One day, historians will conclude that silliness was by far the deadliest virus of our time

Soms, very occasionally, when some news trickles in about Israel and Hezbollah firing rockets at each other or when knowledgeable analysts talk about Putin’s other nefarious expansion plans, I suddenly get nostalgic for the time when there were still virus madmen stood on the Malieveld.

The world somehow felt more organized when public enemy number one was a dance teacher and the social fuss was mainly concentrated around clandestine, because church services were too massive in such a community with a somewhat smaller gene pool.

Especially when the pandemic was coming to an end and there were hardly any deaths, there was something almost innocent about getting excited about a group of mothers who concluded, based on formulas found on Facebook, that it was wiser not to have their offspring vaccinated. They always had many children, because although people like that were obviously very good at arithmetic, they were often just a little bit better at that other form of multiplication.

Homesickness almost took over, until I read Maarten Keulemans’ piece about the sharp decline in vaccination willingness in the Netherlands since the same corona crisis. According to an extensive study by Unicef, the number of Dutch people who consider vaccines ‘important’ has since fallen from 90 to 70 percent, with the result that the vaccination rate among babies and toddlers fell below the limit needed to prevent outbreaks of, for example, prevent polio.

In addition to the strictly religious and anthroposophists, this decline is on the one hand among people with a migration background and practically educated people who are distrustful of the government. And on the other hand, among highly educated millennials who, thanks to the nonsense of a series of influencers, question mainstream medicine and are distrustful of the government.

In the Wednesday newspaper, Haro Kraak spoke with a number of those new vaccine refusers. For example, with a woman who finds it terrible that four babies have recently died from whooping cough, but nevertheless refuses to have her own children injected. Scientists could claim that the vaccine in question offers 90 percent protection, but based on their own research they considered its effectiveness ‘unproven’.

The more likely problem, she said, is that people are eating far too unhealthy foods. ‘When I see the average shopping cart, I understand why children are so affected by a disease like measles.’

My homesickness for the Malieveld was gone, because I suddenly remembered how a subject about which there is no debate at all in scientific circles can still lead to extremely tiring discussions at circle anniversaries.

How many times had I had to listen in bewilderment to the discourse of some fool who had never studied for it, continuously mixed the facts with self-interest and built all his arguments on quicksand, but was still one hundred percent sure that the world was crazy was becoming, instead of himself.

“I’m just asking questions,” one of those people who refused the injection would say, but the only question that really mattered was: how can something that I don’t understand be the truth in a world that revolves around me?

The answer was always the same: that’s impossible.

Later, when historians take stock of this time, it will appear that silliness was by far the deadliest virus of our time, followed by pure selfishness, intellectual overconfidence, mumps, polio, whooping cough and measles.