Brian May on Eric Clapton's anti-vax stance: "He’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways”

Queen legend Brian May has expressed his dismay at the anti-vaxxers in a new interview with The Independent, calling them "fruitcakes". But he also addressed the recent announcement from his guitar hero peer Eric Clapton, who refused to play any venues that would require proof of COVID-19 vaccination. 

“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 pulled no punches in the interview when it came to his opinion of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his handling of the pandemic. 

“I think it would have been impossible for anyone to make worse decisions than Boris,” said May. “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 [former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matthew] 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…’”