His shoulders are powerful, his chest is “ripped”, he raises a muscular arm in a hopeful thumbs-up. Yet John Eyers is strapped to a ventilator, his organs are failing. The photograph begs the question: how can Covid take such a magnificent man? Because, said his grieving twin sister, Jenny McCann, he had only one pre-existing health condition, “belief in his own immortality”.
In Instagram pictures Eyers is scaling a rock face, hiking over fells, camping in wilderness, oiled and pumped for a bodybuilding contest, finishing an ironman race. He swam 2.4 miles, cycled 112 miles, then ran a whole marathon — what should he ever fear? Eyers, 42, refused to be vaccinated or even to wear a mask, said his sister, since he thought his body — that invincible, self-hewn body — would just bat the virus away.
The young think they are immortal, too. That’s the way nature made them so they are unthinkingly brave, the best soldiers. Take that party drug, go on a bender, walk back after the club through dark streets. Being young means seeing possibility, not danger. Your body is rubber, your liver is neoprene, your joints are carbon fibre. Stop worrying, Mum!
No wonder vaccination rates for under-30s have stalled at about 70 per cent. The young aren’t inclined to vote either. What is a distant possibility — a change of power, an illness you might never catch — compared with the excitement of now? Only if the thrilling moment, that flight or gig or football match, is otherwise forbidden will many get a jab.
In his book The Denial of Death, the American anthropologist Ernest Becker argues that most of human activity and culture is a defence mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. The only creatures who know we will one day die, we engage in “immortality projects” to distract us from the inevitable grave.
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An obsession with fitness promises that by your own slavish effort, self-denial and training, sweat and pain, you can barter your odds with God. Articles in exercise magazines speak of ending or even reversing the ageing process. Get your body fat down to a single figure so you are solid muscle and hard bone, no softness or weakness left. By eating cold-pressed wheatgrass or living on meat alone, like primitive man, you take charge of your health, cut out Big Pharma and “western medicine”. Cure yourself.
The most insidious of all antivax advocates have been the wellness gurus, the yoga teachers and Instagram influencers who present anti-science as a superior lifestyle choice. To them there are no established facts. Like the Duchess of Sussex, they speak of “living their truth”. The rest of us are sheep and dupes. The QAnon shaman in face paint and bull horns who stormed the US Capitol building was a yoga practitioner on an organic diet.
Vaccine denial is not a big leap for “clean eating” advocates who believe they can expel any dirty disease. According to his sister, Eyers “didn’t want to put a vaccine in his body”. I’ve heard this from super-fit women: why risk corrupting their perfectly honed machine? It was often mothers who breastfed two-year-olds and fed kids carob instead of chocolate who fell for Andrew Wakefield’s misinformation on MMR. Like the Mitford sisters’ mother who, if a child broke his or her arm or was prescribed medicine, would wait until the doctor had left to rip off the cast or flush pills away, they believe “the Good Body” will sort itself out.
The ironman community is the ultimate “immortality project”. It pushes athletes beyond the envelope of what is safe or sane: train for 15 hours a week, compete through blisters, even fractures, risk hypothermia in open water swims, run through desert or Arctic tundra for 48 hours without sleep. Finish this and you can do anything, competitors are told. You become a superhero: your body is no longer flesh but living armour. You can keep your youthful immortality deep into wiry middle age.
Yet most of us have a moment when our own mortality hits us. Sometimes it happens in childhood, with the untimely death of a parent or when a school friend steps in front of a car. But mainly it creeps up slowly with age.
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I heard a gymnast explain that the loss of confidence suffered by Simone Biles happens when, after years of casually flipping through the air, an inner voice pipes up, warning of the dangers you had always shut out but can never ignore again.
Over time you see more random tragedy. I always think of Natasha Richardson dying of a brain injury on a sunny day on the easiest of ski slopes; my neighbour who slipped in the bath; a man who fell on a dishwasher with a sharp knife pointed up; the friend who ignored a mole on his back.
Soon you think twice before climbing a ladder or swimming out too far. “You could leave life right now,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “Let that determine what you do and say and think.” I never say goodbye to loved ones thoughtlessly, because, well, you never know ...
The awful thing about Covid is that it mimics the capriciousness of life itself. Just as, almost certainly, you’ll be fine cycling without a helmet or taking that flight, a 42-year-old athlete could expect to get away with little more than a head cold. But there’s a tiny chance fate might laugh at your hubris.
Only towards the end did poor John Eyers admit he was not invincible, that he wished he’d had the vaccine. Our immortality moment shouldn’t come as we’re fitted to a ventilator in ICU.