Since the Covid vaccines have shown such limited efficacy as regards reducing infection and transmission, some stick was required with which to beat the unvaccinated, to say nothing of a premise to justify the entire project of coerced mass vaccination. Increasingly, this cudgel and justification has been found in the notion that the unvaccinated are placing a disproportionate strain on the health system. Country after country rolled out the notion of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, and politicians and their media husks were happy to propagate a guilt-leaden narrative that the unvaccinated, with their blinkered and selfish refusal to roll up their sleeves for the Science, were “taking up” hospital beds, and pushing frontline heroes – whichever of them hadn't been unceremoniously fired themselves for refusing the Science, that is – to the edge of their benevolent tolerance.
Are the figures underlying these claims accurate, or have they been massaged to prop up the tottering vaccine narrative, and the credibility of the entire Covid response, in which so much suffering and sacrifice was leveraged on the idea that the vaccines would eventually deliver us from every evil? It isn't clear. Certainly, here in Ireland, where politicians have derived incredible mileage and deflection from the numbers of unvaccinated receiving intensive care, journalists have refused to do even the slightest due diligence with these figures. They haven't asked for a breakdown of who is actually in ICU specifically for Covid, and who for other causes; nor how many are immunocompromised, and hence potentially unable to take the vaccine.
Something feels dubious about the whole claim. It certainly can't be the case that many healthy 18, or 25, or 35 year olds, who decided quite reasonably not to take the vaccine, are suddenly flooding our ICUs, unless something has radically changed in the entire phenomenology of Covid. The Irish state did not prevent one hospitalization, nor clear up a single ICU bed, by lying to 21 year olds that they would be able to go to nightclubs if they got vaccinated.
Even if one were to take the figures at face value, and allow the government the further indulgence of assuming that capacity issues do not arise from long-standing mismanagement, there is still something peculiar and unseemly about the entire argument that the unvaccinated are capitalizing healthcare facilities which they somehow don't deserve. We have never before referred to people receiving healthcare with the condemnatory language of “taking up beds.” By what logic is one patient a deserving recipient of healthcare, and another an unwelcome drain on resources, whose illness is not be commiserated, but collated into an oft-quoted statistic of guilt and blame?
In this instance, the difference is clearly personal choice. Had the unvaccinated person taken the jab, then we are to assume that they would not require the hospital bed. The reality, however, is that a whole panoply of poor personal health choices result in hospitalization, and constitute, if one wishes to adopt that language, a drain on our healthcare resources: smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, substance abuse, bad diets, unhealthy lifestyles in general, etc. Yet, we have never in any prior instance subjected these individuals to any guilt or recrimination, nor regarded their right to healthcare as somehow unearned, as an effort which might be better expended on more deserving patients. We didn't make healthcare a zero-sum game, or a meritocracy.
The reason for this is that, prior to Covid, we were generally compassionate beings. Knowing that alcoholics or drug addicts will constitute a greater demand on our resources than those who maintain a more disciplined or careful approach to life, it nevertheless didn't occur to us that the former were taking up that which was more rightly deserved by the latter. We regarded it as simply an unavoidable fact of the world that some people will make poor health choices, and while constantly informing the public of the consequences of such choices, we never saw fit to subject them to guilt, on top of the burden of their illness. The problem, then, is that we are selectively applying this standard in respect of one particular choice – that of not taking a Covid vaccine – but to no other. Why are we doing this?
The answer, I suspect, is the same for why journalists have chosen to wholeheartedly accept, rather than query, the state's assertion that the unvaccinated are creating a disproportionate drain on the health system. Our leaders have resolved to create a hysterical climate in which there is an overwhelming public conviction that every man, woman and child must receive a Covid vaccine. A couple of things are worth noting about this conviction: it is comparatively recent (only a few months old), and it has no rational basis. In January of 2021, for example, England's then health secretary Matt Hancock made two noteworthy statements: he said the Covid vaccines were for adults only, and would not be given to children because the risk to children was negligible; he also famously expressed a desire to “Vaccinate the vulnerable, and cry Freedom!”
The point worth noting is that in January of this year, is was a perfectly normal and socially acceptable thing to suggest that only the vulnerable cohort really needed the vaccines, and that children didn't need them at all. A mere 12 months later, to express either sentiment would be to risk figurative burning at the stake; these are now toxic, dangerous “anti-vax” ideas. What happened in the meanwhile was that, once the vaccine rollout began in earnest, a vigorous campaign of mass vaccination, irrespective of age and health status, was mounted. Literally everything was thrown at the wall as this frenetic project slowly moved from carrot to stick: burgers, doughnuts, lottery tickets, blow jobs, joints, and all kinds of nice things eventually gave way to vaccine passports, mandates, bullying, demonisation, and so on.
But was was the purpose of it? What was the scientific rationale for mass vaccination at all costs, rather than speedy vaccination of the vulnerable cohort, and optional, informed consent for the young and healthy? Ostensibly, two related arguments were offered in favour of mass vaccination: that mass vaccination would get us to herd immunity, and that rapid mass vaccination would prevent the emergence of undesirable variants. The problem with both these augments was that, in order for them to have any chance of working at all, the vaccines would need to provide full sterilizing immunity, or something close to it. They would need to effectively stop the chain of transmission – but the Covid vaccines had never been tested for blocking transmission, only for the reduction of severe symptoms.
A funny thing then happened on the way to Forum: as gushing hype gave way to the revelation of vaccine efficacy in the real world, the case for mass vaccination simply and definitively imploded in plain sight. The Covid vaccines weren't just a little leaky – they were post-iceberg Titanic leaky. As far as herd immunity was concerned, they simply weren't close to effective enough at blocking infection and transmission to achieve this – a fact which nobody, not even Bill Gates, ultimately denied. It became increasingly, maddeningly obvious that the Covid vaccines could only confer any meaningful benefit on the vaccinated individual themselves – nobody else. An yet then, an even stranger thing happened – the political and media class ploughed ahead at full steam, as though none of this had happened. For reasons which I'm not going to speculate on this essay, they simply intensified the climate of vaccine fanaticism, precisely as any underlying rational justification for it became untenable. However many were vaccinated, it simply wasn't enough – if you had over 93% of adults vaccinated, as is the case in Ireland, and Covid still surged, it wasn't evidence that the vaccines themselves were failing; only proof of how much havoc the remaining 6% could wreak.
Which is to say that the entire process has moved out of the rational domain entirely. A large percentage of the population now has an overriding conviction that everybody must receive a Covid vaccine, yet they no longer have any firm sense of why this should be so. They feel it in their viscera, as much as anything else. The politicians resolved – shamefully – to play an extremely dangerous game. They decided, quite consciously and deliberately, to set one group of people against another. To do this is to play with fire. It is to awaken primordial, deep-rooted aspects of animal nature which simply have no contact with reason or logic.
It has frequently been noted that the sharing of food plays a recurring role in the creation of particular communities and social niches in a variety of creatures, from insects to humans. In The Parable of the Beast, John Bleibtreu argues that the de-segregation of lunch counters in the southern US was far more of a challenge than the buses for precisely this reason – when you share food together, you are no longer separate on some fundamental level. You are a community. The ritual sharing of any substance, however, can consecrate a community, and demarcate one group from another. The consumption of the communion wafer, for example, marks out the Catholic from the non-Catholic; during the 1960s, the consumption of LSD, or some other drug, marked the divide between the hippie and square worlds and communities.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless, reckless propaganda of 2021 has created precisely this kind of irrational divide between those who have taken the vaccine, and those who have not. The trauma of prolonged lockdown, the simmering frustration of failed Covid policies, provide the perfect breeding ground for the creation of such an irrational sectarian division. Hence the now inchoate desire for everybody to be vaccinated; Elias Canetti writes in Crowds and Power that the crowd, once formed, seeks above all else to expand rapidly, and “regards anything which opposes its growth as constricting.” It is for this reason that the vaccinated so readily perceive the unvaccinated as “taking up beds” in a hospital; they are now so radically Othered that even the affliction of Covid, so sacred in every other context, garners them no sympathy, only fresh fuel for recrimination.
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