You'll be amazed at this simple Clickbait Remedy

So this headline annoyed me.

I'm sure North Yorkshire Live's online sub-editor, or whichever form of Artificial Unintelligence has replaced the sub-editor, thinks this is genius.

It has all the keywords to bring out out the rightwing bots, the tankie Trots, and James Delingpole. The trillion conspiracy bots and the conspiracy theorists who, weirdly, can't work out that the Facebook account called MagatillIdie99 with an avatar that is an upside down union jack and has no friends is in fact a fake.

It's odd, because they're dead good at spotting the conspiracy that mRNA vaccines are being spread across the world in the vapour trails of Boeing 737s. Changing all our genes so we turn orange.

So here we are. A virus spreading. Masks to be worn. Everyone must get a vaccine. Everyone piling on to call everyone else a fool. Including me in this blog of course. All it needs is to mention that John Jackson Serocold, vicar of Helpston, "died suddenly" and you've got a full house of click bait.

Now here's the thing. I used to be a flu researcher, in the former Oxford University Department of Mind Control and Zoology.

And flu is a funny virus. Funny peculiar not ha ha. I had a nice little graph with the name deaths.dat. 

And what that graph showed is that deaths from flu each year vary from loads and loads, almost apocalyptically loads, to not many.

The 1918-19 Spanish Flu (which originated in the USA) killed more people than the actual Great War. I know of a war grave in an English graveyard, of a man who came home from the Western Front and attended his mother's funeral. From flu. And then died of flu himself.

And the  there was nothing for a couple of decades, and then another pandemic. Nothing for a couple of decades then another. Flu lurks quietly like the sentient beast it clearly isn't. Then there's a genetic shift and the world is again plunged into pandemic.

 Because our immune systems can't recognise the virus's newly morphed antigens, it spreads more quickly and is more serious.

Eventually everyone has had it and either died or not. Which is herd immunity, I suppose. 

Most healthy young people resist well - 1918 being the terrible exception when the virus seems to have kicked off terrible immune over-responses in the young, with people drowning in their own blood as their lungs were attacked by their own immune systems. I'm not putting you off your muesli am I?

But people with serious conditions, such as kidney disease, are far more susceptible. People of advanced age likewise. Which is why these people get their free jabs.

And of course even if you're fit and young, flu can put you off work for a fortnight. Which is why many retailers and the NHS often actually pay for jabs for any employees that want them. And have done for ages, without any mind contol effects or mysterious cancers.

 Because it may be heroic to drag yourself in looking like you're at death's door and infecting Mabel who has a heart condition but is looking forward to retiring next month. But you're no bloody use and you put the customers off, coughing and spluttering all over the baked good like the evolutionary success you think you are.

And the headline's not true. The article actually says everyone who is eligible for the flu vaccine. The vulnerable. The ones that might be seriously affected, or might die.

Not you, you pinnacle of evolutionary perfection, who hasn't been exposed to a virus since 2018 because you've only left your desk in your bedroom to go to the toilet in all that time. You'll be fine.

I have a simple remedy for a clickbait headlinee like this. I block the Facebook group that's published it. If we all did, then South Croydon Action, Inner Epping Chronicle and the Husborne Crawley Bugle could just be left to the bots and Trevor from Hartlepool, who thinks he's safe from flu because he's got lizard genes. And maybe one day - you may say I'm a dreamer - these rubbish little local pages will either close down or simply tell us the truth.

At least we can hope.