I was listening to James O'Brien's midday radio programme on LBC yesterday, and was enthralled by what most of the callers had to say about the topic under discussion: whether there was anything in the conspiracy theory that when people got their Covod-19 vaccines, the powers that be would ensure a microchip would be injected into their body to facilitate some form of monitoring or control.
Of course, science is amazing, making almost anything possible. And Governments and powerful people do sometimes misbehave - and nearly always have secret agendas. But malign motives, that require the elimination of most people around the world? Really?
It seemed the rumour on social media and various anti-vaccine websites was approximately this. With the army enforcing attendance at vaccination centres, a minute device would be injected into everyone with a syringe, finding its way through the bloodstream to some spot in the brain where it could be activated by 5G at a given moment. Activation could allow mind control, or lead to instant death. Deaths were to be justified by global over-population. A severe cull was needed. The ones not culled would be managed by electronic means. The rich and powerful would end up in control.
I listened with wonder at what the callers had to say. I caught the last half-hour or so of the programme.
One after another they made their arguments. Most stressed that the vaccination testing had been perfunctory, and the vaccine (if it were a vaccine at all) would be pushed at the public without adequate time to pause and reflect, and conduct a proper assessment. That was suspicious in itself.
Two callers had a strong religious angle, asserting (when pushed to name names by James O'Brien) that the likes of Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Joe Biden (all of them pretty rich) were agents of Satan, and that the Bible had warned mankind of this specific threat, even if it didn't actually refer to the perpetrators (such as Barack Obama) by name. One lady was almost beside herself with frustration that Mr O'Brien was not accepting her sweeping scripture-based beliefs. I was equally struck by a mature-sounding man who, when he began speaking, sounded to me like the calm voice of reason. But then he went on - still in a conversational tone - to accuse James O'Brien of being in league with the Devil. Aha.
Another man asserted that this was class war gone mad. All the rich and powerful wanted to kill all the poor people, whom they utterly despised and considered a waste of space. It would happen automatically: somehow the microchip would 'know' that it was lodged inside a poor person, and then - poof! - that person would be eliminated. And so on.
It was fascinating to hear what people could bring themselves to believe. Equally fascinating (and disturbing) was to realise how narrow or copycat their thinking was. As if they didn't want to think it all out for themselves, but instead preferred to adopt someone else's ready-made point of view - and never mind its absurdity. What kind of life, or personal experience, made you develop that sort of mindset? I felt sure that these callers had a reason for thinking the way they did.
James O'Brien didn't make fun of them. But they got annoyed with him all the same, because of his insistence that they quote their authorities. Where did the information that so-and-so was going to happen come from? Who was saying it? But they wouldn't be specific, or couldn't be, and kept to generalities. I do not doubt that they were convinced by what they had heard, or read, or had been told, and were perfectly sincere. But they didn't persuade me. I just thought them gullible, sadly or dangerously as the case may be, for swallowing a baseless conspiracy theory that was going to deprive them of a way out of the pandemic, and preserve them as potential sources of infection. I do hope they and their dearest stay alive.
I wonder why someone would want to believe that everything about Covid-19 is part of an arcane plot to destroy humanity. Presumably a lot of people have become hyper-mistrustful, and inclined to take extreme measures in self-defence.
So the next question. Assuming that they not simply mad, what is there about modern life that poses the threat they see, and gives them a bunker mentality? I say this as one who grew up with real-life threats constantly in the background, such as cancer that could only be treated by surgery, killer diseases there was no cure for (although eventually they were conquered - by vaccines!), and, in particular, the high likelihood of nuclear annihilation, deliberate or accidental. I therefore feel comparatively relaxed about the slim chance of acquiring a microchip during my eventual Covid-19 vaccination.
Final reality check: If this alleged microchip (or nanochip?) is small enough to inject through the thin needle of those little syringes they use for vaccination, it must be very hard to see. How will the nurse (who must of course be a Satanist, or perhaps an agent of Bill Gates, and fully party to the whole nefarious business) know that she has sucked the chip into the syringe from the sealed vaccine bottle or phial, and that it's then been successfully injected into me? Know, that is, without alerting me with a post-injection scanning device? I mean, I am not stupid*.
* I saw a tracking capsule being injected into Daniel Craig in one of his James Bond films, and the technician checked that it was working with a machine with a screen that went bleep-bleep-bleep. Anything at all like that at the hospital, clinic or vaccination centre will definitely put me on my guard. Maybe I'll have a new 5G phone by then, and can use an app on it to see whether the microchip has got as far as my brain, or has merely got lodged in my left lughole.
