COMMENT | On conspiracy and vaccination

COMMENT | Although countries like Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States have done particularly well getting Covid-19 vaccines into arms as fast as possible, vaccine hesitancy remains a serious hurdle. In the US, it has already derailed President Joe Biden’s goal of administering at least one vaccine dose to 70 percent of the US population by today (July 4).

In a CNN poll in April, about 26 percent of US respondents said they do not intend to get vaccinated at all. That is a big problem, given that near-universal vaccination is the only reliable way to end the pandemic. Assuming, for example, that Covid-19 variants as contagious as measles become dominant, achieving herd immunity could require that 94 percent of the population is immune.

In these circumstances, policymakers might be tempted to try to suppress vaccine hesitancy – much of it fueled by conspiracy theories. To believers, the real danger is not Covid-19, but that Bill Gates is using vaccines to implant microchips in our brains.

But aren’t conspiracy theories just another form of free speech? In his classic defence of that principle, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill offers two arguments: those who hold erroneous beliefs are more likely to abandon them in a free exchange of ideas, while vigorously contesting a true belief prevents it from becoming an unexamined prejudice or dogma.

In fact, conspiracy theorists rarely abandon their beliefs through a free exchange of ideas. Conspiracy theories have a “self-sealing” property, whereby new information that challenges the belief comes to be seen as further proof of it. If you try to convince a ...