When does the search or understanding, or sympathy, tip over into collusion and fellow travelling? When does the wish that we could all “just get along” tip over into inaction in the face of behaviour that will get us all dead?
If you’re looking for answers to those questions, stop reading now, cos I’m all out.
I look at the anti-vaxxers (and there’s a piece in the FT I have yet to read on how they are replacing traditional parties, and I have various observations-not-rising-to-the-level-of-thoughts.
- Suspicion of “mainstream” medicine has always been with us, long before mainstream medicine was any good (and it really wasn’t much good for most things until the 1920s onwards)
- That suspicion has always been derided as ignorant and dangerous, even when (especially when?) the grounds for Belief In Science were shaky.
- The tremendous successes of vaccinations and other public health measures against endemic diseases (smallpox, measles, polio) are now long enough ago that people’s memory of just how shitty life is with epidemic diseases can be (See the 2021 Thomas Keneally article abt polio “no concept of how awful it was”).
- There are lots of really good reasons to be deeply deeply suspicious of the confident pronouncements of government and corporate (let’s just call them The Thing, as per Cobbett). The list of scandals – malfeasance, incompetence, greed, coverups, collusions – is so very very long. Thalidomide, blood transfusion, Horizon, Grenfell, asbestos etc etc etc etc
- Peopel want purity and simplicity in a polluted and complex-beyond-comprehension world. The whole New Age mystic woo-woo stuff became a pipeline to the Far Right (that “wellness influencer and his sonnerad (here and here), that episode of Community with the trampoline – Aerodynamics of Gender). Anti-vaxxerness can be a gateway drug (oh the irony) to some truly evil messed up shit.
And yet…
When the ant-vaxxers say that the Thing has been wrong, has lied and oppressed, they are not wrong.
In the same way that zombie apocalypse fascination lets you say that the Whole Show is Rotten and should be pushed over, the anti-vaxxer stuff allows you to say the same and to assert – however short-sighted, wrong-headed and selfishly – that the Whole Show is Rotten and – crucially – that you can resist, you can have bodily autonomy (even if that leads to your death and the collapse of herd immunity – Live Free and/or Die and all that).
Where does this leave me? Confused, demoralised, fatalistic. So, no change there then.
Further reading
That piece in the Times last week by James Marriot (more on him and mainstream commentators at some future point, perhaps).
Loads of stuff on the impact of disease. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, Plagues and People’s by William McNeill etc etc
marchudson.net 
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