2021, the second year of the covid 19 pandemic but unfortunately not the last, is over. In 2020, rather curiously, the hottest social conflicts were not directly related to the pandemic, but to police brutality, racism, the climate. In 2021, it was different. How to deal with covid became the focus of countless quarrels and riots, demonstrations, fights and endless discussions. The divide between the pro- and anti-vaxxers is deep. What is unusual is that it cuts across all groups. All classes, races, religions, countries, ages and other categories are internally divided on the question of what the situation requires.
The anti-vaxxers are a minority but not a small minority. They have an influence on policy and also on the course of the disease itself. Some of them find the name “anti-vaxxer” inappropriate because they are not against vaccines per se but against the obligation to be vaccinated. It should be a personal choice. What this means in today’s context is that they demand the right to refuse to follow the measures to limit infection, or to decide for themselves which ones to follow or not. But no one has a purely personal relationship with an infectious disease. A pandemic is by definition a social danger that can only be overcome socially. Through solidarity.
Strange bedfellows
Solidarity goes beyond getting vaccinated but that is part of it. Refusing vaccination is not a purely individual choice with implications only for the individual himself. The unvaccinated are the terrain in which the virus can adapt its attack strategy, that is, mutate. A virus can be controlled and even eradicated, as in the case of smallpox. But that requires a collective will, which the anti-vaxxers resist.
It may come as a surprise, then, that in the motley collection of people that oppose vaccination campaigns, there are also some that fall under the broad progressive umbrella. Greens, feminists, anarchists, newagers, libertarians of various persuasions. The left-wing commentator George Monbiot wrote in the newspaper The Guardian :
“It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit, but in the countercultural movements where my sympathies lie, people are dropping like flies. Every few days I hear of another acquaintance who has become seriously ill with Covid, after proudly proclaiming the benefits of “natural immunity”, denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals. Some have been hospitalized. Within these circles, which have for so long sought to cultivate a good society, there are people actively threatening the lives of others.”
There are also those on the far left who accuse the left of having turned its back on the working class which suffers the most from lockdowns and other measures, and of being led like sheep by the capitalist state. They tell you that they don’t care that fascists share their views, as long as these views are right. According to them, it is because of the betrayal of the left that the far right is doing so well in the anti-vaxx resistance.
The left has betrayed the working class long before but it’s true that the far right plays a much more prominent role in the anti-vaxx protests. Conspiracies are their daily bread, and conspiracies are what anti-vaxxers need to justify their position. Their goal- the right to refuse measures against the pandemic- puts them in individualistic, reactionary waters, where far-right conspiracy theories offer support.
According to Monbiot, the anti-vaxx movement is “a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures.” Facebook, in his view, was the lubricant for that penetration, through algorithms that lead vaccine doubters to far-right conspiracy sites.
‘Just a Flu’
In the anti-vaxx movement, of course, there are different currents. They don’t all think alike. But they have their starting point in common: the virus is a pretext and as such is not a major threat in itself. Their differences are about what this pretext is for.
Minimizing the danger is the essential binder. That’s understandable: to acknowledge the threat and yet demand the right to act as if it did not exist would be hard to defend. So covid doesn’t exist or is just a flu. Mortality rates are falsified, statistics lie. Doctors, nurses, scientists, politicians, the media, they are all involved in a gigantic global conspiracy to scare us, to enslave us.
But unless you are a believer who sees the hand of God in the pandemic and would rather let Him do his thing, counting on the power of prayer to be saved, you still have to come up with some scientific explanation. And there are indeed experts who contradict the findings of their colleagues on the danger of the virus and the effectiveness of vaccines. Not many, but they exist. Similarly, in the climate debate and on other hot issues, there are invariably scientists who disagree with what the rest thinks is undeniable, with or without financial or political ulterior motives. The anti-vaxx experts use apparently science-based arguments and in that sense their claims are different from the many pseudo-scientific theories that circulate ( there are microchips in the vaccines, the vaccines make women infertile and/or men impotent, the vaccines change your DNA, etc.) In the anti-vaxx movement, the contrarian experts are considered heroes, rebels who dare to defy the global conspiracy. That they are so rare is then because most doctors and scientists are afraid to speak up or have a personal interest in toeing the line.
We are no experts. But we see how every time, with each new wave, the hospitals fill up with deathly ill unvaccinated people. Is that all staged? Like the moon landing?
Anti-vaxxers who see their struggle as anti-capitalist, point out that science and health care are not neutral institutions, that they are in the service of the pursuit of profit. Therefore, so they claim, their data and findings are unreliable. Indeed, there is plenty of reason to criticize the “health-industrial complex.” The fact that no drugs are being designed for numerous poor people’s diseases because there is no profit in them, for example, or that treatments that do exist are priced beyond the reach of many patients. In relation to the pandemic, the medical/scientific sector (which is the state and private industry) can rightly be blamed for having made little or no preparation for it despite the many warning signs. After all, research into pills to lose weight or to inhibit age-related symptoms such as hair loss and impotence is so much more profitable than research into zoonotic diseases. But that the data with which the industry works are unreliable is implausible; not only because it presupposes the complicity of an unimaginably large number of people but also because the industry, and the economy in general, needs accurate data in order to function and not descend into chaos.
I don’t want to be a guinea pig, you often hear vaccine refusers say. It is true that the vaccines were developed in record time (which shows what can be done today when great efforts are applied), and that normal procedures, which stipulate more testing, were shortened because of the urgency. But by now, in the entire history of humankind, there was no vaccine that was tested more than these that are being used against covid. Billions of doses have been administered and it was in the interest of the manufacturers and the authorities to investigate any adverse effects. The vaccines are more tested and safer than many drugs that millions of people take every day and much more tested than drugs like remdesivir and hydroxychlorine that some anti-vaxxers are promoting as an alternative to the vaccines.
A pretext for what?
Who is organizing the “hoax”? Who is conducting the conspiracy from behind the scenes? There is some vagueness about that. Sinister “elites” are most often blamed. Right-wing anti-vaxxers specify that they are “globalist” elites who are subverting the nation and want to install a totalitarian world government. And (surprise, surprise!) Jews play a big part in this. They can’t help themselves. Anti-Semitism is just deeply ingrained in them. The Jewish-Hungarian speculator/philanthropist George Soros is a favorite target.
Some left-wing anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, compare themselves to the Jewish victims of the Nazis. Like them, they claim, they are stigmatized, ostracized and persecuted by the totalitarian state. Some demonstrate with the yellow Star of David pinned to their chests alongside Nazis carrying slogans about “the protocol of Zion,” the so-called secret plan for Jewish world domination of which the “covid hoax” is supposedly a part. They claim to be fighting fascism and do so hand in hand with fascists.
But look what is happening, say anti-vaxxers who oppose capitalism. The artificially stoked fear of the virus gives the state a free pass to implement all sorts of measures to strengthen its totalitarian grip. High tech surveillance, digital passes, tracking, bans on congregating, on going out, forced mask wearing, forced testing, ever more control, harsh repression of resistance, emergency powers for the government.…society is becoming more and more a prison.
That is happening indeed. It is not a new phenomenon: Digitalization allows us to be increasingly monitored, not only by the state but perhaps even more so by private companies. We are in hundreds of data banks, we are watched by countless cameras. Privacy and individual freedom have largely become an optical illusion. That said, since the pandemic began, the mechanisms and tools of government control over citizens have expanded even more significantly. On that front, too, there may be no return to the pre-covid world. Just like many “emergency” measures taken after 9/11 were never abolished. The emergency proves to be of long duration.
We share the revulsion against our increasingly Orwellian world. But for anti-vaxxers, the fact that states are using the pandemic to increase their control over the population is proof that there is no pandemic. This is a fallacy.
Anti-vaxxers say that the state imposes, under the guise of virus control, an “Hygienic Apartheid” that divides the population into compliant good people and bad people who refuse to submit to “medical fascism”. The goal would be to instill fear in the citizens so that they obey without questioning. One may wonder why the states would find it necessary to temporarily shut down most of the economy and take on gigantic debts just to speed up a process that was already ongoing. Had the social climate become so hot that a cure of fear was necessary to restore order? Did the mass strikes and riots get out of hand? Unfortunately that was not the case. Fear per se is not always so helpful to those in power. What benefit does the state or capital gain from people being afraid to be in the same room?
For the anti-vaxxers, covid vaccines are an evil fetish with the magical power to destroy their personal freedom. Before covid, mandatory vaccination was not such a bogeyman. In the European Union, health care workers already had mandatory vaccination against infectious diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A and B, and chicken pox. No one called that “hygienic apartheid.” Except for a few fanatics, everyone thought such measures were evidently needed to protect both staff and patients. Faced with a highly contagious disease, general vaccination and social distancing are reasonable measures, regardless of whether the social form is modern capitalist, feudal, or communist.
Golden business
Another motivation for staging the pandemic, according to anti-vaxxers, is the huge profits that some are now reaping as a result. “Given the money at stake,” write Toby Green and Thomas Fazi , “and with Biontech, Moderna and Pfizer together making $1,000 a second on their vaccines, is it so strange to think that vaccine manufacturers might have motivations other than ‘the public good’?”
No, that’s not strange. Those three companies are not the only ones profiting from the pandemic. Amazon and other distribution companies are doing golden business, to name but one example. In every crisis, there are sectors who profit from the situation.
Some climate deniers reason in the same way: the producers of electric cars, wind turbines and the like earn many billions from the fear of climate change, so “big green” instigates the hoax that it is all so catastrophic.
Golden business for a few but for most, a crisis is a crisis. Even the pharmaceutical industry as a whole does not profit much from vaccination: only a few companies produce vaccines. In fact, the pharmaceutical sectore makes more profit on unvaccinated people than on vaccinated ones. Since the former are more likely to be hospitalized when contracting the virus, they consume many more pharmaceutical products then the latter. So, in the logic of conspiracy-theorists, the anti-vaccine propaganda could be a hoax devised by the pharmaceutical industry.
In the total world economy, “big pharma”, “big tech”, Amazon etc. are a relatively small fraction. An important and influential one, that may be strong enough to mobilize the state for its interests but only insofar as they do not conflict with the interests of the entire economy, with those of the other capital owners.
And for most of the rest of the economy, the pandemic was and is disastrous. Before there were vaccines, the managers of the world economy had to (belatedly and against their will) put economic activity on hold to slow down the spread of the virus. For months the mechanisms of production, distribution and profit formation were largely blocked. And even after that, the pandemic continued to undermine economic activity and thus profit formation. The states were obliged to take on gigantic debts. To finance research into vaccines and the infrastructure for combating the virus, to prevent the purchasing power of the demobilized workers from collapsing, to prevent business closures from triggering a downward spiral that would sink the value of all capital. Remember that the world economy was already on the brink of recession before the arrival of the pandemic. The phenomenon of “zombie companies” – those that stretch their existence only through cheap loans – grew fast. Then already but much more so now. That the managers of the world economy – the states, the governments, capital – would be willing at such a time to make such a gigantic sacrifice of loss of profit and increase of debt, just to serve the profits of a small minority of capitalists and/or to increase the control mechanisms of the state, defies the imagination.
But not the imagination of the anti-vaxxers. Many anti-vaxxers firmly believe, against all data, that the vaccines are dangerous and even deadly. The states that promote them are, in their eyes, willing to sacrifice the health of billions of workers for the profits of a few pharmaceutical and other companies. They don’t seem to realize that capital needs these billions of workers, that it cannot survive without extracting surplus value from them.
One can rightly criticize the anti-virus policies of the various states. It was and is often chaotic, poorly coordinated and contradictory. The information about the vaccines was indeed sometimes unreliable. For example, it has been falsely claimed, probably out of haste to get everyone back to work, that they protect against contamination. They do protect against serious illness and hospitalization, but the delusion that vaccinated people don’t transmit the virus created a false sense of security that increased the number of infections. The lack of preparation and of initial knowledge about the virus played a part in this and other blunders but their main cause is the contradiction in the interests of the owners of capital themselves. In the short term it is in their interest to interrupt the economy as little as possible, to resume making profits as quickly as possible. But in the longer term, it is in their interest to prioritize virus control in order to have a healthy workforce in the future. This contradiction between short-term and long-term interests leads to conflicting measures, inconsistent and fluctuating policies.
Why so intense?
The pandemic is exhausting. We are tired of it, of the controls, the masks, the loss of work, the bans on going out, on getting together, the lockdowns, the tests, the jabs, the divisions… Every time when the end seems in sight, a new wave crushes our hopes. The uncertainty is nerve-wrecking. The desire to return to life before covid is broad and intense and has led to angry demonstrations and riots. We share this desire to escape from the current misery. But we fail to see how that goal can be achieved by pretending that the virus is “just a flu,” by deliberately refusing to take protective measures against it including vaccines, whose effectiveness against symptomatic infection, hospitalization and death has been abundantly proven.
Many opponents of anti-virus measures are young and healthy and therefore feel invulnerable. They feel they are unfairly paying for a problem of old and sick people.
A French observer saw posters in an anti-vaxx demonstration with the slogan: “Laissons la nature travailler” (“Let’s Nature do its work”) and another, sarcastic one: “Tous ensemble, renonçons à la vie pour protéger les plus fragiles d’entre nous.” (“Let’s all together renounce life to protect the weakest amongst us”). It’s called “social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. That is also the basis of Nazi ideology.
True, not all anti-vaxxers think like that. Their distrust of the state, including the media, is not without ground. We’ve been lied to so many times by politicians, journalists and so-called experts, we suffered their ploys to trigger wars and to divide the exploited, so why should we believe them now? Lying has become such an important feature of the information stream that you can understand the confusion.
And the anger. There is plenty of reason to be rebellious but that this rebellion is currently expressed in opposition to anti-virus measures is disturbing. The concept of solidarity, of the collective interest, is being called into question. Social relations are seen as a burden for individuals who consider themselves independent, inviolable and immune. The question of the extent to which social media have contributed to this evolution is for another text.
It’s a mistake to contrast coercive measures and individual freedom in a purely abstract manner, regardless of their context. In the context of a pandemic, vaccination should be an obvious act of care for the community; social solidarity should make coercion unnecessary. The fact that vaccination also serves the interests of the state and of capital does not change this. Capitalists have always found abstract “individual freedom” a useful tool. In recent decades it has been an ideological weapon to undermine labor protections in the U.S. and many other countries. In the context of the pandemic, “individual freedom,” for the anti-vaxxers, means the freedom to be indifferent to a social calamity.
The virus deniers have created the ideological space for the state to present itself as the responsible and rational defender of the common good against irrational individualism. They are also a convenient scapegoat for the failures of the state’s anti-virus policy. The recent hateful outburst of the French president against the unvaccinated is an example of this. He won’t be the last politician to tap that keg. Our rulers neglect to vaccinate the vast majority of the world’s population, then from India comes the delta variant and from Africa comes omicron, and who gets the blame? The anti-vaxxers.
The polarization over vaccination divides society, but not on a class base. The division runs through workplaces, even through families and circles of friends. In that way, it benefits the ruling class. “Divide et impera” – divide and rule. It’s the first concern of all ruling classes since class society exists.
The anti-vaxx protests channel social discontent into a deadend.
The discontent is real and about more than just anti-virus policy. It is fueled by growing uncertainty on all levels. The future looks bleak. Denial is perhaps an understandable reaction, a phase some of us must go through in the process of mourning the “normal life” that is definitively behind us. Climate denial and virus denial help to think away the woes, which is soothing for a while, and profitable for some.
Not so, some anti-vaxxers would say, we do care about others. We fight for freedom, not just for ourselves but for everyone, for the right to assemble when we want to, not when the state says that we can. Our resistance is not fueled by nostalgia but by our refusal to blindly submit to the march towards a totalitarian society. Yes to that, but is fighting for the right to ignore a contageous disease the way to do this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a mass protest movement based on solidarity instead of abstract individual freedom?
Protest? Yes please!
The managers of the world economy are driven by the necessity to continue the process of capital formation at all costs. This is not a choice, they have to do it to prevent a spiral of devalorization. Economic interests, that is, the needs of value accumulation, take precedence over human interests. They overlap but are essentially antagonistic. Imagine if it were not the compulsion to make a profit but human needs that was the driving force of the economy. How would virus control be different?
We have no blueprint but it is obvious that the immediate focus would be on protecting the population. All possible protective, preventive and therapeutic means would be made immediately available to everyone throughout the world. Universal vaccination would be a matter of course. The best vaccines would be produced worldwide as soon as possible. Patents, of course, would no longer exist, nor would for-profit health care. Hospitals would not be downsized to cut costs and would not be overwhelmed by an influx of patients. The interruption of non-essential production would not be a huge problem. Such production would have shrunk considerably anyway, leaving much more free time for anyone who wants it. The production that is really essential (food, infrastructure, health care…) would continue under the safest possible conditions. No one would fall in debt. No one would go hungry or lack care.
That would be a rational way to win the fight against the virus. But, of course, the conditions that gave rise to the virus – the plunder of the environment – would no longer exist.
What we saw instead was disastrous in many ways. “Essential workers” (usually the lowest paid) often had to go to work without adequate protection, resulting in the illness or death of many of them. Millions lost jobs and income. Protection of the most vulnerable, particularly in nursing homes and prisons, was grossly neglected. The often privatized health care system suffered from a shortage of personnel and, in many countries, a dire shortage of masks, oxygen tanks and other resources. State support measures made the richest even richer and the poor poorer, while the cost of living rose rapidly. The European Union and other authorities have even prevented the temporary suspension of patents on covid vaccines, in cool bureaucratic language that for many is a death sentence. In many poorer countries, only the elite are vaccinated, less than one percent of the population, which in itself is a guarantee of a future covid wave. The fluctuations in states’ policies, driven by the urge to resume production and the fear that a horizontal lockdown would become inevitable, give the course of the pandemic a cyclical character rather than ending it. What the pandemic shows is that capitalism is unfit to rule the world today.
Collective resistance is therefore necessary. We need a mass movement for better health care for all, rather than one for the individual right to pretend that covid doesn’t exist. Capital’s tendency to defund social health care, which is itself the cause of countless avoidable deaths in this pandemic, can only be restrained by collective struggle. And even then, health care will reflect the continuing growing divide between rich and poor, which is not merely a policy choice but a direct result of capitalism’s crisis. The realization that capitalist society will never provide proper health care, that it will never cease creating conditions that give rise to new global diseases, that it will never stop destroying the planet, that it will never end hunger, war, racism and despair but on the contrary, increasingly create them, must foster the desire to smash capitalism and take society in our own collective hands.
The collective worker, who, potentially, has the whole world in his hands, must wake up, come together without letting differences of nation, race, religion or other such beliefs divide them. Ending the division over the need for vaccination would be helpful.
Sander
1/25
This article is partly based on “The Reality of Denial and the Denial of Reality” by Cognord and Antithesi. This (long) essay can be found in English on the site of Cured Quail .
Best analysis I’ve read so far of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of capitalism. Bravo!