: our relative’s behaviours were putting her life – and all our lives – in danger. So, one day she sat on the bed with me and she listened carefully. She seemed to agree with me that those ‘alternative’ cures were nothing but fake treatments designed by greedy vultures to prey upon those who suffer. I suggested her to stop spending money on expensive, ‘alternative’, and totally ineffective ‘treatments’ mailed from the US and follow the science. Initially, she resisted by saying that the no-vax/no-mask reflexologist-cum-sham treatment specialist was a licensed ‘expert’ that “studied hard” just like me (!), with a diploma and official courses and whatnots. Upon my firm requests for clarification, she confessed that the reflexologist had to pay to obtain her fake diploma. QED.
On that very occasion, she also tried to convince me that the good health she was enjoying right then was due to the alleged benefits of her sham treatments, while the oncologists’ “chemical” treatments were responsible for all the nasty side effects. I explained her a tiny bit of organic chemistry and told her that everything is chemical deep down inside (even – shock horror! – us), and I also told her about the neurophysiology of the placebo effect (whose usefulness I have no intention to downplay in any way – it’s great if a ‘reflexological’ massage makes you feel good, but please, for the love of everything that’s dear to you, don’t subscribe to the underlying pseudoscientific justifications and don’t bet on this treatment to cure you from any serious illness).
Does it hurt there if I press your allux? A reflexological chart showing the “the areas of the feet that practitioners believe correspond with organs in the ‘zones’ of the body.” Spoiler alert: they don’t. By TarcísioTS, from Wikipedia.
She was not convinced (she didn’t even know what an ‘atom’ is, let alone how something that made her feel better might fail to cure her), but in the end she seemed like she was quite persuaded by my passionate speech. I also wanted to talk to her about how cancer evolution works, but her puzzled expression when I said that cancer cells do “evolve” and that her cancer will eventually become resistant to the treatment – remember, according to her church, belief in “evolution” is a blasphemous trick concocted by the devil and his agents on Earth, as I learned by leafing through her creationist library at home – convinced me otherwise.
And yet, it was a very emotional moment for both of us. I felt like we truly bonded. I felt like I could make a difference, and I told her not to hesitate to talk to us whenever she had a doubt about the science behind her treatments. I felt like our sacrifices were not in vain. I felt a spark of joy after months of darkness. It was worth it.
Boy, was I wrong.
As I discovered a few weeks later, she only acted like she was listening. My wife told me later that this relative of ours does this when she does not want to be caught red-handed or to avoid being reprimanded. In fact, ‘alternative’ cures and prayers to ‘cure’ her from her cancer never went anywhere at all. They have been always there, threatening to undo everything good achieved so far. Pseudoscience is her bread and butter. She kept on inviting home no-vax & no-mask family members. One day, her sister decided to be vaccinated only because one of their brothers died of Covid-19 complications and because my wife insisted for her to get the blasted vaccine. But for me that was it. I drew the line then and there. If in order to get one person vaccinated another one has to die, there’s no point in doing anything. We already lost. I couldn’t take so much stupidity anymore. I threw in the towel.
What a failure. What a disaster.
Dealing almost on a daily basis with all the pseudoscience, no-vax & no-mask antiscience, and religious fundamentalism there proved to be too much for me. It opened my eyes and provided me with an unhoped for key to understand the crazy world in which we currently live in. But enlightenment also brought despair the likes of which I never experienced. It broke me. Despite an academic career in Religious Studies, Cognitive Science of Religion, History of Science, and Epistemology, I felt totally powerless. It was – and still is – beyond frustrating. It’s sad, and it is truly maddening.
As if this was not enough, upon our return we had to witness the descent into no-vax madness of both a long-time high-school friend of ours and one of the closest BFFs of my wife. To see these two individuals so helplessly engulfed in a maelstrom of no-vax clichés while ticking all the pseudoscientific boxes – like advocating for free speech and tolerance between equal positions (as if a no-vax stance was a legitimate and epistemically warranted position), decrying pro-vax “propaganda” as “terrorism” to engender a “state of fear”, and denying the usefulness of getting useful information from the right media sources by saying that there are “better things to do with our time than this” – was simply heartbreaking. And terrifying – our high-school friend was among the top students of our school. How the mighty have fallen…
The bottom line is, we’re all in this together, and what goes around comes around. If you’re lucky, you may escape the virus itself that causes Covid-19, but you can’t escape the current infodemic of conspirational post-truth. Covid-19 pseudoscience – just like Brexit, MAGA, the resurgent radical right, and QAnon – is dividing and destroying kith and kin all over the world. Such scars won’t heal. We are at a historical crossroads. Our democracies are in danger. As I told my ailing relative: you have the power, and the responsibility, to save yourself and your dearly beloved by keeping yourself updated on everything scientific you need to know. Ask real experts, trust your doctors. Stop following social media. Stop watching MD wannabes on TV. Stop listening to televangelists’ podcasts. Get your fundamentalist superstitions in check. You have the responsibility to look for the most epistemically warranted information out there. There’s no excuse for ignorance today because ignorance kills. And your ignorance can kill others.
Also, just to be clear, ignorance cuts across all layers of society – it’s not just fundamentalist reborn Christians who are enthralled by bonkers pseudoscience. The anthropologist who was my MA dissertation supervisor at my alma mater passed away in April 2020 because of Covid-19. I clearly remember he believed in ‘traditional’ medicine and shamanic superpowers. Now, I am in no position whatsoever to link those specific pseudoscience-related beliefs and the chances of getting ill during a pandemic, as I ignore the circumstances in which he got ill, but I cannot but find this correlation chilling, all the more so because getting ill was – and still is – entirely avoidable with the adoption of basic behavioural vigilance, masks, and hygienic routines. And vaccination of course, if and when available.
All of this to say that if my wife and I are facing an uphill battle against our relative’s cancer, we are all enrolled in a war against this deleterious mixture of scientific ignorance and religious superstitions. And it’s a battle we seem to be losing, nay, one that we can’t win. Paradoxically, insofar as my personal family microcosm is concerned, the situation would be more manageable if only that particular relative and her closest family members were more trustworthy, more helpful, more engaged with science – or at the very least more willing to listen and learn. But, alas, they’re not. It takes too much time and effort for them to listen and learn even the most basic things. And during a pandemic, time is a luxury we don’t have. How could they be listening anyway, when there’s the Bible and their Brothers and Sisters in Christ to help? What good is science for, when you have the most venerable and inerrant word of God on your side? How can you convey the efficacy of vaccines when such individuals even lack the basics to understand how a virus works or what a human cell is? How can you convince them that they should always wear a mask and cover their mouths and their noses to protect not just themselves but also those they love? Even though I think that the ultimate culprits are elsewhere (ignorant ministers and criminal preachers, social media platforms and echo chambers, mass media infotainment, neoliberal defunding of academia – I’m looking at all of you), I cannot help but feeling like I should have done much more, and I blame myself for failing so spectacularly.
Cosplaying as a human pincushion. 20 August 2021 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Leonardo Ambasciano.
Despite my pessimism, I should have no regrets. I did what I could. Probably, even more than most. Meanwhile, I am scheduled for my chickenpox booster shot in a couple of days. And I will be asking about meningitis, encephalitis, and HPV vaccines as well. I just have to move the appointment with my reflexologist on that same day... nah, just kiddin’.
Notes
Please note that this post was originally written between late August and late October 2021. Since then, I slightly updated the text. In the meantime, I also got my chickenpox booster shot, and I am now scheduled for my MenACWY vaccine.