The singer, 76, has previously claimed he suffered alarming side effects after his AstraZeneca jabs and released an anti-lockdown single, Stand And Deliver, with Van Morrison in 2020.

In a new interview for The Real Music Observer YouTube channel, Eric claimed that subliminal messaging hidden in advertising led people to get the jab. 

He said: 'Whatever the memo was, it hadn't reached me. Then I started to realise there was really a memo, and a guy, Mattias Desmet [professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium], talked about it.

'And it's great. The theory of mass formation hypnosis. And I could see it then. Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere.

'Then I remembered seeing little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising. It had been going on for a long time: that thing about "you will own nothing and you will be happy." 

'And I thought, "What's that mean?" And bit by bit, I put a rough kind of jigsaw puzzle together. And that made me even more resolute.'

Mass formation psychosis - an attempt to hypnotise groups of people to follow messages against their will - has been widely discredited by scientists. 

Asked why he felt implored to speak out in the first place, Clapton explained: 'My career had almost gone anyway. At the point where I spoke out it had been almost been 18 months since I'd been forcibly retired. 

'I joined forces with Van and I got the tip Van was standing up to the measures and I thought, "why is nobody else doing this" so I contacted him.