How to deal with those dastardly anti-vaxxers

IN Busting Anti-Vax Myths: Seriously EXPERT Arguments for the Covid-deniers in your Life, an author writing under the nom de plume Professor Oisin MacAmadain, a member of staff at the Termonfeckin Institute of Expertise, takes us through the many manifest untruths, the misinformation and far-right (very far-right) views on one of the most ‘dangerous’ things to enter our lives, Covid-19.

Before I start, I must stress that this is a spoof take on the arguments and ways to deal with the many anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, mask refuseniks and those who disobeyed all the rules.

The book starts with the story of how Covid originated. Our minds are cast back to a video coming out of China about a man walking around a district of Wuhan. He sneezes and then he and everyone around him drop dead. This made-up video, though, was not far from the truth. Remember what it was like if you coughed or sneezed in a shop during the early days of Covid; people backed off because they thought you were going to kill them. How we laugh now, but it was what we were all led to believe about the ‘deadly virus’.

MacAmadain covers the naming of variants using letters of the Greek alphabet and scoffs at people who criticise this. He is also clear that the Omicron variant is not ‘moronic’ and that, indeed, there were probably going to be so many variants that we would soon reach Omega and have to move on to other alphabets.

Thus the book gets off to a great start and it is gripping from the first chapter. The humour is relentless. Considering the issue of the ideal Covid classroom, MacAmadain receives a letter from Germany giving an account of what school life has been like. The teacher states that they start the day by questioning the students on their vaccination status and those with three jabs are allowed to play the traditional ‘geese marching game’, which, as she explains, is ‘an old game we have here in Germany, a bit like you with your ring around the rosy’.

Moving onwards we come to ‘Oisin’s Guides to Factchecking’, in which he teaches us how to correct the people who are spreading misinformation on social media. An example of this sort of propaganda was ‘lockdowns cause more harm than good’. Oisin gives us a study from the University of Expertise, which states that lockdowns have increased happiness levels due to an ‘augmentation of time spent loafing and eating takeaways’. And there was I thinking that the lockdowns were too harsh and too long.

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