Covidiots: The Clay Feet Edition

Boomers like me often live in the past when it comes to musical idols: the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison. to name but three, were the gods at whose altars we worshipped. The problems with gods, however, is that they often have clay feet, something we would have been inclined perhaps to overlook in our younger years.

The time for such willful blindness, however, has passed, especially since some idols are now abusing their power to the detriment of society. Going beyond the incomprehensible and inexcusable anti-lockdown stance taken by fellow-musician Van Morrison, Eric Clapton has gone into the realm of the absurd, claiming that those of us who have acted responsibly by getting vaccinated against Covid-19 are victims of mass hypnosis.

In a new interview for The Real Music Observer YouTube channel, Eric has claimed that [...] subliminal messaging hidden in advertising led people to get the jab. 

His eyes were 'opened' by 

....a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], [who] talked about it.

'And it's great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.

'Then I remembered seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising. It had been going on for a long time: that thing about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." 

'And I thought, "What's that mean?" And bit by bit, I put a rough kind of jigsaw puzzle together. And that made me even more resolute.'

Mass formation psychosis - an attempt to hypnotise groups of people to follow messages against their will - has been widely discredited by scientists.  

What led Clapton into this disordered thinking? It was his personal experience with the AstraZeneca vaccine which, he says, worsened his pre-existing peripheral neuropathy.

In a message to his music producer, he said: 'I took the first jab of AZ [AstraZeneca] and straight away had severe reactions which lasted ten days.' 

The 76-year-old said he 'recovered eventually' but suffered further 'disastrous reactions' six weeks later after the second shot.

He added: 'My hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks, I feared I would never play again...

'I should never have gone near the needle. But the propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone.'

I am certainly willing to admit the possibility that the vaccine, in his case, worsened his neuropathy. However, doctors say that the risks of getting Covid are greater than the risk of adverse reactions from vaccines. In any event, what I find unforgiveable about Clapton's stance is his monstrous ego. Because he says he suffered an adverse reaction, he is now actively discouraging others from getting protection, putting countless lives at risk.

That is not the work of a god. It is more like that of a devil.