There are a lot of easily debunked conspiracy theories out there and I’ve spent many a happy hour over the years taking apart the various ‘Zionist plot’, Chemtrails and ‘Illuminati’ theories that abound on the internet. Many of these conspiracy theories are often harmless intellectual backwaters that give those deluded by them a cause to fight for. A deluded believer in ‘Chemtrails’ is only really going to harm themselves and maybe one or two equally misguided followers.

But, there are some conspiracy theories that have serious real world consequences and you can read about the influences of these conspiracy theories in the book Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch. In history for example, we’ve seen how a Russian forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ helped to inspire a whole movement of Jew hating fraggles with obviously tragic results for the Jewish people and indeed the whole world. In the modern world probably one of the most dangerous and destructive conspiracy theories are the ones surrounding vaccines. Across the world people believe in half baked or plainly dishonest theories and statements surrounding vaccines that can do great harm to individuals, families and whole nations. I

n the West, the science deniers of the anti-vaccine movement can to a large extent be tackled with education. It can also be tackled by individuals who are opposed to such idiocy challenging those who believe in them. The judicious use of the question ‘Smallpox, so what happened to that then?’, often suffices to silence or dismiss those who still believe in the claims by medical charlatans that vaccines are either damaging or ineffective. For those who don’t know the answer to the smallpox question then it is this: Smallpox devastated humanity for centuries but it is now completely wiped out (apart from a couple of lab samples) because of vaccination.

The situation in Islamic countries is tragically different from that of the West. In Islamic countries there are often large numbers of people who are severely lacking in education and access to information and who are therefore vulnerable to the anti vaccine propaganda put out by Muslim clerics. There are all sorts of dangerous and deluded conspiracy theories going round Pakistan with regarding vaccinations. These range from ‘the vaccines don’t work’, ‘they contain pork fat’, ‘they are based on alcohol’ or my favourite bit of lunacy ‘the vaccines are a Jewish plot to sterilise Muslim men’.

The affect of Islam inspired vaccine denial is truly awful and this story from Radio Free Europe (h/t Religion of Peace) about vaccine denial in Pakistan shows just how damaging these conspiracy theories can be in an Islam dominated shithole like Pakistan.

Radio Free Europe said:

Five-year-old Mohammad Ashar Aziz will never be able to walk without orthopedic leg braces.

The youngest of three brothers from a village near Islamabad, he is one of just 17 children in the world — all of them in Pakistan or Afghanistan — who developed paralysis during 2017 from a wild polio-virus infection.

His father, 41-year-old day laborer Hamid Aziz, is disconsolate because he repeatedly had the chance to immunize Mohammad Ashar for free during the past five years.

Instead, Hamid Aziz says he listened to the advice of a cleric in his village, who announced over loudspeakers of the madrasah, a local Islamic religious school, that the vaccine was “not good” for children’s health, and prevented it from being administered to any of his sons.

Whenever teams of government and international aid workers came to his village as part of a massive polio-eradication campaign, Aziz and his illiterate wife, Huma, hid Mohammad Ashar and his siblings and told the vaccination teams there were no children in their home.

“Why didn’t I give the vaccine to my son?” says Aziz, who quit school at the age of 14 and knew nothing about the polio vaccine.

“We believed what our cleric told us, but now I realize that we’ve not done the right thing for our son,” Aziz tells RFE/RL. “We realize how important it was and that we should have let him get the vaccine.”

No, this family really should not have listened to their retarded and hate filled and ignorant Islamic cleric as it has brought them nothing but tragedy. In a way the plight of this family is a very good analogy to what has happened to Pakistan itself. It started out with great hopes of being a secular state but with a Muslim character but over time the government of Pakistan has got more and more Islamic and because of that has got more and more backward. Just as the Islamic cleric speaking rubbish about vaccines has crippled a little boy so have Islamic clerics and their demands crippled the nation of Pakistan.

As the Radio Free Europe piece says, it is Islam or more specifically conservative Islam that is driving the vaccine denial culture of Pakistan. Radio Free Europe said:

Nooran Afridi, a pediatrician at a private clinic in Pakistan’s Khyber tribal region, says one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating polio in Pakistan has been “refusals” stemming from “antipolio propaganda” spread by conservative Islamic clerics in “backward areas.”

One common fallacy in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan with low literacy rates is that the vaccine sterilizes young boys.

Antipolio propaganda also has been fueled by distrust in Western governments who fund vaccine programs — particularly after the CIA staged a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in 2011 to confirm the location of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Since then, some clerics have even issued fatwas saying that children who become paralyzed or die from polio are “martyrs” because they refused to be tricked by a Western conspiracy.

Taliban militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan also have propagandized that Western-made vaccines contain pig fat or alcohol, which are both forbidden in Islam.

As we can see clearly from both this piece and other pieces in this blog’s ‘Now That’s Why Pakistan Is A Shithole’ feature, Islam has brought nothing but social retardation and tragedy to Pakistan. Pakistan is not so much a nation as it is a cautionary tale to warn of what happens when Islam takes over a nation. Pakistan has squandered the social, intellectual and material capital that it had when it became independent from Britain in 1947. It’s neighbour India has prospered greatly since then but Pakistan has descended further and further into the Islamic abyss.