An anti-vaxxer philosophy student was accused of ‘talking nonsense’ on Question Time last night after arguing with one of the world’s top experts that the vaccine is more dangerous for young people than catching Covid.
The unnamed man said that tens of millions of Britons had been given the jab even thought the country was ‘operating with incomplete data’, shuffling his notes and telling the panel: anarchism ‘I have looked at the data myself’.
When asked by host Fiona Bruce about why he didn’t believe the experts he replied: ‘I studied philosophy at university’, claiming this had taught him to question authority.
He then referred to Professor Robert Malone, a former vaccine scientist turned skeptic who went on the Spotify podcast to slam the Covid-19 jab, claiming he had invented the mRNA vaccines being used to battle globally.
Fiona Bruce began pointing her pen at him and said: ‘No I don’t think that is the man who invented the vaccine’.And Professor Robin Shattock, head of the Mucosal Infection and Immunity at Imperial College London’s Medicine department, then accused him of talking ‘complete nonsense’ and that it had been designed after research by teams at BioNTech and Moderna.
The unvaccinated man claimed the jab had ‘horrific side effects’. He then said that ‘for young healthy people… the potential side effects’ of the vaccine are ‘worse than the potential side effects from Covid’.
Professor Shattock said: ‘We have far more safety data on the current vaccines as they have been in the arms of billions of people,’ he said, and encouraged him to check the data on risks and ‘serious adverse events,’ saying they are ‘extremely rare’. He said the data on vaccine safety is ‘indisputable’.
The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, who was on the panel, said ‘To the gentleman with his degree in philosophy, which is a very good thing to have, by the way, of course it won’t protect you from a virus, whereas degrees in medicine are probably much more useful in that regard.’
The BBC has been facing criticism after it emerged that Question Time was planning to show an episode to air the views of vaccine sceptics.One woman appearing on the show said she felt she didn’t need the vaccine – believing her body was best to beat it – but admitted her friends had advised her not to reveal she was unvaccinated because ‘people are gonna look at you like you smell.’