The Purpose of Conspiracy Theory Is What It Does

In his latest article, David Robert Grimes traces the history of the anti-vaccine movement. Ever since Edward Jennner's early experiments, using a relatively mild disease (cowpox) to protect against a much more serious one (smallpox), people have expressed scepticism, fear, scorn and outright opposition to all forms of vaccination.

Vaccine hesitancy has increased significantly in the last few years, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jim Reed's article also notes that the sheer quantity of vaccinations that are being pushed onto people has resulted in a degree of vaccine fatigue, even among NHS workers.

Those who believe in the efficacy of vaccines, and in the important contribution that vaccine makes to public health, tend to see the anti-vaccine movement as fueled by conspiracy theories, immune to scientific argument because the adversary in this game plays according to rules that are not generally those of science WHO 2007.

In relation to another area that has promoted strong opposition in some quarters, the idea of eating insects as a source of protein, Riley Farrell's article quotes Stephan Lewandowsky, who suggests arguments based not on the content of the beliefs but on their purpose. You're not going to be successful if you say, Uncle Bruce, you're crazy… don't believe this utter nonsense. But instead, you can ask: What function do your beliefs serve? Why are you believing this?

Many politicians and internet celebrities take strong positions on vaccines, bug eating and other topics, and some of these may be cynically driven by the desire to build support and revenue rather than their own private beliefs - for example vaccinating their own families while attacking vaccines for everyone else. For such people, the purpose of these positions may be clear, although they probably won't acknowledge it. But as for Uncle Bruce, it's not at all clear what kind of answer Professor Lewandowsky would expect or accept, or what arguments this would lead to.

Underpinning all of these movements is a distrust of authority, especially governments, big business and scientists. And yet a willingness to trust the biggest businesses on the planet - the tech platforms and their Generative AI tools that add fuel to these theories, and generate income for themselves. Obviously.

 

 

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Riley Farrell, How eating insects became a conspiracy theory (BBC 4 September 2025)

David Robert Grimes, The strange history of the anti-vaccine movement (BBC 5 September 2025)

Jim Reed, Rise of vaccine distrust - why more of us are questioning jabs (BBC 16 January 2025)

WHO Bulletin 27 November 2007 86(2):140–146. doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.040089

Childhood Diseases

Should children be protected against minor diseases? Or are childhood diseases a normal (and perhaps even necessary) part of growing up? 

Some doctors are now recommending routine vaccination against chicken pox (varicella) - there is a suggestion that it might be combined with the (already controversial) MMR vaccine to produce MMRV [BBC News November 8th 2007]. 

Chicken pox killed six children in the UK and Irish Republic last year, and there were 112 cases involving severe complications. So there is certainly a risk. But is this risk high enough to warrant action? Each mass vaccination campaign has

• financial costs - could the same resources deployed elsewhere have delivered greater medical benefits to a greater number of people?

• medical side-effects - possible negative reactions to the vaccination itself in some children, reduced protection against related diseases such as shingles

• social costs - fear of side-effects (whether founded or unfounded) reducing the take-up of all vaccines, not just this one

But I have a more general concern. If this proposal makes sense, then it would make sense for every other infectious disease that kills a small number of people every year. Medical researchers think they understand the effect of a single vaccine on the human immune system, or even a compound vaccine such as MMR. But how would it be if a child never got ill, because every possible disease was preempted by vaccination? Would the immune system develop normally, or would it be weak from lack of exercise? Would new diseases emerge to fill the gap? Will medical research tell us the answers to these questions before it is too late? 

Childhood disease involves some suffering, and a tiny risk of complications and even death, and most parents accept that. If I wanted to protect my children totally from any suffering or risk, then they wouldn't learn to cross the road or ride a bicycle or climb trees; they wouldn't be allowed to use the kettle or the toaster, or bathe in more than 3cm of water; and they certainly wouldn't have any contact with the opposite sex until they were at least 25 years old. This is of course ridiculous - I would be condemning them to a life-without-life. 

While my heart goes out to those parents who have lost their children to childhood disease, I don't think the answer is to eliminate childhood disease altogether. It is a normal part of growing up: it develops the immune system, and equally importantly it develops confidence in the immune system. A child can feel poorly one week, with spots all over her face, and then be back at school the following week: this experience engenders a deep belief in your ability to recover, a belief that however bad you feel right now, you should feel better tomorrow. 

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Update

The Chief Executive of RoSPA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) made a similar point in his 2007 Annual Report.

"Rather than adopt the extremist protectionism of ‘cotton wool kids’ our argument is that a skinned knee or a twisted ankle in a challenging and exciting play environment is not just acceptable, it is a positive necessity in order to educate our children and to prepare them for a complex, dangerous world, in which healthy, robust activity is more a national need than ever before."

Of course this is not an argument dismissing safety precautions altogether, and my blogpost should not be read as an argument against all vaccinations - merely an argument against the extreme idea that we need to vaccinate against every possible condition.

See also

Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do (Ted Talks, March 2007)

Vaccination

Vaccination means dealing with a serious threat by creating and injecting (or disseminating) a feeble and attenuated version of it.

Someone sent me a notice about a conference called The Joy of Work - about management and spirituality - with a tongue-in-cheek comment suggesting he thought it was dangerous. For my part, my heart sank at the thought of all those earnest and jovial people, waffling knowingly about spirituality in a five-star hotel at some fancy Mexican resort. (Nice work if you can get it, though.)

Such conferences are packaged to make them as undangerous as possible. Business is a complex self-healing system, perfectly capable of neutralizing any really dangerous ideas, including spiritual ones. Let's send a few maverick middle managers off to Mexico to be vaccinated - infused with a weak and warm teabag spirituality - so that they will become immune to the real thing. They can then return to their organizations and spout pseudo-spiritual jargon, which in turn increases the resistance to dangerous ideas within these organizations.

Vaccination works by educating and exercising the immune system. A network security manager might try and persuade staff NOT to open weird email attachments by disseminating an extremely weak software virus -- perhaps one that does something mildly annoying and embarrassing -- Code Pale Pink perhaps.



Related posts: Easier Seddon Done (June 2008), Notes on the Value of Culture (January 2010)