Anti-vaxers

‘Data-free vegans incoming by taxi,’ I texted the builder boyfriend, to alert him to the possibility of triple trouble. Quadruple really, for they were also American. The young eco-tourists from the West Coast didn’t want to switch on roaming on their phones, for they were interrogating me about the route by text while at the airport. I knew they were lefty environmental types because when the girl booked she told me she was travelling to Europe to learn about ‘natural building’. After the course, she and her boyfriend would be heading to Ireland for what she called ‘some misty time’. I don’t know whether that was a euphemism for sex. She would be too young to remember the jazz standard by Erroll Garner, or the Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me.

The solar panel fitter was eating his fried breakfast when the talkative vegans came into the kitchen. They surveyed his plate of bacon, eggs, sausage and black pudding with a look of disgust before helping themselves to cereal, which they doused in the soya milk they had gone to the supermarket to buy, because I refuse to stock milk alternatives. What people eat is now a political issue hotter than the Middle East. It would be easier and safer for me to ask a B&B guest’s views on a two-state solution than say: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ When I ask a guest what they want for breakfast, the vast majority tense up, flush red and begin listing what they will and will not eat, with their myriad complicated reasons.

‘Please do NOT wash up!’ reads the makeshift sign I have fixed above the kitchen sink. It instructs our B&B guests to leave their dirty dishes on the side, which sounds ridiculous. But we cannot convince anyone to put their plates and cutlery in the dishwasher any more, because they all seem to have bought into the latest conspiracy theory. The Canadian was making his way through a plateful of eggs like Cool Hand Luke. He was very young and good-looking, so watching him devour eggs at my kitchen table elicited mixed feelings in me. I couldn’t be cross, given how lovely he looked as he performed his bowel-defying feat. I had set the large platter of scrambled eggs for two down in the middle of the breakfast table as he drank coffee, waiting for his wife to appear.

‘Please do NOT wash up!’ reads the makeshift sign I have fixed above the kitchen sink. It instructs our B&B guests to leave their dirty dishes on the side, which sounds ridiculous. But we cannot convince anyone to put their plates and cutlery in the dishwasher any more, because they all seem to have bought into the latest conspiracy theory. You may think anti-vaxers like me are annoying enough. But please give me credit for never being so barmy as to become an anti-dishwasherer. The anti-dishwasherers are way worse than the anti-vaxers for a whole host of reasons. So far they seem to be flying under the radar of the authorities, and no one in a position of power has taken them on to expose their nonsensical rhetoric.

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn. And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn. On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID.

Until recently, progressive elites had cornered the market in COVID irrationality. They shut down society to prevent one particular threat to human health, oblivious to the costs of that shutdown on the rest of human flourishing. They used a zero-tolerance approach to COVID risk, arguing that if lockdowns prevented just one death from COVID, as New York governor Andrew Cuomo insisted early on, the destruction of social and economic capital would be worth it. They inflated the toll that COVID was allegedly taking on human life, counting hospital admissions and deaths with COVID as hospital admissions and deaths from COVID. They hyped case counts as tantamount to death counts and refused to compare COVID deaths with other sources of human mortality.

The Biden administration is desperate for some fresh ideas as they attempt to convince more Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Between White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Rochelle Walensky, we are constantly hearing about the White House’s latest creative ways to encourage people to get vaccinated. The administration seems eager to push the notion that all of the vaccine holdouts are Trump supporters. Unfortunately for them, recent studies suggest otherwise.

What follows the global pandemic? The global vaccine freakout. European politicians have their knickers in a twist about the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot. The source of the panic was reports from Denmark and Norway that some people who received the British-made vaccine developed blood clots — though there is no evidence yet that the shot is at fault. Over a dozen European nations, including France, Germany, Ireland and Spain have temporarily suspended their use of Oxford-AstraZeneca, in what seems to be a team effort to mistake correlation for causation. Sometimes the world cries out for American global leadership. The US is currently sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. AstraZeneca has yet to apply for FDA approval for their shot.