TOM EATON | In the pursuit of truth we should be abuzz about the malaria vaccine

In perhaps the biggest medical news of the century, approval has been given to roll out a vaccine for malaria, meaning we are weeks away from being told by elderly relatives that Bill Gates is trying to turn children into mosquitoes.

Malaria kills between 380,000 and 460,000 people a year, mostly in Africa, with babies and young children suffering the overwhelming burden of the illness, and the new vaccine, developed in Ghana by Dr Kwame Amponsa-Achiano, promises to bring radical social and economic change to the continent south of the Sahara.

Fortunately, these facts might also limit the spread of misinformation that seems to accompany any medical breakthrough these days.

Over the last many months, we’ve come to learn that hard-core conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers have highly flexible principles, being outraged by treatments that affect them personally while remaining unconcerned about medications that don’t.

This is how, for example, we’ve seen thousands of men freaking out about the one-in-250,000 chance of getting a blood clot from the AstraZeneca vaccine (or one-in-a-million for the Johnson & Johnson jab), while being entirely happy with their partners, wives, girlfriends and mistresses using a contraceptive pill that produces a blood clot in one in every 1,000 women each year.

The last few years have confirmed that there is nothing than can’t be twisted into absurd fiction, or, conversely, no absurd fiction that is too absurd to be believed.

If malaria were a major health crisis in, say, Texas, town halls would already be full of protesters chanting “Give me mosquitoes or give me death!” and “My body, my choice to die of fever!”. But because it isn’t, I suspect only the most dedicated fantasists will get onto Facebook to denounce the New World Order for trying to depopulate the planet by saving babies in Africa.

I wish I were joking. I wish I lived in a world in which a malaria vaccine could be universally celebrated as a game-changer without triggering a chorus of whooping from the lunatic fringe.

But the last few years have confirmed that there is nothing than can’t be twisted into absurd fiction, or, conversely, no absurd fiction that is too absurd to be believed.

Consider, for example, the Netflix sci-fi series Sweet Tooth, set in a dystopian near-future in which human-animal hybrids have started being born.

In the past month, two of my Facebook friends — people who like to stay abreast of current affairs and who seem to inhabit the real world — have posted stills from the series, convinced that they are fact.

The first I could, perhaps, understand. The front page of a fictitious newspaper, with the headline announcing the arrival of the hybrids, it probably looked real enough to alarm someone with extremely underdeveloped critical faculties and visual literacy.

The second, however, was a close-up of a cute little puppy-human baby, with a little doggy nose and little floppy ears on an otherwise human head. It would have been a stretch even for an American supermarket tabloid. And yet this Facebook friend, who has opinions about politics and science and the world, was presenting it as shocking fact to friends who climbed into the comments to denounce the sickos who would create such abominations.

So no, I’m afraid it’s all too possible that we’re about to start the next episode of the surreal telenovela that is the world of conspiracy theory, with mosquitoes and African babies taking over from 5G, demonic DNA and magnetic arms as the new rallying cry of the noisily delusion.

But until that starts, let’s take a moment to celebrate this gigantic event in world history, and once again repeat the mantra of the last six months, and, indeed, the last 200 years: thanks, science.