Lucy Carne: Anti-vaxxers don’t want to listen to the truth about the COVID-19 vaccine

Given what is at stake in this pandemic, the people protesting against the COVID-19 vaccine are not advocating for freedom of choice, but for avoidable deaths, writes Lucy Carne.

If ever there was evidence that fake news can sink its claws in deeper than the truth, this is it.

The people protesting the coronavirus vaccine in Brisbane on Saturday are not anti-vax. They are pro-virus.

They ignore the more than 2.46 million lives lost to COVID-19 worldwide and the desperate doctors and nurses pleading for people to be vaccinated.

They distrust empirical research and are immune to evidence-based medicine.

People protested against the coronavirus vaccines at Brisbane Botanical Gardens. Picture: Peter Wallis

Yet they choose to be soiled by the deliberate misinformation oozing from the blogs, Facebook pages and YouTube channels of under-qualified, over-paranoid armchair agitators.

These protesters — senior citizens, young mums and right-wing extremists — marching side-by-side through the streets may as well have been shouting “let us die”.

Given what is at stake in this pandemic, they are advocating not for freedom of choice, but for avoidable deaths.

The absurd irony is that they preach their propaganda from the protection of herd immunity — courtesy of a vaccinated community.

By denying science, activists advocated in favour of avoidable deaths. Picture: Peter Wallis

They have never had to bury babies taken by measles or witnessed a child permanently paralysed from polio.

They have never known the pain of farewelling a dying loved one over a phone, listening as COVID silences their final struggling breaths.

And they can march the streets mask-less, thanks to Australia’s locked borders, which economically we cannot sustain for much longer, hence the vaccine.

Anti-vaxxers choose to ignore science and fact over fake news. Picture: Peter Wallis

The reality overlooked in all of this madness is that no one will be forced to have the coronavirus jab. But what use is fact to people who think being asked to use hand sanitiser is an attack on their human rights?

COVID-19 is a war between humanity and a virus. But as yesterday illustrates, it has instead become an embarrassing bunfight between anti-vaxxers and truth.

If only we could vaccinate against the hysterical fake news infecting these poor people.