I love vaccines because I love science

I’ll be taking COVID the vaccine the second it becomes available

I love science. I’ve always loved science. But the appearance of three COVID vaccines – and the news that we’ll be able to start administering one within a week has reminded me how much I love it. Sadly, the inevitable carping from the anti-vax squad has reminded me that not everyone feels this way, but we’ll come back to this.

My love of science has its roots in my 70s childhood. As a kid, I devoured science magazines – Discover, Popular Science, the comic Science, the sciencey parts of National Geographic and the bits of New Scientist I could understand. I lapped up wild predictions of the future – bases on the Moon and Mars. Flying cars. And sexy robots (which, weirdly, are the only part of those futures that are likely to come true in my lifetime).

The 60s and 70s were the Golden Age of the scientist. Science delivered new marvels almost daily. Via the green revolution it had helped to feed the world. It was showing us the wonders of the universe and would take us to infinity and beyond. My friends’ dads were engineers and scientists. They talked about the truly great scientists in the kind of awed tones we now reserve for billionaires and celebrities. Brilliant men who would deliver a gleaming future (brilliant women too but as this was the 70s, they rarely got the credit they deserved).

Scientists were the Gods of the technocratic society I grew up in. As for actual God, pah, science had made him obsolete. I confidently believed that my children would grow up in a world where religion and superstition had been banished to the sidelines. So now, as I sit, flicking through a Twitter feed that includes 5G truthers, anti vaxxers, corona deniers, Trumpists, born again believers,  and Soros conspiracists I wonder what the hell happened.  

OK, you could argue, those gleaming labs delivered quite a lot that was bad as well as good. If I look for the negatives, I could easily reference Thalidomide, Chernobyl, DDT, Silent Spring and plastic pollution. Industrial might may have made us masters of the world, but it often did so at the expense of other living creatures. I agree that science has been commandeered by consumerism, and repurposed for profits rather than public good. iPads not space travel. We seem far keener on treatments that afflict the well off (like AIDS) than those that kill the poor (like Malaria).  So, perhaps I can see why science has lost its 70s’ shine.

What is harder to understand though is why we replaced our rationality with madness. You can be sceptical about pharmaceutical companies without being a raving anti-vaxxer. You can be dubious about the real value of smartphones without believing that 5G is government mind control... 

Or perhaps you can’t. Perhaps, to adopt the quote popularly attributed to GK Chesterton (but actually said by Émile Cammaerts)

“When you stop believing in science, you don’t believe in nothing. Rather, you become capable of believing in everything.”

But why now?

Crank beliefs have always been with us (I can just about remember the mystical woo of the 70s). But what is different this time round is social media. If you believed in the healing power of crystals or paedophile pizza rings or alien mind control circa 1978, your peer group was limited  and your friends would tell you were talking rubbish. Now, thanks to Facebook, you can connect to cranks all over the world who will tell you, you’re right. 

The result is a kind of Enlightenment in reverse. A war on expertise in every field. Open denial of global warming as glaciers provably retreat and hurricanes demonstrably worsen. Tweets about 5G mind control sent from, err, 5G phones. And most recently and tragically the awful spectacle of Trump supporters in hospitals, denying the existence of COVID, sometimes literally, until their last breath. It’s not just science either. We’ve had enough of other experts too – and British government, having bungled the pandemic is now pressing full steam ahead into a Brexit that nearly every economist says will make us poorer and less influential on the world stage. 

In the face of such deep-seated wilful ignorance, it’s tempting to give up. You shrug, and say that, yes, it is possible to fool all of the people all of the time. You repeat the rather good line that Facebook has radicalised the Boomers in the way that they worried video games would radicalise us. You retreat into your educated, metropolitan middle class bubble, give up on civic life and politics and hope nobody starts a nuclear war because of something they read on Twitter.

I was contemplating this. Just stop engaging. Spend my time enjoying life, taking bracing walks, drinking good wine and reading books on the decline and fall of past empires. But then two things happened. First Joe Biden won on a moderate, rational and sensible sounding platform. Second, science delivered a hat trick of COVID vaccines. 

Now this isn’t a Hollywood ending where the scales drop from everyone’s eyes and they turn confused to each other and say, “What were we thinking?” Even now, only 66 percent of Americans say they’re happy to be vaccinated – and 74 million people voted for Trump. Our own fool of a Prime Minister continues to maintain that believing in Brexit is enough. But perhaps it’s a sort of turning point.

I certainly hope so. Because we’re going to need science and grown-ups over the next few decades. The thing is COVID is not our greatest challenge. It’s not even Brexit. It’s global warming. If we are to mitigate the effects of global warming – and survive as a civilisation, we’re going to need all the science we can get. Specifically we’re going to need to decarbonise our energy supply (here I’m cautiously optimistic), move to lab-grown meat and work on carbon capture (removing some of  the CO2 we’ve already dumped into the atmosphere). All this while the population rises inexorably to its peak of around 10 billion, sometime around 2060. That is 10 billion people who will want to live like Americans with SUVs and iPads, not Bangladeshis or Malawians, whose carbon footprints are actually sustainable.

Still, if we can hit these three big goals, we might make it. My grandchildren might enjoy a lifestyle similar to ours, albeit cleaner, greener and in an era where Fox News and QAnon are studied by historians. Miss these goals and there’s a good chance they’ll be living in a refugee camp up by the closed and fortified Scottish border. If we want option A rather than option B, science really is the only game in town. It’s our last, best hope. 

That’s why I’ll be taking the COVID vaccine the second it becomes available. Shoot it into my veins. Spike me with that scientific goodness. I’ll have it administered while using a 5G phone. To donate to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Gates. Bring it on.