History lessons!

‘There is no new thing under the sun’ – so wrote King Solomon, putting down for his people lessons to live by (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Other sayings along the same lines might be: ‘What goes around comes around’ and ‘History repeats itself’.

Writing a historical novel brought me up against one aspect of these wise and witty sayings. Through the ages there have been outbreaks of severe and fatal diseases: the Black Death, the plague and various outbreaks of smallpox. I have written about such an event in ‘The bitter and the sweet’ and found in my research that as soon as the cowpox vaccine was produced there sprang up distrust and uncertainty about the whole process – leading to the spread of ‘fake news’. Such as ‘those vaccinated will develop cow-like appetites, make mooing sounds instead of speech and go about on four legs, butting people with their imaginary horns’. These were dismissed as ‘boanthropy scare stories’ and it was believed they were put about by medical critics jealous of Dr Jenner’s discoveries.

Today there are stories being put about concerning the Covid vaccine, with a number of people believing them and therefore refusing to be inoculated. As I said at the start: ‘what goes around comes around’. Smallpox was a nasty disease – so is Covid 19.

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