Eric Clapton pulled out a piping hot take about people who get vaccinated against Covid-19, suggesting those trying to decrease the likelihood of getting or dying from an easily transmissible virus are victims of “mass formation hypnosis.”
Mass formation hypnosis (or sometimes “mass formation psychosis”) has become a shiny new term in anti-vax circles, although crucially it’s not an officially recognized medical condition (as one psychology professor put it to Reuters, “mass psychosis” is “more metaphor than science, more ideology than fact”). Nevertheless, the “concept” recently gained traction thanks to Twitter-banned vaccine expert, Dr. Robert Malone, who appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast at the end of 2021 and claimed people had essentially been hypnotized into believing the efficacy of the vaccine (Malone threw in a comparison between the United States’ pandemic policies to Nazi Germany, for good measure, too).