For this pandemic denier, the protection is the danger – no matter what his doctor says

Don’s emails come sporadically. They included links to blogs, videos and websites that claimed the COVID pandemic is a fraud and that the vaccines against it are dangerous.

It’s the kind of commentary editors usually ignore, but it’s proving too pernicious to dismiss. A significant number of Americans see the pandemic as a plot. Now their fantasies are producing a harsh reality: The stubbornly unvaccinated are fueling a new wave of the pandemic.

I called Don and asked he was discouraging vaccinations.

He said, “If you thought somebody was going to take something that would lead to their death, don’t you feel you’d do something to prevent that? That’s how I feel.”

Of course, Don has his mission exactly backward.

Don, 86, lives in Hillsborough. He said he has a law degree and a master’s of business administration. He worked for eight years as a lawyer and then for 35 years as an investment banker. He sounded lucid and sensible even as he said things that were not.

“You have the CDC, the World Health Organization and the NIH all pushing hard to get everyone vaccinated. In the meantime, there are more people who have died from the vaccination than are known,” he said.

The CDC says deaths reported after vaccination are 0.0019% of those vaccinated, and in most of those cases there is no established link to the vaccine as the cause of death.

Don didn’t want his last name used. Not because he feared criticism, he said, but because he worried that his points would not be properly expressed.

Needless to say, Don doesn’t wear a mask and isn’t vaccinated, though he has taken vaccines in the past. He voted for Donald Trump.

While Don’s denialism is disconcerting, it was reassuring to hear he wasn’t getting far with it, even with his wife. She’s fully vaccinated.

“I tried to convince her not to,” he said, but common sense prevailed. “Our daughter is a nurse and she took charge of her and took her off and got her vaccinated.”

And is his wife OK? “So far, so far,” he said.

Don’s doctor also told him to get vaccinated. He said, “I’ve had a debate with my doctor on that. I’ve tried to convince her, but the medical profession is pretty much all in on this.”

But not, Don said, 100 percent. “There are some very prestigious doctors that are speaking out about this and they are not quacks. They’ve done their homework,” he said.

Ahh, homework. What animates those with a conspiratorial mindset is that they’ve discovered what the general population doesn’t know.

“You’ve got to do some digging. You’re not going to get it from the media, you’re not going to get it from the government and you’re not going to get it from the medical profession,” he said. “You gotta dig. It’s there and it’s frightening.”

Don is right about that. It is out there. It’s wrong, but it’s out there. And that’s frightening.

After we spoke, Don sent me links to some of the rabbit holes he does down to discover that the vaccine is apparently part of an eugenics plan pushed by Bill Gates, that hospitals inflate the numbers of COVID cases to get paid more by the government, that many more people have died from the vaccine than the CDC reports, and on and on.

For Don, it’s part of a plot to weaken the United States. “Globalists want one government for the entire world and the United States has been a barrier to that,” he said. “If they knock down the United States, they don’t have that barrier anymore.”

It seems such a simple thing. To fight an infectious disease, vaccinate the people. But there seems no cure for the other pandemic – misinformation.

All we can do is keep talking sense about getting vaccinated and hope that the pandemic, in its course, exposes the nonsense.

Meanwhile, I hope Don’s doctor wins the debate.