Queen’s Brian May Says He Respects Eric Clapton But Clapton’s Vaccine Beliefs Are “In The Fruit Cake Jar”

Eric Clapton has made his point of view on COVID and all attempts to combat it very clearly. Last year, Clapton joined Van Morrison on the anti-lockout protest song “Do You Want To Be A Slave?” More recently, Clapton claimed he had a “catastrophic” response to the AstraZeneca vaccine and promised that he would not perform any shows requiring proof of vaccination to attend: “I will not perform on any stage where there is a public discrimination present. Now another British guitar legend has respectfully called it bullshit on all of this.

Brian May of Queen’s, who is a true astrophysicist despite not being a rock star, recently gave an interview to The independent, lambasting the UK government’s COVID response and recounting how he needed emergency surgery after suffering a heart attack last year. (It wasn’t just ripped gluteal muscles.) During this interview, May praises Clapton while in the same breath dismissing Clapton’s anti-vaccine stance:

I love Eric Clapton, he’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways. He’s a person who thinks it’s okay to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting man. Anti-vaccines, I’m sorry, I think those are fruit cakes. There is a lot of evidence to show that vaccination helps. Overall they have been very safe. There will always be side effects in whatever medicine you take, but to say that the vaccines are a plot to kill you, I’m sorry, that’s fine in the jar of fruit cake for me.

You can read Brian May’s full interview here. In other Brian May news, he’s apparently considering a sequel to Bohemian Rhapsody, the highly successful 2018 Queen biopic. According to NME, May recently said on Instagram Live that the band members were “looking for ideas” for a sequel, “It’s going to be hard to keep up with that one because neither of us could have predicted how huge it was going to be.” It’s hard to imagine a movie about Queen’s Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert eras, but I can’t imagine what else May might be talking about there.