.......
Neither Julia nor her partner Stan have been vaccinated.
They’ve both had bad reactions to vaccinations in the past, and prefer to rely
on other measures. Julia says Stan is generally very healthy and never gets
colds or bugs, while although she has a range of health difficulties this makes
her less worried about covid than you might imagine: it’s just another thing to
take into account when she goes out, in the way she always has. She had hand-sanitiser
in her bag long before it became the fashion. Reason holds her back from being
a full-fat covid-sceptic: ‘people are saying the same thing across the world,
so I suppose it must be true.’ This is very sound reasoning. Nevertheless she
feels governments are exaggerating the threat in order to take control of more
of our lives.
.......
Florence is an evangelical Christian, and life experiences have
given her a firm opposition to abortion and the scientific use of foetal
material. This is the root of her objection to the covid vaccines. It leads her
to seek out media stories which emphasise their ineffectiveness, and the
self-interest of the bodies that produce them and the governments that promote
them. It’s not that she’s a covid-denier: she’s had the disease, and been ill
with it, and faith pulled her through, she insists. It’s that, for her, the damage of the sickness is outweighed by the
immorality of the measures taken to combat it. Because she can’t understand how any Christian could take a different view, she sees the response to the pandemic
as an aspect of an ongoing, long-term secular attack on Christian values. Friends
who comment on her posts on social media use more extreme language than
Florence does: one said that while there might be a case for vaccinating the
old, vaccinating young or otherwise healthy people, or children, was ‘demonic’.
.......
I’ve mentioned Jasper before. He has a rational reason for
not wanting to be vaccinated, having had relevant health problems in the past,
but even were that not the case his deep ideological stance conditions his
attitude to the pandemic as a whole. His basic belief (which I took a long time
to work out) is that human beings have within themselves everything they need
to solve their problems naturally, and that therefore anyone who promotes
scientific or technocratic solutions does so out of self-interest or malign
intentions. He sees the medical response to covid as part of a widespread
assault on human nature that began decades ago, leading to humans being
enslaved by technology and those who control it. Like Florence, he was ill with
covid, so he doesn’t think it’s a hoax, but as far as he’s concerned he saw the
disease off with meditation and willpower. He not only rages against the
powerful individuals he sees as responsible for what’s happening, but is also
contemptuous of the majority of people who are meekly falling in line with their
agenda, mocks mask-wearing, insists the vaccines are causing the deaths of
thousands of people, and describes medical professionals as liars and stooges,
and worse. He publicises, very uncritically, anything that seems to endorse
this viewpoint. Like Florence’s friends, it’s Jasper’s who say the more extreme
things: commenting on his social media posts, they use words like ‘genocide’ to
describe the vaccination programme, and predict that the officials of the World
Health Organisation will be ‘tried for crimes against humanity’, hanged, or end
up in front of ‘a firing squad’.
.......
All three begin from their own experience, but Florence and
Jasper place over theirs an ideological framework which leads them to interpret what
has happened to them, and their own instinctive feelings, as just one aspect of
something much larger. This larger context is a society-wide conflict in which they
are on the side of right, and, precisely because it positions them as part of a
minority who understand what is truly going on, powerfully validates who they
feel they are. It’s also polarising: it forces them to see everyone else as an
ally or an enemy. Violent language both reinforces that sense of polarisation
and pushes it farther. I wonder, in the case of the people who comment on
Florence’s and Jasper’s posts, how far? I have a university friend who works
for the WHO, and would like him to remain safe, thank you.
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