Dim Dorries
It’s not nice to tease people for not being able to spell. I’d not poke a dyslexic. But, sometimes, misspelling reveals that a writer has no idea about what they are saying. Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Bedfordshire said that “a strong feeling of De Ja Vue overcame me this morning as I listened to the Today programme.” This is not quite as funny as her praise of John McCain’s “desire to reach across the Isle and work with the Democrats on key issues and Bills”.
This display of ignorance, however, comes in a more important context. The disease that Ms Dorries calls swine flue.
Nadine Dorries was once a nurse, and seems to believe that this gives her carte blanche to pronounce on all health issues. During the embryology debate, she seemed to think that hybrid cells were made by “inserting human sperm into an animal” and was worried that British scientists might be tempted to copy failed 1920s experiments (which she, predictably, misunderstood and misdescribed) to breed an “invincible human being, insensitive to pain and indifferent to the quality of food he ate” by crossing “humans with apes” to make a “humanzee”.
Now, she is moving on to epidemiology. Her new recommendation is that we get “summer swine flu” so we’re all immune to it before nasty “winter swine flu” comes along. It is hard to know where to start. She displays not only complete ignorance of what a virus is, but also a misunderstanding of the nature of risk. She does not seem to realise that a pathogen that is massively contagious - spreading far and freely outside the flu season - does not need to be terribly vicious to do massive damage. Her exhortation that we should all get it as soon as possible is deranged. While her opinions on swine flu barely merit an evisceration, they do have at the least have some value in marking her out as someone not worth listening to on any topic.
For a more sensitive treatment of swine flu, I would recommend this article by the excellent Ben Goldacre.
Nadine Dorries is a terrifying woman. And, thanks to the idiot voters of Mid Bedfordshire, she has a vote in the House of Commons.
