The rise of the johnny-come-lately anti-vaxxer

‘No way am I having it now,’ said a friend, as she insisted on discussing the latest scare stories.

And she shook her head so violently that her long blonde hair was flung sideways across her face, and the resemblance to an anti-vaxxer in the throes of hysteria was extremely convincing.

But then she regained her composure and said: ‘No. I’ve had my two jabs. That’s enough.’

‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘so you are vaccinated?’

‘Oh yes, but I’ve only had two. I’m not having any more.’ And she emphasised the ‘I’m’ with a smug look that said she was no fool, unlike others unspecified.

This is what is happening now. There is an annoying new kind of johnny-come-lately anti-vaxxer who boasts about being only minimally vaccinated and in their view, therefore, qualified to join the ranks of the persecuted – those of us who decided at the very beginning not to have a single dose, for allegedly lunatic reasons.

It never seems to occur to these semi-vaxxers that they are about as credible to a real anti-vaxxer as a dirty vegan to a fruitarian. Someone who enjoys the odd burger on the weekend should not presume to empathise with a properly translucent nut-job – and by that I mean someone who likes eating nuts.

Being an anti-vaxxer, for me, involved working assiduously to attain mad lady in the attic status. I put in years of neurotically obsessing. I sat at my laptop daily with my hair standing on end searching for details that were hard to find on the internet. I printed off charts and went through them with a red pen. I send hundreds upon hundreds of emails to the one friend I knew who thought like me as we deluged each other in bizarrely niche information we had found on Rumble, or in the annals of the FDA, or the CDC.