(OPINION) ETH – Piers Morgan recently took to the Daily Mail and penned a strong rebuke to anyone that opposes the COVID vaccine, stating “America has hit a roadblock in the coronavirus pandemic.
A hard, very dangerous, and completely unnecessary roadblock. Put bluntly, a lot of deluded, ill-informed, shamefully scare-mongered, or simply complacent Americans have got it into their heads that either the covid vaccines are somehow more dangerous than covid itself, or the virus isn’t serious enough to warrant protection from it.
Some of these skeptics believe the insane conspiracy theory that the US Government is using vaccines to plant microchips in their heads to control their minds. (Don’t laugh: a recent Economist/YouGov poll revealed that 20% of Americans really do suspect this.)
Many more, tens of millions of people across the United States, are hesitant to get jabbed for all manner of other reasons ranging from doubts about the vaccine’s efficacy to a fear they impair fertility, damage pregnancy, alter DNA, magnetize you, or even actively help transmit the virus.
These unsubstantiated theories have been fuelled by anti-vaxxer whack-jobs online, and especially on social media. And they have sadly begun to have a very real and deadly influence, as I can personally attest.
I’ve just had covid, the Delta variant, despite being fully vaccinated with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. It was an unpleasant experience and I felt quite sick, as sick as I’ve felt from any illness, but I never came close to being hospitalized or dying. So, the vaccine worked: it stopped me from getting seriously ill”
According to UPROXX, Morgan, who is no stranger to hate mail, went on to explain that when he shared his recent COVID diagnosis on social media and urged everyone to get vaccinated, “I was promptly bombarded with an astonishing amount of utterly insane and incredibly vitriolic responses from the anti-vaxxer brigade — many of them in America…
They didn’t believe I’d had COVID, or if I did, then it proved the vaccines don’t work. They screamed abuse at me for encouraging people to get the vaccines, many branding me ‘Mengele’ after Josef Mengele, the evil Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ scientist who helped create the Holocaust gas chambers and performed deadly experiments on concentration camp prisoners.”
Morgan had lots more to say—lots, lots more—but his conclusion is hard to disagree with: “To win the war on COVID, we need to go to war on the anti-vaxxers — shut them down, get them off the airwaves, ban them from social media, and urgently re-educate their brainwashed followers about the incontrovertible truth around vaccines.”
