Unlike medicines whose main purpose is to treat a disease, a vaccine works more like a tool that helps people to avoid getting sick. This was usually done by introducing our bodies with a weakened or inactive part of the disease-causing organism, resulting for our immune system to recognize the harmful organism and build immunity against it, so that when we got exposed to the actual disease the next time, our bodies would be able to fight the disease and reduce our chances of getting sick or if they get sick, the effects were not that severe. Since the introduction of vaccines, it has helped curb down the spread of many diseases such as measles and pneumonia, as well as the reason to the eradication of smallpox, which has a 30% mortality rate. Even the current lifestyle we have now was saved thanks to vaccines, when the world turned upside down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, despite the millions of people that vaccines were able to save, there are still some who remain skeptical about the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines, which should be fine if their concerns were backed by Science and evidence. But most of the time, they were nothing but conspiracies and misinformation that only risked people of getting sick and, at worst, died from something that is supposed to be preventable. It really blows my mind how people can make such dumb takes, as well as how they were able to convince other people that what they are saying is true despite the lack of evidence.
The time when these conspiracies were at their peak was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that even resulted in people to doubt vaccines used for other diseases. For example, my country has been Polio-free since 2000, but there was a resurgence of the disease by September 2019 that lasted until June 2021, which is related to the fear that stems from the Covid vaccine conspiracy theories.
One of the craziest and, I think, the dumbest conspiracy theory about vaccines was that it contains microchips, which apparently will be used to track people or to control their minds. To begin with, we already have a device that has the ability to track us wherever we are and to know what we are doing to some extent, then sell that information to big companies as well as to the government. It's called a smartphone, and wasn't the misinformation and propaganda on social media doing more than enough job to control people? At the same time, the pandemic has also significantly impacted the supply of materials used in integrated circuits, which leads to a global chip shortage, so how was it possible that while the rest of the tech industry suffers from the lack of materials used in chips, big pharma was just willy-nilly distributing them in their vaccines? Oh, rest the souls of all those people who have to purchase PS5 at $800, if not of those who need to spend $1000-2000 from scalpers due to the lack of chips.
Another dumb theory that surfaced during that time is that vaccines have the mark of the devil by some religious hardliners due to their interpretation of their holy book. Instead, they believed that their faith in their god was more than enough to save them from the virus, which is not only very dumb but also reckless because the followers of this group tend to believe in what their leader says without a second thought and will claim that the reason why a member of their group gets Covid is because they do not have enough faith in god. For these people, no amount of logic and evidence is enough to change their minds. That was until the pastor of that group got Covid and, sad to say, didn't survive. I have my sympathies for the family that she left behind, but she did it to herself.
Some years have passed now since the Covid pandemic, and although the virus is not completely gone, our lives have now returned to what they once were, and that by itself just proves the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines as well as the best way to debunk the many conspiracy theories that attempt to instill fear in people. As you can see, I am one of those people who get a vaccine shot but have no signs of my mind being controlled by Big Pharma, or maybe I am and was just using me to write this post.
Thank you for reading my post, and see you in the next one!
