Queen guitarist Brian May has labelled anti-vaxxer rock stars such as Eric Clapton, Ian Brown and Richard Ashcroft ‘fruitcakes’, and delivered a damning verdict on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that “thousands” died because of “the bad decisions that Boris made.”
“I think it would have been impossible for anyone to make worse decisions than Boris,” says May in a new interview with The Independent. “At every point he did too little, too late. Hundreds, if not thousands of our relatives died because of bad advice and because of the bad decisions that Boris made with [disgraced former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt] Hancock and those other people. If he’d taken the precautions of shutting down the borders a year earlier, we wouldn’t have been in the situation we were.”
“And the fact that he’s willing to trade lives quite openly for economic gain, I find horrific… completely unacceptable,’ May adds. “It’s like Winston Churchill going out in his garden and seeing the planes overhead and the bodies and going ‘the bombs are dropping! The bombs are dropping! Should we hide? No, actually let’s think of the economic consequences of hiding…’”
May is equally scornful of the stances taken by Eric Clapton, former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft and Stone Roses singer Ian Brown who have all insisted that they will not play gigs where the audience are required to show ‘COVID passports’ to gain admission.
Interviewed by Classic Rock writer Mark Beaumont, May shakes his head when mention is made of Clapton and fellow rock stars questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“I love Eric Clapton, he’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways,” says May. “He's a person who thinks it’s OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting the man.”
“Anti-vax people, I’m sorry, I think they’re fruitcakes,” May continues. “There’s plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps. On the whole they’ve been very safe. There’s always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I’m sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.”
