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It is appropriate that in a crazy week of a crazy year, we had the President of the United States, Donald Trump, speaking of the Covid-19 vaccine as “the gold standard in safety”, even as Mogoeng Mogoeng, the face of the judiciary SA widely respected, he was floating in a sham. conspiracies that the vaccine is “from the devil.”
Mogoeng’s judicial colleagues, who stood firm against the government’s capricious lockdown rules this year, will surely be embarrassed that this is the man who remains their putative front man as Chief Justice.
Quite famously speaking at Tembisa Hospital on Thursday, Mogoeng said: “If there is any vaccine that is the work of the devil, intended to infuse 666 into people’s lives, intended to corrupt their DNA … let it be destroyed by fire . “
A day later, under fire from doctors, he said he would not retract his views.
“If there is a vaccine with 666, I want God to destroy it. If there is any vaccine intended to corrupt people’s DNA, I ask God to discontinue it. Any clean vaccine, they have to produce it quickly, ”he said Friday.
Perhaps the best that can be said for his “clarification” is that he preceded it by admitting that he knows absolutely nothing on the subject.
But that still doesn’t absolve him. Mogoeng occupies such an important position, as head of the judicial branch of the state, that his words, and his conspiracy statements, carry immense weight.
This is why Dr. Aslam Dasoo, with the support of a number of leading Covid-19 scientists, wrote yesterday in City Press that Mogoeng’s remarks were such a dangerous’ abuse ‘of his position that he’ should be charged and shown the door now. “
He said, “This is inconceivable, and the action of an ignorant fear monger leads his followers into danger.”
Dasoo’s statement was supported by Professors Shabir Madhi, Glenda Gray, Alex van den Heever, Ames Dhai, and James McIntyre.
Now, there are understandable doubts about a Covid-19 vaccine, as it was developed with an unprecedented rush. But studies of more than 30,000 people have concluded that it is safe, as The Lancet here and the BBC here report. As it happens, none of the studies found the “mark of the beast” in patients.
Although Dasoo agreed that vaccination is voluntary, he said that this right “is at its limit when [someone’s] Lack of vaccination prevents herd immunity from developing, thus perpetuating transmission and exposing others to harm.
In his own defense on Friday, Mogoeng made a technical point: I never said the vaccine was infused with the devil; I just said Yes was.
That is a false claim. The Chief Justice surely knows that many people will not hear this qualifier and will instead see what he said as confirmation of his IQ beliefs at room temperature.
Mogoeng also argued that he has freedom of expression to say what he did. But he, above all, knows that this right does not exist in a vacuum.
As Stephen Grootes convincingly argues in the Daily Maverick, Mogoeng himself ruled in Robert McBride’s defamation case: “Freedom of expression is a right to be exercised with due deference, including the pursuit of national unity and reconciliation”.
The way Mogoeng framed his vaccine scaremongering not only endangered the unit; as Dasoo sees it, it was nothing less than “an incitement to harm.”
Grootes agrees. He notes that at a time when there are thousands of new cases of Covid-19 every day, and as the specter of another financially crippling lockdown looms, “the Chief Justice is questioning the only thing that could save us: a vaccine.”
No one disputes that Mogoeng has freedom of expression; it is his appalling judgment and basic scientific ignorance that has put him in the line of fire.
Bill Gates’s bogeyman …
Clearly, there would be no problem if Mogoeng were law.
But sadly, any claim that vaccines are “satanic” and infused with the “mark of the beast” is simply wrong. No credible scientist would describe this as anything other than hopelessly insane tunes.
So where did the notion come from?
The idea originated among conspiracy theorists and stems from the (nonsense) idea that Microsoft founder Bill Gates plans to use Covid-19 as a pretext for mandatory vaccinations, which would implant a microchip to “track” the people.
This chip, they claim, is nothing less than the biblical “mark of the beast.”
As Yahoo News reported: “The pandemic created the perfect environment for apocalyptic Christianity to merge with anti-government libertarianism, New Age rejection of mainstream science and medicine, and internet-driven gullibility toward baroque conspiracy theories about secret cabals that rule the world through viruses ”.
Although it is a conspiracy driven by a section of evangelicals, all but the most marginalized Christian scholars have roundly rejected it.
Matthew Halsted, associate professor of biblical studies at Eternity Bible College, says he knows of “no reputable biblical scholar or theologian who would endorse the [view that] Covid-19 quarantine or a vaccine is related to the ‘mark of the beast’ ”. (If interested, read his reasoning here.)
Likewise, Steve Fouch of the Christian Medical Fellowship says that vaccines should be commended for eliminating deadly diseases like smallpox.
“People often hear half-truths and little stories that they fear vaccines. But the reality is that they are the greatest life-saving medical technology, except possibly clean water, that we have ever developed, ”he told Premier Christian News last week.
This 666 conspiracy is, in fact, such blatant nonsense that the legions of Covid-19 fact-checkers haven’t even wasted much time on it.
What you may The findings, however, are BBC fact-checks, disproving several other rock-dumb vaccine theories.
Making you believe that the vaccine is made from aborted fetal cells or that it alters their DNA? Tricked into believing that Gates is using the vaccine as a pretext to install a microchip?
Then read the BBC fact check here.
Unoriginal sin
Finally, and perhaps most embarrassingly, this is not even a original conspiracy.
Many of the same things were said about the smallpox vaccine in the 19th century: that it was a ploy by doctors for “profit” and that it was a satanic ruse that would usher in the “end of time.”
For example, the Salisbury Times recorded in 1903 that the vaccine is “the prototype of that modern kind of medical art which would have us believe that its highly remunerative invocations of the vaccine god alone prevent the total extermination of the human race by the smallpox”. .
(Read about that in the conversation, here).
The Economist this week described an 18th-century French cartoon, in which two evil characters chase children with a syringe and drag a smallpox-riddled green monster behind them.
“The people on Facebook who exchange wild theories that Bill Gates wants to insert tracking chips into everyone are the heirs of the 19th century pamphleteers who suggested that people would grow horns if they got vaccinated,” he said.
However, in the end, the smallpox vaccine did not usher in the apocalypse. And that vaccine was a much more rustic affair and a foul test than the slippery vaccines we use today.
In 2020, more than a hundred years later, people are much more technologically advanced and know much more about science.
Well, not all, obviously.
This is a roundup of the web’s best Covid-19 news, featured in today’s FM lockdown newsletter..
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