Conspiracy Theories
Yesterday, I saw a meme about the vaccine for coronavirus. Basically, it was saying that they haven't managed to find a vaccine for HIV, so why and how have they come up with this one so quickly? There must be something dodgy going on....
This made me worried; my dad works for the NHS, so he will be getting the vaccine soon. How can I be sure he'll be ok?
I plucked up some courage and talked to my mum about it. To start with, she was really angry that I could even think that way, but after she calmed down, we had a really good talk about it.
What mum said is that I should stop and think about things like that before reacting to them and especially before believing them. It's a bit like when we look at sources in history: who wrote it? Why did they write it? How trustworthy is it? Where did you find it? What bias might the writer have?
It's really important to take a minute and think sensibly about things, rather than reacting and panicking straight away (like I did). If you see things on social media, or have them forwarded to you on WhatsApp, are they really going to be the most serious and trustworthy information?
Check your facts, talk to other people, listen to other people and then you can make up your own mind with ALL the information and not just one five second clip that some random year 11 shared on their feed.