Queen’s Brian May on Anti-Vaxxers: ‘I Think They’re Fruitcakes’

Queen’s Brian May called anti-vaxxers “fruitcakes” in a new wide-ranging interview.

The guitarist and astrophysicist offered that criticism to The Independent. He reportedly shook his head upon the journalist’s mention of artists like Eric Clapton questioning vaccine safety and refusing to play concerts with strict COVID-19 protocols.

“I love Eric Clapton, he’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways,” May said. “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. 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.”

May also lambasted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, saying his “bad decisions” in handling the pandemic led to “hundreds, if not thousands” of deaths. “I think it would have been impossible for anyone to make worse decisions than Boris,” he said. “At every point he did too little, too late. … If he’d taken the precautions of shutting down the borders a year earlier, we wouldn’t have been in the situation we were.”

On a lighter note, May recently noted in a separate interview that he’s still amused by a Queen-related joke from the 1990 fantasy novel Good Omens. “I love that quote about every CD that stays in a car for more than a year turns into Queen’s Greatest Hits,” he said. “I should know where that comes from, but it makes me laugh. It is great – I mean, it’s the ultimate compliment for an artist, really, I think, to be sown into people’s lives to that extent.”