Perhaps the least interesting thing about this talented young couple is that they are unvaccinated against Covid-19. When I meet them at their house in a wooded suburb outside Vienna, I am almost embarrassed to ask about it. But they carefully explain how, for reasons of mistrust, caution and, as they see it, integrity, they have decided not to take the Covid vaccine — and how this fact is suddenly defining their whole lives.

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: it’s the world’s first “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. It was introduced in response to rapidly rising cases and a lack of excess capacity in Austrian hospitals. “It is not a recommendation, but an order,” announced the Interior Minister Karl Nehammer at a press conference. “Every citizen should know that they will be checked by the police.”

It is, essentially, a ratcheting up of the regime of vaccine passports that exists already in many countries across Europe, whereby unvaccinated people are already excluded from restaurants, museums and theatres. But to place a minority of the population under partial house arrest does seem to cross a new line.

The Brazilian-born Mia has already had Covid and, in the Austrian “2G” system, proof of recovery affords you the same status as if you had been vaccinated — albeit for a period of six months. So, for now at least, she is allowed out and about. Chris is stuck at home. He describes it as a “brainfuck”. Attempting to remain philosophical about it, he explains how he tries to tune out the relentless fear coming out of the TV and keep control of his own mental state. “I don’t want to be dependent on these kind of things to be happy.” But the sense of alienation and unease is palpable. What will the future look like? He is supposed to be performing in Paris before Christmas; who knows if he will get there.

Back in the old town, alongside the fancy boutiques of the Kärntner Straße, it’s a very different world. Affluent shoppers are out and about in the crisp November air, and they are more than happy to share their views with us.

“I think it comes much too late,” says one woman. “They’re crazy. All the trouble we have is due to those people that believe in, I don’t know, that the earth is flat… If the majority of society depends on idiots, then they can’t be helped and it’s the end of society!”

Her view is typical — there is very little sympathy here, and a good deal of frustration. Only a few voices take the opposing view, and they tend to be passers-through more than the wealthy locals; the doormen and deliverymen we try to talk to just shake their heads. One man simply describes the latest lockdown as “bullshit”.

What is striking is that very few think the policy will actually work. Covid levels per capita have shot up in recent weeks, and Austria now has one of the highest case rates in Europe. The rationale behind the lockdown is that it will increase the level of vaccination (low for a Western European country at 65%); but even supporters of the move predict that it will be followed up by more universal measures soon enough. The Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg openly explains that the policy is a heavy-handed “nudge”: “My aim is very clear: to get the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, not to lock up the unvaccinated,” he told ORF radio station.

On a practical level, though, the logic of the new rules does not withstand much scrutiny: unvaccinated workers are permitted to travel to and from work, and they work disproportionately within the hospitality sector. This means that they are currently allowed into restaurants and bars to serve, but not to consume. In any case, if there were only vaccinated people in a venue, that wouldn’t necessarily make it Covid-free. Many places require daily testing for non-vaccinated staff, yet not for the vaccinated, leading to the odd situation where the unvaccinated are “safer” than the patrons.

It feels like a bit of a stand-off. The vaccine issue has become a show of strength, a test of principles. As Ivan Krastev, a political scientist at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences, tells me: “When some of the anti-vaccine people said, ‘we are ready to defend our freedoms’, the basic message of the Government was, ‘Okay, let’s see what price you are ready to pay for them.’ The idea of this measure is to make people uncomfortable.”

One peculiar feature of this dramatic new measure is the silence of the liberals. Why are the bien-pensant Viennese, usually so concerned with the rights of minorities, so relaxed about a measure that in other contexts would seem outrageously draconian?

Somersaults of logic have been performed to assert that the policy is more liberal than the alternatives. For one thing, they say, it stops short of an actual vaccine mandate, which just about keeps alive the notion of personal choice; for the majority, it offers the hope of avoiding another lockdown, so seems to them to be a lesser intervention. And, unlike in neighbouring Italy, the unvaccinated can still work, with tests being provided at public expense. In Austria, across the West, there is no one left to assert the rights, or even try to understand the motivations of this despised minority, the anti-vaxxers. They are the new deplorables.

To interrogate this seeming contradiction, I visit Professor Manfred Nowak, one of Europe’s pre-eminent human rights lawyers, at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has dedicated his whole life to the upholding of human rights and the defence of oppressed minorities against arbitrary detention and mistreatment. Former Special Rapporteur to the UN on Torture, current Secretary-General of the European Campus of Human Rights, activist against Guantanamo Bay, UN Independent Expert on Children Deprived of Liberty — the list continues. I expect him to be a little concerned about the potential direction of travel in his home country of Austria.

He wasn’t. He thinks the policy doesn’t go far enough. “From a human rights perspective, you always have to balance the obligation to protect the right to life, the right to health, with interfering with other rights such as personal liberty,” he tells me.

He wants to make vaccination mandatory, with refusal equivalent to a traffic offence, resulting in a fine rather than a criminal record. He is also worried about how this partial lockdown might affect an already divided society — but he is unconcerned about the human rights or civil liberties implications. Do you not even have a twinge of anxiety about the shift in democratic norms, or whether such discriminatory policy might be applied in different settings, I ask? “No, not really,” he says, with admirable candour.

The final component in this lockdown mix is, of course, politics. In most European countries there are no mainstream political parties that could be described as “anti-vaccine”, but Austria has the populist, right-wing Freedom Party, which was part of the coalition government until 2019; it has made vaccination choice a central issue. The FPÖ organises regular rallies in cities around Austria, and its new leader Herbert Kickl is gaining popularity by condemning Covid policies as “corona fascism”.

Having thus turned vaccine hesitancy into a “right-wing” political campaign, Kickl has managed to put a face to the dissenting minority — and it’s not one that many people like. As a result, instead of thinking of the unvaccinated as a vulnerable, if misguided, group and one worthy of protection and respect, they have become viewed as an extreme political enemy who must be defeated.

It would be hard to think of anyone less threatening or extreme than Mia and Chris. Alternative, certainly; anti-establishment, yes. But good people who in any healthy, confident culture would be cherished and celebrated. Allowing them, and millions like them, to drift into a caste of untouchables, separated from the mainstream, all for the sake of a marginal gain against a virus that is rapidly becoming endemic, may prove to be a grave miscalculation with effects that will be felt for years to come.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

More from this author

What we're not being told about ME

By Tom Chivers

The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong. 

And it’s true that all five groups are wrong, or at least their central claims are. The earth is in fact an oblate spheroid; the climate is warming, due to human influence, and will likely have severe negative impacts; vaccines work; GMOs are safe; and Covid is real.

The trouble is that by using these groups, McIntyre is playing on easy mode. When your example of a “science denier” is a literal flat-earther, it’s easy to say “look over there at the crazy deniers”.

Even with climate change scepticism, sure, there are people who literally don’t believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet. But those people are relatively rare. People who believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but that the emissions are going to be hard to stop because of economic growth in the developing world and it would make more sense to concentrate on adaptation rather than mitigation, are much more common. Are they “deniers”? Certainly they’re often called deniers. But McIntyre himself acknowledges that China is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and that the IPCC says the sweeping global changes required to cut emissions sufficiently to avoid a 1.5°C warming are unprecedented.

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

More from this author

Who would kill children to save the planet?

By Tom Chivers

Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

So, since some anti-vaxx conspiracy theories like the polio vaccine giving children polio, or the CIA using fake vaccination stations to take people’s DNA, are true, does that mean anti-vaxxers don’t believe in “conspiracy theories” but “conspiracies”?

Obviously not. But the point is that there’s not some clear line between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories”. When Alex Jones says that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay, he’s referring to real claims that endocrine disruptors are affecting sexual development in lots of animals. It’s not easy to draw a line between real and fake, evidence-based and not evidence-based.

I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.” 

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%).

So I don’t need to draw a bright line between “denial” and “reality”. I can say: “I think it’s likely that tobacco firms conspired over lung cancer, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that NASA faked the moon landings.” And I can update my beliefs as new evidence comes in. I don’t have to “rule anything out”, I can simply downgrade how likely it is.

McIntyre, though, is stuck with two categories: things that might be true; and things which have been “disconfirmed”. If you believe things that have been disconfirmed, then you must be a “denier”. And so he needs to find ways of explaining why these “deniers” are so different from the rest of us. 

He has various ideas about “inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem”. But if you reject the idea that there are two groups of people, “deniers” and “non-deniers”, then you can avoid the need to explain it at all, beyond saying “some people are better than others at working out what’s true”. 

But we’re not just here for his epistemology: we’re here for a masterclass in how to persuade people out of false beliefs. Over the course of the book he meets various people — the flat earthers; two coal miners; a couple of hippyish friends of his — and tries to talk to them about their beliefs, using the methods he has learnt. His solution is to listen, to be respectful, to meet people face to face, and to do so over several meetings. Does his approach work?

In short: no. Hilariously, both of the coal miners he meets cheerfully accept the reality of climate change, but say that the economic value is worth the potential damage to the climate. His first hippyish friend is entirely pro-vax and only slightly GMO-sceptical; the other one is anti-GMO but on anti-corporate grounds rather than safety ones. 

Suggested reading

Never trust a scientist

By Stuart Ritchie

So he falls at the first hurdle: he not only doesn’t convince anyone, he doesn’t meet anyone who unambiguously disagrees with him, except the flat earthers. (He also struggles to be respectful, at least in the book itself. There’s an astonishing line on p77 in which he says “When speaking to them, we should remember that it is an insult to use the word ‘anti-vaxxer.’” There are 109 uses of the term “anti-vaxx” in the book. Occasionally he remembers and says how important it is that we listen and pay attention, then he immediately reverts to calling, say, Covid scepticism “ridiculous conspiracy theories and partisan nonsense”.)

But there’s a bigger problem. McIntyre’s big question, as mentioned, is asking: What evidence would it take to change your mind? But at no point does McIntyre ever ask himself what it would take to change his mind. 

For instance: when he was talking to the Pennsylvania coal miners, he accepted that they were just trying to feed their families. I assume he’d also acknowledge that Chinese coal mining is allowing that country to get richer and improve its citizens’ way of life. But I don’t think I’m misrepresenting him when I say that he thinks coal mining is a disaster.

When he talks to a friend of his about GMOs, though, that friend says that even though GMOs can save lives now (in the form of golden rice), they’ll cause disaster in the future. McIntyre says, OK, so the kids who can’t get the golden rice now, they’re just going to die? And his friend says yes. McIntyre says that’s easy for him to say, “because he had money and wouldn’t be one of the ones who suffered”.

The exact same question, though, can be asked about coal mining. Sure, McIntyre can say stop using coal, and it’ll help prevent future disasters. But it will also presumably mean some number of tens or hundreds of millions of Chinese people losing electric lights and functioning hospitals, and a smaller number of Pennsylvanians losing their jobs. McIntyre himself would be fine, except for somewhat higher electricity bills. 

Is the tradeoff worth it? McIntyre clearly thinks so (and I think I do too): but what would change his mind? I can tell you: I would update my beliefs significantly if you showed me a utilitarian calculation showing that more people would be harmed by ending coal mining than by continuing it. But McIntyre never asks himself the question. He is stuck on transmit, never on receive.

What’s sad is that he sometimes comes close. He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are. The idea of working together to establish a shared reality is hamstrung by his certainty that the reality that needs to be shared is his one.

It’s mainly a book designed to tell readers that people they already think are dumb are, in fact, dumb. It is, really, How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil.

Since it’s very likely that you are a British person, and therefore have either recently had or will soon have your first jab – and that it is very likely that that jab will have been the Oxford/AZ vaccine – I can understand if this makes you feel nervous. Especially since the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Thailand and Germany have all suspended or partly restricted the use of the jab.

It is a stupid, harmful decision; it will predictably lead to some avoidable deaths; and there is absolutely no good reason to think that the Oxford vaccine is linked in any way to blood clots. It’s also dangerous because it will give people the false impression that it is unsafe, even when these countries change their minds.

But it is very instructive. Because it shows us a simple, but common, way, in which numbers go wrong in the news: the failure to ask “Is this a big number?” After all, 37 people getting sick sounds really bad, on its own. But is it more than we would expect? What do we need to know to understand that?

We need two more numbers: one, how many people have been given the Oxford vaccine; and two, how many blood clots we would expect to see in that many people, if we hadn’t given them the vaccine. Luckily, we know those two numbers fairly well. About five million people have been given the Ox/AZ vaccine in Europe (about 17 million worldwide, according to AstraZeneca); and about one person in every 1,000 suffers a thrombosis every year.

So you’d expect to see about 5,000 blood clots among the five million recipients of the jab every year — 14 a day, nearly a hundred a week — even if that jab had nothing to do with blood clots whatsoever. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, the Cambridge statistician, goes into a bit more detail here if you’re interested.

On that basis, it’s hardly surprising that we might see 37 thromboses over a few weeks of vaccination. In fact, it’s surprising that there aren’t quite a lot more, although that’s probably because a lot of people had blood clots and didn’t associate them with the vaccine.

Asking that simple question — “is this a big number?” — and knowing how to answer it would have saved a lot of bother, for journalists and for policymakers. But it often doesn’t occur to people.

So I’ve written a book with my cousin David (he’s an economist) in an attempt to correct this: How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Stats in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them). Because while it’s true that the public needs to be literate in order to participate in democracy, it’s not enough to be able to read words. We also have to be able to navigate numbers.

Is 37 a large number of thromboembolic events? Probably not. But if you don’t know to ask “is it a big number?”, you might end up being scared when you don’t need to be – and be put at risk of Covid, if you don’t get vaccinated.

How about 361, as in “361 cyclists were killed on London roads between 1993 and 2017.” Is that a lot? Obviously it’s tragic for each cyclist and their families. But should I feel unsafe when I cycle, or not? Should I be out campaigning for TfL to improve cycle safety? Well, that depends how many cycle journeys there were in London in that time. Was it 4,000 a day? 40,000? 400,000? (It was 437,000, so about one journey in every 10 million ended in tragedy. Only you can say whether that is safe enough for you.)

By the same author

Why don't women feel safe?

By Tom Chivers

Or: when we say that police-recorded hate crimes have gone up in the last few years, is that the same as saying that actual hate crimes have gone up? Or has the way that hate crimes are reported and recorded changed? (Probably the latter. If you look at survey data, the number of actual hate crimes has been steadily falling. But police-recorded crimes have gone up, because as a society we take them more seriously: so the public has become more likely to report them, and the police more likely to record them.)

It’s important to be able to navigate these issues. You don’t need to be especially good at maths; you simply need to be aware of how numbers can go wrong. It’s more about a way of thinking than about mental arithmetic. It matters, because we make decisions every day — should we have a bacon sandwich? Should we have a glass of wine? Are we safe walking home? — based on numbers which we have seen in the news.

But journalists, too, need to be clearer. We are performing a public service: we hold governments to account; we inform the public. Despite the stereotypes, journalists in my experience are usually well-intentioned and public-spirited. We’re not just out there hawking for clicks; we pride ourselves on finding out things that other people don’t want to be known, or for explaining complicated things to our readers.

Often, though, journalists aren’t traditionally very good with numbers. One of the things I try to do with my columns for UnHerd is explain bad science stories. Often the numbers in these stories mislead not because journalists are doing it on purpose, but because they’re not scientists or statisticians. Questions like “Is that a big number?” “Are we still measuring the same thing?” “Is the study it comes from any good?” simply don’t occur to them. We’ve thought of a neat way to address this: a statistical style guide.

Most publications have style guides. At the Telegraph, the style guide was very concerned with the correct terms of address for aristocracy. (“The Duke of Bedford’s son is the Marquess of Tavistock. Lord Tavistock’s elder son, if he has one, can use the third title of the Duke, and he therefore is Lord Howland.”)

The style guide at BuzzFeed, where I worked after that, was much more concerned with whether or not to hyphenate “butt-dial”, “circle jerk” or “douchebag” (all thus).

The Sunday Sport’s style guide, meanwhile, is extremely particular about how to write “bellend”. (“BOLLOCKS: Full out in copy and in headlines. WANK: Full out in copy, w**k in headlines. BELLEND: One word, full out in copy and headlines.)

Having a consistent style is useful; it helps publications maintain a clear identity. But as far as we know, no publication has a style guide for numbers. Not just in terms of when to write 100 and when to write “one hundred”, but: how should you present statistics in order to avoid misleading your readers?

So we have put together a list of 11 points that we think will help. They’re in our book. We don’t pretend that they’re the final word, and we’re keen to find out how we might improve them. For instance, Evan Davis, the radio presenter, tells us that he thinks we should explain in words that there is uncertainty around an estimate, or that a study is not very robust, rather than explicitly including confidence intervals and sample sizes.

We do think, though, that if journalists follow our guide, we’ll end up with a better national discussion. People will have a better understanding of the numbers in the news, and therefore make more informed decisions. It might also prevent governments from making insane decisions about perfectly good vaccines, putting thousands of lives at risk in the middle of a pandemic.

By the same author

What Covid tests can we trust?

By Tom Chivers

 Our Statistical Style Guide

1) Put numbers into context

Ask yourself: is that a big number? If Britain dumps 6 million tons of sewage in the North Sea each year, that sounds pretty bad. But is it a lot? What’s the denominator? What numbers do you need to understand whether that is more or less than you’d expect? In this case, for instance, it’s probably relevant that the North Sea contains 54 thousand billion tons of water.

2) Give absolute risk, not just relative

If you tell me that eating burnt toast will raise my risk of a hernia by 50%, that sounds worrying. But unless you tell me how common hernias are, it’s meaningless. Let readers know the absolute risk. The best way to do this is to use the expected number of people it will affect. For instance: “Two people in every 10,000 will suffer a hernia in their lifetime. If they eat burnt toast regularly, that rises to three people in every 10,000.”

3) Check whether the study you’re reporting on is a fair representation of the literature

Not all scientific papers are born equal. When CERN found the Higgs boson, or LIGO detected gravitational waves, those findings were worth reporting on in their own right. But if you’re reporting on a new study that finds that red wine is good for you, it should be presented in the context that there are lots of other studies, and that any individual study can only be part of the overall picture.

4) Give the sample size of the study – and be wary of small samples

A drug trial which has 10,000 subjects should be robust against statistical noise or random errors. A psychological study looking at 15 undergraduates and asking whether washing their hands makes them feel less guilty is much less so. It’s not that small studies are always bad, but they are more likely to find spurious results, so be wary of reporting on them.

5) Be aware of problems that science is struggling with, like p-hacking and publication bias

Journalists can’t be expected to be an expert in every field, and it’s hard to blame them for missing problems in science that scientists themselves often miss. But be aware of the various ways that scientists can chop up data to make it look as though there’s something there when there isn’t — or to quietly hide results that don’t support their hypothesis. Also, if a result is surprising, that might be because it’s not true. Sometimes science is surprising, but most of the time, not very.

6) Don’t report forecasts as single numbers. Give the confidence interval and explain it

A lot of the time, the media will report on forecasts and models of the future. For instance, each year the Office for Budget Responsibility will make an economic forecast for how much the economy will grow. Or in early 2020, statistical modellers made forecasts for how many people the Covid-19 pandemic would kill.

If they said “Without a lockdown, Covid-19 will kill 250,000 people in Britain,” they didn’t mean that it would kill exactly 250,000. Instead, that was a best guess, in the middle of a wide range of uncertainty: they might say, for instance, that they were 95% sure that the true figure would fall between 100,000 and 400,000. That is the “confidence interval”.

Often, though, when the media reports on forecasts and models, they just give the central, best-guess estimate, which makes them sound more precise than they are. When reporting on forecasts and models, make sure you give the confidence interval, not just the central estimate.

7) Be careful about saying or implying that something causes something else

Lots of studies find correlations between one thing and another — between drinking fizzy drinks and violence, for instance, or between vaping and smoking weed. But the fact that two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one causes the other; there could be something else going on. If the study isn’t a randomised experiment, then it’s much more difficult to show causality. Be wary of saying “video games cause violence” or “YouTube causes extremism” if the study can’t show it.

8) Be wary of cherry-picking and random variation

If you notice that something has gone up by 50% between 2010 and 2018, have a quick look — if you’d started your graph from 2008 or 2006 instead, would the increase still have looked as dramatic? Sometimes numbers jump around a bit, and by picking a point where it happened to be low, you can make random variation look like a shocking story. That’s especially true of relatively rare events, like murder or suicide.

9) Beware of rankings

Has Britain dropped from the world’s fifth-largest economy to the seventh? Is a university ranked the 48th best in the world? What does that mean? Depending on the underlying numbers, it could be a big deal or it could be irrelevant. For example, suppose that Denmark leads the world with 1,000 public defibrillators per million people, and the UK is 17th with 968. That isn’t a huge difference, especially if you compare it with countries that have no public defibrillators. Does being 17th in this case mean that the UK health authorities have a callous disregard for public emergency first-aid installations? Probably not. When giving rankings, always explain the numbers underpinning them and how they’re arrived at.

10) Always give your sources

This is key. Link to, or include in your footnotes, the place you got your numbers from. The original place: the scientific study (the journal page, or the doi.org page), the Office for National Statistics bulletin, the YouGov poll. If you don’t, you make it much harder for people to check the numbers for themselves.

11) If you get it wrong, admit it

Crucially – if you make a mistake and someone points it out, don’t worry. It happens all the time. Just say thank you, correct it, and move on.

And if you agree with all that, then join our campaign…

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Stats in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) is published on Thursday.

The news of the Pfizer and BioNTech breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against Covid-19 was greeted across the world with cautious relief and delight. In France, there was some delight — but also suspicion and even anger. International research by Gallup last year reported that one in three French people believed all vaccines to be dangerous — the highest percentage of the 144 countries surveyed. This week, an Ipsos survey suggested that 46% of French adults will refuse — or say they will refuse — the Pfizer jab or any other kind of anti-Covid jab. (Compared to 36% in the United States, 30% in Germany, 21% in Britain and 16% in India.)

Strangely, opposition appears to have increased as the vaccine looked more likely to appear. An Ipsos survey in September found that 41% of French adults would refuse any Covid jab. With “herd immunity” estimated to require 60 to 70% coverage of a given population, the pandemic appears to have a long and prosperous future in France.

Suggested reading

Yes, the vaccine is really on its way

By Tom Chivers

Anti-vax feeling has been spreading throughout the developed word in recent years (much less so in poorer countries, which know a thing or two about infectious diseases). But why should the opposition be so powerful in France? Are the survey figures reliable?

Laurent-Henri Vignaud, a French historian who has studied the rise and fall of anti-vax movements, is sceptical. It’s not always a good idea, he suggests, to take the French public at its word — and certainly not on this subject. “The only other countries broadly as anti-vaccine as the French are the Russians and the Mongolians,” he says. “Countries where government is widely held in disrepute. What we are looking at here, I think, is a transfer of suspicion. For many years 30-40% of the French have been vastly sceptical of all politicians and all media.”

He concludes that, “this deep pessimism has spilled over to the question of vaccines”. Wide-scale rejection of mainstream politics exists in other countries, but takes an especially acute form in France, where the traditional centre-Left/centre-Right pattern of politics has all but collapsed. The poor performance of recent governments offers a partial explanation. But France’s aggressively suspicious attitude towards authority is not a new phenomenon.

As he describes it, there is a core of people who are viscerally anti-vax, “people who use arguments on natural health or because they believe conspiracy theories of the far-Right or the far-Left”. But there is another group, he says, who are simply sceptical or negative about whatever the government proposes. “But I doubt they will all refuse in the end to take a Covid vaccine?” he says.

Suggested reading

The truth about vaccines

By Stuart Ritchie

Lucie Guimier, a public health expert who has studied French anti-vax movements, also makes an important distinction — between hard-core anti-vaxxers and those with legitimate doubts about a new form of vaccine created in such a short time. She told France 24: “Usually it takes 10 years to develop a vaccine. Some doubts are perfectly justified … Many people remember the hasty campaign of vaccination against the H1N1 virus in the winter of 2009-10. France suffered 60 cases of narcolepsy. Obviously that stays in people’s minds.”

There is another factor which has enflamed and muddled pro and anti-vax arguments in France since the beginning of the Covid pandemic: the Raoult factor.

Professor Didier Raoult, the Professor Dumbledore of Marseille, is an internationally recognised expert in infectious diseases and progenitor of the widely-debunked, but far from dead, Hydroxychloroquine craze. He has become a secular saint for many “anti-system” people in France, both on the hard-Left and the hard-Right. Their adoration is immune to the Professor’s appalling track record in predicting the course of the pandemic.

Raoult wrote a book in 2018 which argues that some vaccines are useful and even essential — but not all. In other words, he is not an anti-vaxxer but in recent months he has often sounded like one. “Looking for a Covid vaccine is an idiotic quest,” he told BFMTV in April. “The chances of a vaccine against a newly emerging illness becoming a useful tool of public health are close to zero…”

In another interview with Le Parisien in June — before a second wave of the pandemic began to swell in France — Raoult said the virus had mutated into something relatively innocuous. “For daring to say such things,” he added, “I will be targeted by the laboratories which are working on vaccines.”

More from this author

Didier Raoult: the man whose Covid 'cure' went viral

By John Lichfield

Whether intentionally or not, such comments feed the conspiracy theories that teem on French-language Facebook and Twitter. More than 1,100,000 people follow 90 different French-language Facebook dedicated to Professor Raoult. There is a growing overlap between such groups and the most virulent anti-vax movements. The Jean Jaurès foundation reported in July that 89% of Raoult supporters on Facebook accept the proposition that “the ministry of health is in league with the pharmaceutical industry to hide from the general public the noxious effects of vaccines”.

Anti-vaxxers in other countries tend mostly to be people who believe in natural or holistic medicine or have swallowed the discredited allegations of people, such as the struck-off British doctor Andrew Wakefield, that vaccines have generated a boom in autism or other so-called “modern” diseases. In France, opponents on health grounds intersect with, and are supplemented by, large bodies of people on the far-Left and far-Right who believe that vaccines are a capitalist conspiracy between government and industry (Big Pharma) or part of a giant plot to subjugate the population to group-think (Big Brother).

Sub-groups of both movements argue that modern vaccines are actually just a form of medical Trojan Horse. The whole pandemic is a hoax, they say. It will permit a mass programme of vaccinations that will place electronic micro-chips under our skin to control us for either Profit or Power — or both. Professor Raoult’s genius is to somehow appeal to all these groups (while not actually being anti-vax).

Typical comments found online in recent days include: “I’d rather die than inject myself with this filth,” “My health is not for sale,” and “This is all a government plot.” Longer comments include: “Wake up! Vaccines are poisons. It’s through vaccination that people die, become sick, autistic, handicapped. Get with the programme.” And: “I’d rather kick the bucket than give my genetic code to all these businesses. That’s what’s happening here. They want to put us all into a genetic filing system.”

This anti-political, anti-state virus predates the internet but thrives online. A good comparison is the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement, which began two years ago with authentic grievances and rapidly splintered through competing Facebook groups into weird and inoperable conspiracy theories.

Suggested reading

The dangerous power of the anti-vaxxer brigade

By Imogen Shaw

In recent days, many of the most outlandish French Covid theories have been spliced together in an 143 minute online documentary film, Hold-up, which, according to the news agency Agence France Presse, contains 30 inventions or distortions.

Laurence-Henri Vignaud, who has studied anti-vax movements in France and elsewhere that date back to 19th century, points to the unwitting emergence of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates as a kind of Raoult-in-reverse: a man who unites in baseless hatred all the strands of anti-vaxdom in France. Because of his charitable foundation’s drive to provide vaccines to the developing world, Gates has become “both the capitalist who sells useless vaccines and the geek who wants to put microchips under your skin”. “For the anti-vaxxers Bill Gates is wonderful,” Mr Vignaud said. “He combines Big Brother and Big Pharma in one person.”

All the same, Vignaud is convinced that if the Pfizer or other vaccines prove safe and effective, a large percentage of the French population will ultimately allow itself to be jabbed. He points to the fact that since 2018, vaccination of children against 11 diseases has been compulsory in France. Very few parents have broken the law and refused to have their kids treated.

That raises another question: should vaccination against Covid-19 be compulsory in France, not just for children but for adults? It’s a measure that has never been taken before, for any disease. Some in the United States suggest that vaccination should be compulsory for key workers, especially in the health sector. The British Government says that compulsory vaccination for all has not been ruled out.

This week the French health advisory body, the Haute Autorité de Santé, began a consultation exercise on this subject. The authority said that in its own “provisional” opinion,” compulsory vaccination was unjustified. The French Government therefore faces a potentially hazardous decision. Would compulsory jabs feed the online paranoia and strengthen anti-vaccine feeling in France? Or would it — like the 2018 law making some vaccines compulsory — sort out the hard-core opposition (small) from the permanent grumblers (many)?

Even compulsory vaccination of medical staff might meet resistance. Martin Hirsch, head of the Paris hospital service, points out that something like one in five French nurses has declared themselves to be dubious about vaccines. “When anti-vaccine arguments are starting to stick even amongst nurses, you know that these conspiracy theories have gone much too far,” he told France Info radio. “The anti-vaxxers have done great harm to public health in this country, including within the hospital service.”

More from this author

Is France's secularism worth dying for?

By John Lichfield

There is, I believe, a greater problem — and one for which no vaccine is possible. France’s epidemic of doubt in politicians and institutions is sometimes justified but often spirals into wilful negativity — a kind of cynical credulity — which is prepared to believe the worst against all evidence. As Mr Vignaud points out, there is a widespread but not universal belief in France that politicians and/or capitalist enterprises are fundamentally corrupt and work against the interests of ordinary people.

This is not confined to France — although in the developed world, only the United States is worse afflicted. But France is different from the US, in that the French can distrust the state in the comfortable knowledge that they can rely on it for protection (as French people have done during the Covid crisis, despite some blunders).

Laurent-Henri Vignaud is probably right: when faced with something as tangible as a deadly new disease, much of the instinctive French scepticism will fade away. The marginal doubters — some of whom have perfectly reasonable questions about a new vaccine — will be separated from a hardcore of health and political obsessives. Most French people will, in the end, queue for their anti-Covid jabs.

And yet France’s epidemic, or endemic state, of obsessive national pessimism will survive. The threat to the country’s political health may be more disturbing than the anti-vax threat to its physical health.