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LETTER: Conspiracy theorists are a lethal virus in society

Pandemic will be unnecessarily prolonged if government tries to appease anti-vaxxers
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Like most people, I am tired of COVID and the pandemic. But I`m most tired of the government and businesses not doing more by making it mandatory that people get vaccinated. Businesses can and must tell their workers either to get vaccinated or don’t show up for work.

The government, on news that the Central Okanagan has been told to re-mask due to a big spike in COVID, and the Delta variant, needs to take a page from the French president who has ordered that without proof of vaccinations people cannot go into stores, go to work, go to restaurants or anywhere else. The day after his announcement, a million people signed up for vaccinations.

The role that conspiracy theorists have played in causing vaccination hesitancy is blatantly obvious. What is also blatantly obvious is that people who are addicted to conspiracy theories are domestic terrorists and should be treated as such. We have to get over this idea that all opinions have equal value as they clearly don`t. There is science and fact-based evidence which has been peer-reviewed and proven effective.

The conspiracy mob that denies that COVID even exists have nothing but online garbage. Their evidence is nothing more than quoting from other conspiracy theorists who have absolutely no knowledge or facts, nothing but hearsay, innuendo, and bizarre ideas that vaccinations are some sort of bio-weapon designed to reduce the world’s population. What is reducing the world’s population are the millions of deaths from this insidious virus.

Charles Darwin said it best back in 1871, and it can be applied to conspiracy theorists and Fox & Friends today.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

There is no reasoning with anti-vaxxers, so stop trying. Their confidence in their ignorance does not allow actual facts or pleading to do the right thing into their thick skulls.

They don’t believe in the virus. They don’t believe that they are contributing to deaths and the spread of the Delta variant and serving as potential breeding grounds for perhaps even more deadly variants because they smugly know – not just believe – they are right and the world’s scientists are wrong.

When H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, he was worried that society was dividing into two. We are clearly divided into two over COVID with the anti-vaxxers assuming the role of the Morlocks, the troglodytes bullying society with their ignorance like glorified schoolyard bullies. We need our political leaders to do what the French president has done and say enough is enough.

If that hurts the feelings of our present-day troglodytes then let me be clear, I don’t care. We can’t be afraid to hurt people’s feelings when staying silent might get us killed. Conspiracy theorists themselves are a lethal virus in society and need to be vaccinated against with critical thinking as they are as dangerous as the virus itself is.

This pandemic and the suffering it has caused will be unnecessarily prolonged by the government trying to appease anti-vaxxers who deserve contempt, not respect. And respect is one thing I will never give conspiracy theorists and their loopy ideas.

Robert T. Rock

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