Insights jitterbugger named Flu who took me out for a twirl on the hardwood last February. When I was sure she had left the building, I told some smart friends about the experience, and added, “Since I had actually read statistics about the chances of dying from the disease, I was never really worried during the process”. Well, you might have thought I had just joined “Pussy-Grabbers United”. I was swiftly told –despite the clear and unassailable fact that some 90+ percent of the people who get Covid (even those past the age of 70) experience it more or less as I had – that I was indeed “very lucky”. When I asked why they insisted on portraying my experience in this way, I heard, in buckshot succession, about a cousin, the nurse friend of a friend, and, of course, all the people seen in media reports who had suffered much more than me. And all my smart friends all seemed agree that these decontextualised anecdotes had much more to say about the true threat posed by the disease than my tired old set of verified statistics. Somewhat exasperated, I finally responded: “You regularly get on planes to fly because, on one level or another, you know it is quite statistically safe for you to do so. Imagine if, during ten months, you were treated to anecdote after anecdote about the lives lost in air crashes, complete with graphic reconstructions of the
12 ColdType January 2021 | www.coldtype.net
excruciating last moments of the ill-fated passengers. The stats wouldn’t change, but I suspect new doubts would be generated in many of you about the safety of flying. Would it be your right to change your disposition about flying after hearing these stories? Certainly. Would the stories be real? Yes. Would they actually change your chances of dying in an airline crash? No. Those chances would remain exactly the same. So, then it would be your choice as to which part of your brain you were going to listen to when it came to flying.” Silence. And in typical, conflict-averse bourgeois custom, the swift end of the conversation.
Y
ou see, today’s smart people clearly can’t be propagandised. Rather they simply assemble the disconnected anecdotes that are
fed to them by other smart and oh-so-obviously disinterested people provide them and rebottle it as Reality®. And after having demonstrated their passionate and enduring love for Reality® for all to see (after all, you never want to be caught out as being insensitive or obtuse!), they muse superciliously about those poor souls who still believe that charting a sound course in public policy and many other important areas of life can and should revolve more around analysis of the available facts than the telling of evocative tales. CT Thomas S. Harrington is professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His most recent book is A Citizen’s Democracy in Authoritarian Times: An American View on the Catalan Drive for Independence (University of Valencia Press).
Kit Knightly
‘Herd immunity’ gets a new definition
T
he World Health Organisation has changed the definition of “herd immunity” on the Covid section of their website, inserting the claim that it is a “concept used in vaccination”, and requires a
vaccine to be achieved. Both of these statements are total falsehoods, which is demonstrated by the WHO’s own website back in June, and every dictionary definition of “herd immunity” you can find.
