Lies or Facts?

 

Chatting with a friend, it alarmingly became clear that we were on opposite sides of the fence. The friend, I had considered well read and well informed, called the Covid vaccines 'jhol'. Apparently, it gave her close relatives bad vertigo attacks, immediately after the vaccination.

The Greek philosophers had a name for this - correlation causality. Simply put, if you have a bad headache after eating say, cheesecake, for the first time, you might be inclined to attribute the cause of the affliction to the dessert!

Last month, has seen an increasing intolerance of anti vaxers - be it Novak Djokovic or Spotify's Joe Rogan. It has resulted in the deportation of the world no. 1 tennis star and in intrepid singers like Neil Young pulling their music off  the music streaming platform, Spotify. Yet, all over the world, there is an avowed section of the society who continue to decry inoculation efforts. But I think this distrust of the vaccine runs deeper than just the whims and  unexplained fears of the people.

In a lot of education systems around the world, we are taught scientific principles but not asked to imbibe them in our lives. As a daughter of a rationalist doctor, I looked on, aghast, as my educated class eight friends in a premier Calcutta school, hurried home in the middle of a working school-day, to feed milk to the idol of Ganeshji. At night, news reports on TV showed gallons of milk going down the drain, in the collective frenzy that had gripped the nation. It forced me to think - why cramming principles of science didn’t actually translate into everyday scientific thinking.

In the Indian society, everyday life is laced with superstitions and false beliefs often held by the elderly in our family. As educated individuals we, respectfully and indulgently, nod our heads, but guide our children not to believe in the hogwash. But how do we steer them on the internet - an information system replete with gossip, fake information and conspiracy theories?

Nevertheless, we continue to try because teaching them to separate the grain from the chaff is crucial. When I asked my aforementioned friend to justify her vehement claims, she blithely said, 'Google it up!' The fact that Google inundates us with truckloads of unverified claims is not a palatable fact.

Do you cite your sources when you make a claim that runs against scientific beliefs? Do you know how to verify facts on the internet? Did you get your child vaccinated when she was born?  Do you believe in data driven medical and scientific advice or don't you? Unfortunately this is still not part of the education syllabus. It took a novel disease to break our naive expectations that an archaic education system would turn us into skilled thinkers!