How to wrongfoot an anti-vaxxer

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic.

But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart. Ronson looks into the rise of the weird and shocking ‘QAnon’ phenomenon in America — a movement persuaded that the United States is in the grip of a vast, hidden paedophile conspiracy, in which powerful figures from the country’s ruling elite are believed to be complicit.