“Hi there long time”
The message came at 1:06am, startling me from my sleep. I didn’t bother reading it until the morning and was surprised to see it was from a very emotionally fragile friend I used to chat with on occasion years ago. The last message he’d sent me (and the second last message) was November 15, 2015. That was a month before my ex-fiancé asked me out. So very much has happened since then and he was interested in none of it. He certainly had tonnes to say about the “truckers”, covid-19, and vaccinations though. And I immediately noticed the same thing I’ve noticed for several decades.
There’s a group of people who simply don’t think, or at least they don’t think very much. Let me explain. Years ago I had a friend that I met while briefly running our community group. She was easy going and had a good sense of humour. Later I discovered she was a rabid antivaxxer and after that, on Facebook, I realized the depths of her hatred and distrust of all things science and medical. One day she tagged me in yet another post containing a link to an article. I read the article and was surprised to see the author had provided three sources, all of which were reputable papers. Sources weren’t exactly a common site on these pages. Then I clicked on the links and every single one of them went to an article that said the exact opposite of what the author had claimed. The author knew their audience and knew no one was going to check sources. Which is so patronizing and insulting when you think about it. The author was basically saying, “I know my article is wrong and here are three articles that prove me wrong but I know none of you will bother to look or think to question me so here it is.”
I find it ironic this crowd calls everyone who disagrees with them “sheep” for blindly following the mainstream media and “big pharma”. They scornfully claim that Reuters can’t be trusted but will totally believe everything written on a small page with no credentials or corresponding education. They claim that Big Pharma (as if every doctor, nurse, pharmacist, lab technician, and so on are a conglomerate) is only in it for the money unlike alternative medicine. Umm, yeah, about that. See the photo above? That’s Mercola’s mansion in Florida. Alternative medication’s not cheap and he’s reaping all the benefits – one hand shoveling in the money while the other hand forming a trumpet around his mouth as he yells, “Big Pharma only wants your money!” And they move on over, in herd formation, because what’s being sold is natural. Forgetting that nature kills quite regularly. Shelling out money for plain water because it has “memories” of poison. Water doesn’t have a brain, it has no memories. It has cells and if those changed it would cease being water. Besides, if water could remember everything it came in contact with, we’d be drowning in frigging memories every time we had a glass. But someone said it’s true and who needs evidence.
Then there’s the broken telephone news where bits of information are passed around and around (and around again) without anyone questioning whether it’s true. It must be true! So-and-so just told them! And so I cycle back to the friend I mentioned in the beginning who informed me that he’s seen “many times” that the pamphlets that come with the vaccines are blank. Of course I’m like “what pamphlet?” because I’ve never got one and I’m sure someone in my family would have said something if they’d been given a blank folded sheet of paper when they got vaccinated. Then he claimed it was in the package and I was still all ??? because I never got a package either. Finally he told me it was the insert that came with the vial and the pharmacist got it. So if the pharmacist got it how did he see many of them? Does he sit in the pharmacy only area with all the meds and watch? I didn’t even bother to ask. Instead I went onto Google and did a quick search. The information popped up right away. As usual, there was a slight grain of truth buried inside a ball of misinformation. Yes, Johnson & Johnson put in blank inserts… nearly blank inserts. They had a QR code at the bottom of the page. That way people could scan the code and get the most up to date information, which was the exact opposite as the rumour claimed. I’ve watched the Instagram video (the middle link in the article I shared) and the woman looks younger than me. I have no idea why she doesn’t know what a QR code is, let alone how it works. You’d think she’d be curious enough to scan it.
I was a precocious child, reading the paper and the Reader’s Digest when I was maybe a smidge into being a preteen. Most adults were impressed by my reading habits. My grandfather wasn’t one of them.
“Watch what you read,” he’d warn me. “Just because someone says something’s true doesn’t mean it is.”
“You’ve got to watch the Reader’s Digest,” he’d continue. “They publish that medical section and make everything sound like medicine that will be out tomorrow instead of research that might not be out for another decade or so. They set people up for a huge disappointment. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
“Don’t take anything at face value,” he’d say. “Check the sources and check their sources if you can. Anyone can make a mistake.”
I wish everyone had a grandfather like him.