I was recently queuing behind a lady who was having a loud exchange with her doctor on the phone. I couldn’t hear what advice he was attempting to proffer but I did hear her reply with absolute confidence that she had read an article on the internet that assured her that if she ate enough kale, she would not need chemotherapy.

I visibly recoiled as if someone had slapped me, I couldn’t fathom how anyone could choose what sounded like a 10-minute Google session over their doctor’s advice, but a quick scroll through social media tells me everything I need to know about how more and more people are getting stuck in rabbit holes of their own making.

Most dangerously of all, opinion is presented as fact and people defend it as if it were- Anna Marie Galea

Just a mere decade ago, words mattered. People mostly read to become more educated or adept at things and that meant that they intrinsically trusted what they were reading. Words were eternal and permanent, which meant they couldn’t be untrue. Then came the greatest equaliser of them all: the internet. All of a sudden, the parameters which people had always applied to books and newspapers were being applied to grossly uninformed opinion.

The problem is that most of the opinions being bandied about today would have not ordinarily made it out of the front steps of the village bar, let alone into a common space. Most dangerously of all, opinion is presented as fact and people defend it as if it were. Everyone can now be a teacher, architect or anthropologist without all the tedious hours of study that go into it. It would seem that doctors haven’t been spared either.

Just take a look at the latest local polls on vaccines; a third of the people who took part in the poll said they would not be taking the vaccine against COVID-19 because they didn’t trust it and don’t know what’s in it. This from a population that subsists almost entirely on fast food.

God only knows why Carmen from across the road has decided that she won’t put her faith in a vaccine put together by a team of Oxford’s finest, which by the time it reaches us will have gone through tonnes of trials and which will then have to be approved by some of Europe’s best pharmaceutical minds, but you have to love the audacity of it all.

People are literally saying that they would rather risk the vulnerable members of their family than take a tried and tested vaccine. They have the right to, apparently.

I wonder how smugly they would speak about their rights if their children got seriously ill and they realised they could have somehow prevented it. You truly have to love the privilege of those who have never had to experience deformity and serious illness because their own parents did the rational thing and vaccinated them and now seem to think that their ability not to be maimed by polio is some innate gift that they avoided because they ate all their greens and avoided chemicals. Try telling that to millions of 19th-century women or contemporary African mothers who’ve lost child after child because they didn’t have access to, yes, it’s coming, vaccines.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but that one (widely discredited) paper you read on autism doesn’t make you an expert. You know who is an expert though? Your doctor who spent longer than five minutes reading an article while not sitting on the loo. Maybe you should go back to doing the right thing and listen to him.