Dear friend,

After a month, I still cannot get over that short exchange we had at the door of your cottage when you said that you heard about that horse medicine the uneducated are poisoning themselves with. It left me speechless. Then a little later you asked a poetic question: Isn’t it interesting – you said – to see the correlation between vaccine acceptance and level of education. I still cannot get over the revolting, paternalistic condescension of what you said. Then you told me about your doctor friend, who wishes that she could smash the face of the unvaccinated with a coal-shovel to shock some sense into them. As a doctor, she has an alarming level of animosity toward her potential patients. The ones she would NOT treat with bleach or some horse-paste.
Then a day later, your husband, another brilliant intellectual, was trying to explain to me why the Israeli statistics mean exactly the opposite of what they actually mean. In his opinion, if 85% of the hospital admissions involve the vaccinated in a country where 80% of the population is vaccinated, that does not mean that the vaccines don’t work, it means that the unvaccinated are responsible.
I remember you informing me last year that Trump told his followers to drink bleach. You actually believed that. It may be that you still do.  At some point I had to just drop the subject. Continue reading →