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Joe BidenJoe Biden says he and first lady plan on getting Covid booster shotPresident defends shots as millions worldwide are unvaccinated: US has ‘provided more to the rest of the world than all the rest of the world combined’ S More
Labour has written to ministers urging them to keep funding in place to help free up hospital beds and help the NHS cope with a crisis in patient demand.Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told health secretary Sajid Javid that the NHS needed urgent clarity on the money available to it from beyond the end of September.Specifically, his letter warned money was needed to keep in place an initiative started before the first Covid wave which saw patients discharged back into the community with the NHS paying for up to six weeks of care.This has been credited with releasing 30,000 NHS beds that were the available for Covid patients or for hospitals to use for patients waiting for surgery and other treatment.The government has only agreed a budget for the NHS until the end of September with negotiations between the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and the Treasury ongoing.In his letter to Sajid Javid, Jonathan Ashworth said the health service needed “immediate certainty” adding: “The service is in a summer crisis, with huge numbers of people in need of urgent and emergency care, record calls to ambulance services, and a soaring waiting list.“With only 16 days to the beginning of September, it is incredible that the service still does not have the budgetary clarity it needs to make major decisions about service planning.”“In the first few days of your tenure as secretary of state, you said that you wanted to give the NHS what it needs to recover from the pandemic. The NHS will now be wondering why you have not made a decision on this budget. Patients and NHS staff will consider this a test of whether you are true to your word to them.”He said the discharge to assess programme had been praised by the new NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard as well as NHS England’s director of strategy Ian Dodge.Mr Ashworth added: “Given the lack of any decision on extension of the funding, it is not clear whether your department or this Government are listening. NHS Providers and NHS Confederation had called for a decision to be made on this by mid-August. Regrettably, that deadline has now passed. This indecision and lack of clarity cannot be allowed to continue further.”His comments come as the latest NHS data shows a total waiting list of 5.5 million people, with 304,000 waiting over a year for treatment. More than one million 999 calls were made to ambulance trusts in July – the highest ever number ever recorded.Mr Ashworth challenged the health secretary over what assessment the DHSC had made of the impact of the discharge to assess funding and whether the government accepted the view of NHS England’s Ian Dodge that continuing the scheme would be vital to the NHS recovering its backlog of operations.While negotiations over NHS England’s budget continue, the Health Service Journal, has reported NHS trusts have been told to plan on the basis of needing to make 1.5 per cent cost savings for the rest of the year.Before the coronavirus crisis NHS England had signed hospitals up to a target of 1.1 per cent savings.Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust, told the HSJ: “We would warn the NHS against agreeing to what would be yet another settlement which assumes huge and unachievable levels of efficiency.“There’s covid, but you also just have to look at the NHS financial performance in recent years to see this is an unrealistic target.”The Department of Health and Social Care were approached for comment. More
OpinionCoronavirusAre you in denial? Because it’s not just anti-vaxxers and climate scepticsJonathan FreedlandTo accept the facts about climate science without changing the way we live is also to deny reality Fri 13 Aug 2021 11.55 EDTLast modified on Fri 13 Aug 2021 15.04 EDTIt’s easy to laugh at the anti-vaccine movement, and this week they made it easier still. Hundreds of protesters tried to storm Television Centre in west London, apparently unaware that they were not at the headquarters of the BBC or its news operation – which they blame for brainwashing the British public – but at a building vacated by the corporation eight years ago and which now consists of luxury flats and daytime TV studios. If only they’d done their own research.Anti-vax firebreather Piers Corbyn was there, of course, unabashed by the recent undercover sting that showed him happy to take £10,000 in cash from what he thought was an AstraZeneca shareholder, while agreeing that he would exempt their product from his rhetorical fire. (Corbyn has since said that the published video is misleading.) “We’ve got to take over these bastards,” he said during this week’s protest, while inside Loose Women were discussing the menopause.In Britain, the temptation is to snigger at the anti-vaxxers, but in the US it’s becoming ever clearer that the outright Covid deniers, vaccine opponents and anti-maskers – and the hold they have over the Republican party – are no joke. The Covid culture wars have escalated to such an extent that the Republican governors of two states, Florida and Texas, are now actively barring schools, colleges and local authorities from taking basic, common-sense measures against the disease.They are no longer allowed to require vaccines, proof of vaccination, a Covid test or masks. Any Florida school administrator who demands the wearing of masks could lose their pay. Texas is dropping the requirement that schools even notify parents when there’s a coronavirus case in class. Naturally, the Covid numbers in both states are through the roof. For all Joe Biden’s early success with vaccination, this level of resistance is posing a grave threat to the US’s ability to manage, let alone defeat, the pandemic.What explains this level of Covid denialism? In the US, the roots of a “don’t tread on me” libertarianism that regards any instruction from government as a step towards tyranny run deep. In the Trump era, it has become a matter of political identity: a refusal to believe Covid is real or that the measures against it are legitimate are increasingly conditions of membership of the right and of good standing as a true devotee of the former president. They are conditions of membership. Besides, Covid denialism offers the lure of all conspiracy theories: the promise of secret knowledge, the chance to see what the sheeple cannot see.For everyone else, it’s tempting to take pride in being untainted by such thinking. To dismiss the Covid deniers, whether in Florida or west London, as a group apart, irrational, if not downright stupid – refusing to take the steps that will provably protect them, their families and those around them. And yet, the distance between them and everyone else might not be as great as you think.Contempt for the unvaccinated is a temptation to be resisted | Dan BrooksRead moreOn the same day that Piers and the placard wavers were out in force in White City, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its report on the state of our planet. It was its starkest warning yet. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called it a “code red for humanity”, adding that the “alarm bells are deafening”. The IPCC found that sea level is rising, the polar ice is melting, there are floods, droughts and heatwaves and that human activity is “unequivocally” the cause.Now, there are some who still deny this plain truth, the same way that some insist coronavirus is a “plandemic” hatched by Bill Gates or caused by 5G phone masts or aliens. Both those groups are guilty of cognitive denial, failing to update their beliefs in the light of the evidence.But there is another form of denial, what the philosopher Quassim Cassam calls “behavioural or practical denialism”. This is the mindset that accepts the science marshalled by the IPCC – it hears the alarm bell ringing – but still does not change its behaviour. It can operate at the level of governments: note the White House official who on Wednesday urged global oil producers to open up the taps and increase production, so that hard-pressed US motorists can buy gasoline more cheaply. And it lives in individuals, too, in the fatalism that says one person can do nothing to halt a planetary emergency, so you might as well shrug and move on. Which is “to act in the same way as if you were a climate change denier,” says Cassam. “The practical upshot is the same.”Whether it’s Covid or climate, there is a common defect at work here. It is wilful blindness, a deliberate closing of the eyes to a reality that is too hard to bear – and it afflicts far more than a hardcore of noisy sceptics and protesters. A US poll this week found that a summer of heatwaves, flooding and wildfires – evidence that the planet is both burning and drowning – has barely shifted attitudes to the climate issue. Many, even most, are looking the other way.Perhaps all this is worth bearing in mind as policymakers grappling with the twin crises try to cajole the wary towards action for both their own and the collective good. In both cases, it pays to peel the committed deniers away from those who are merely hesitant or apathetic, and therefore more persuadable. And, again in both cases, it’s wise to remember that the recalcitrant are driven by an impulse that is all too human: namely, fear.TopicsCoronavirusOpinionVaccines and immunisationHealthClimate changeUS politicsRepublicanscommentReuse this content More
You’d think that the whole world could unite against a deadly virus. COVID-19 has already sickened over 200 million people around the world and killed over 4 million. It has now mutated into more contagious forms that threaten to plunge the globe into another spin cycle of lockdown.
The Politics of American Protest: A North Korean Twist
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Avoiding global catastrophe from the more infectious Delta variant of COVID-19 doesn’t require a huge commitment from people and governments. Richer countries just have to ensure more widespread availability of vaccines, and individuals have to get vaccinated. COVID-19 is not an asteroid on a collision course with the planet. It’s not an imminent nuclear war. It’s an invisible enemy that humanity has demonstrated it can beat. It just requires a bit of cooperation. So, what’s the problem?
Three Problems
Actually, there are three problems. The first has to do with supply, since the richest nations have cornered the vaccine market and have been criminally slow to get doses to poorer countries. On the entire continent of Africa, for instance, less than 2% of the population has been fully vaccinated.
The second problem, on the demand side, is the commonplace resistance to the newfangled, in this case a vaccine that was developed very quickly, hasn’t yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and has some side effects that are harmful for a very small number of people. Hesitation is understandable. But not when placed against the obvious lethality of COVID-19 and the clear benefits of herd immunity.
The third problem is political. The far right has jumped on the anti-vaccination bandwagon, seized control of the wheel and is driving the vehicle, al-Qaeda-style, straight into oncoming traffic.
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Both in the United States and globally, the far right has long been infected by various harmful delusions — the superiority of white people, the fiction of climate change, the evils of government. As the far right has spread, thanks to vectors like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, those delusions have mutated.
Now, with its anti-vaccine opportunism, the far right is circulating a new Delta variant of global stupidity: virally through social media, in a shower of spit and invective on the street and through top-down lunacy from politicians and political parties. COVID-19 and all of its variants will eventually burn themselves out, though at who knows what cost. The latest versions of global stupidity promoted by the far right, however, are proving far more resistant to science, reason and just plain common sense.
Hijacking the Anti-Vax Movement
The Brothers of Italy is a neo-fascist formation that is now polling the highest of any political party in the country today. With 21% support, this pro-Mussolini throwback is just ahead of the far-right Lega party. Throw in Silvio Berlusconi’s Forward Italy party at 7% and the hard right looks as if it could form the next government in Italy whenever the next elections are held.
How did the Brothers of Italy grow in several months from a few percent to the leading party in the polls? Led by Giorgia Meloni, a woman who predictably decries Islam and immigrants, the Brothers of Italy started out as a booster of vaccines, which seemed like a pretty safe position in a country that has suffered so much at the hands of COVID-19.
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But Meloni abruptly shifted the party’s stance when the Italian government, currently led by technocrat Mario Draghi, introduced a “green pass” that allows the vaccinated to eat in restaurants, go to bars and enter various public places like museums. Meloni called the pass “the final step on the road to the creation of an Orwellian society,” which “limits the freedom of citizens, further devastates the economy and de facto introduces a vaccine mandate.”
Limits the freedom of citizens? The freedom to infect other people with a deadly virus? Effectively, Meloni wants to grant all citizens the same right that James Bond famously possessed: the license to kill. Unfortunately, such nonsense has support outside Italy as well.
Batting for a Pathogen
In France, the government of Emmanuel Macron has instituted a similar health pass as well as mandating that all medical professionals get vaccinated. The response has been ferocious, with several demonstrations of over 100,000 people mobilizing around the country.
It might seem at first glance that the French protestors are just ordinary folks who are sick and tired of government intrusions in their lives, similar to the yellow vests protestors from 2018. But the organizers of these anti-vax protests are the usual suspects from the far right like Florian Philippot, a former top aide of the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen. National Rally and the equally rabid Stand Up France have come out against Macron’s policies. Unfortunately, some leading members of the left-wing France Unbowed party have also endorsed the rallies. As in the United States, French anti-vaxxers are resorting to anti-system conspiracy theories up to and including QAnon.
Despite the size of these rallies whipped up by the far right, a majority of French support the health pass and nearly 70% of the population has gotten at least one shot, compared to only 58% in the United States. But the far right sees the anti-vaccine movement as an opportunity to worm its way into the mainstream in France and elsewhere, such as the Querdenken movement in Germany, the anti-Semitic far right in Poland and evangelical Christian organizations in the Philippines.
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Toward this end, the far right has eagerly employed the services of such “useful idiots” as Robert Kennedy, Jr., perhaps the most famous face of the anti-vaccine movement. The Polish far-right party Confederation invited Kennedy to speak on-ine to a Polish parliamentary group on vaccines. Kennedy also put his social media power behind a global day against vaccines that took place last October in 15 countries from Europe to Latin America, which a number of far-right parties helped to organize.
Originally in the United States, vaccine skepticism circulated mainly on the left, where suspicions of chemicals and corporations created a resistance to having just any substance injected into one’s arm. But then along came Donald Trump, the dark conspiracy theories of the alt-right and ultimately QAnon, which focused latent anti-government sentiments against the medical establishment and its COVID-19 vaccines. Suddenly, videos like “Plandemic” were zipping around cyberspace, and prominent anti-vaxxers like “healthy lifestyle advocate” Larry D. Cook fell under the sway of QAnon.
Today, in a tired repeat of 2020, US anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are again protesting in front of governors’ mansions, bringing their message to Disneyland and shutting down school board meetings. If COVID-19 were a wealthy corporation that underwrote such disruptions, these actions would make at least some economic sense. If COVID-19 were a wildly popular musical group or a subversively attractive religious cult that governments were trying to suppress, the frenzy of crowds would be somewhat understandable. But COVID-19 is a deadly virus. Why on earth would anyone go to bat for a pathogen?
The Far Right Has Its Reasons
Conservatives have traditionally supported the powerful pillars of society: the police, the army, the state. Today’s far right is not conservative. It detests the state. It prefers vigilante justice — everyone standing their ground with gun in hand — to the police and the army, since these latter are representatives of the state.
Effectively, the far right embraces the old Hobbesian concept of a “war of all against all,” which was the status quo before the emergence of the state. To achieve this “golden age” of general mayhem, the far right pursues any means necessary. It supports homeschooling to destroy public education, privatization of state assets to weaken the government, and deregulation to tilt the playing field in favor of corporations.
And now, in the age of COVID-19, the far right is even willing to support germ warfare. For that’s what the anti-mask and anti-vaccine ideology amounts to: siding with the novel coronavirus against the sensible policies of the state. One wonders: If the state issued a mandate that required people not to jump off cliffs, would the far right suddenly launch a Lemming Crusade simply to spite the state?
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I can well imagine the segment on Newsmax.
Reporter: I’m here with patriot James Q. Public. He and his family are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Tell me, James, why are you about to take a big step into the unknown?
James Q. Public: The government can’t tell me what to do. I believe in choice. And this is my choice.
Reporter: Do you think of yourself as a pioneer?
James Q. Public: Absolutely. This socialist government with its Five Year Plans sickens me. I take it one day at a time. One minute at a time.
Reporter: Your youngest child doesn’t look happy about your choice.
James Q. Public: Oh, he’s just a crybaby. He’ll get used to it.
Reporter: Get used to falling off a cliff?
James Q. Public: What makes you think we’ll fall?
Reporter: Well, uh, gravity —
James Q. Public: Come on, man, you believe in all that nonsense those scientists are trying to force down our throats? Vaccines? Climate change? Gravity? Okay, everyone, let’s go. One small step for the Public family, one large step for arrgghhh….!
It would all be grimly amusing, like some pandemic version of the Darwin Awards, if the far right’s Lemming Crusade wasn’t threatening to drag the rest of us off the cliff with it.
*[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Prices for travel PCR Covid tests, some of which are exorbitant and vary wildly between providers, have prompted an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).The body was called into action after the health secretary, Sajid Javid, wrote to it asking for a review following reports of “exploitative behaviour” and “unfair practices”.Travelers arriving in the UK are routinely charged hundreds of pounds for Covid tests, with many complaining of inflated prices, missing results and poor customer service. PCRs cost holidaymakers an average of £75 per person in the UK – roughly double the cost of the same type of test in other European countries – and some firms charge almost £400.Travellers returning to the UK from amber- and green-list countries are required to purchase a single PCR test – and those who are unvaccinated and have been in an amber-list country within the previous 10 days must take two tests, on days two and eight. PCR tests are also required before travelling to some countries from the UK.The Independent has heard of private providers offering PCR tests with faulty activation codes, rendering them useless, and firms that do not respond to emails or phone calls leading to delays or test results failing to be returned. Prices for the PCR tests listed on the government’s own website of approved providers range between £17 and £399.In his letter to the CMA sent on Friday and reported in The Sunday Times, Mr Javid called for a “rapid high-level review” and said: “The cost of PCR testing can act as a barrier, especially for families who want to travel together.“It is not right if some families experience yet further disruption unnecessarily because of practices in the market for private travel tests.”Responding to his letter, the CMA said: “We look forward to providing the secretary of state with advice on how best to ensure that travellers have access to tests that are affordable and reliable.”The Independent contacted the CMA for further comment. More
Jessica Glenza and Jonathan Freedland discuss how party politics is playing a role in helping – and hindering – public health messaging
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This week the US reached the milestone of having at least 70% of adults receive at least one Covid-19 vaccination shot. Joe Biden had hoped to achieve this by 4 July, but the vaccine programme has stalled over the summer. The resurgence of the pandemic, owing to the much more transmissible Delta variant, has convinced many people who were once hesitant to get the jab. However, some are blaming mixed messages from Republican lawmakers for causing confusion and apathy. So what should local and state politicians be doing? Jessica Glenza talks to Jonathan Freedland. For the other big news of the week, make sure to listen back to our episode about the Andrew Cuomo scandal and why the New York State governor is facing calls to resign. Archive: ABC News, CNN, LiveNOW Watch This Body – a Guardian documentary Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More
A little over a month ago, those who were fully COVID-19 vaccinated in America were feeling pretty good about themselves and their prospects for a summer of wining, dining and a bit of travel. The kiddies, even though unvaccinated, could for some unexplained reason do camp, amusement parks and movies with a return to full in-person schooling to come. And just to show how far we had come in turning back the viral tide, those masks could be washed and stored away to await the next pandemic.
So, what happened? First, a lot of ignorant and selfish people decided not only to stay that way, but to avoid COVID vaccinations as well. They started getting sick and dying, but not enough of them did so to end the plague. Instead, they just spread the disease, now a highly contagious variant, to other unvaccinated people. Then, something really bad happened: It was soon discovered that those ignorant and selfish people were also spreading the disease to vaccinated people, who just haven’t started dying in large numbers, at least not yet.
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Meanwhile, the commercial machine and its political allies were ramping up to open everything and let the good times roll. It quickly became hard to find a seat at the bar or a hotel room at the beach. Airports and airplanes were filled again with vacationing families, rental cars were so scarce that it is hard to imagine that turnaround time included a drop of disinfectant, and those ever-popular buffet tables were dusted off for the hungry hoards. Forgetting your mask at home or in the car was deemed to be of little consequence.
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The US federal government response was to go all in on vaccines as the obvious path to public health and commercial revitalization. The vaccines are now everywhere to be had and free of charge. The only problem with this plan is that it is playing out in America, where freedom is defined by way too many as not having to do anything you don’t want to do that you can get away with. The well-being of others be damned.
This situation would be easy to ignore if it involved only a fringe group of pock-marked anti-vaccine individualists whose children regularly get the measles and who never go to school. But this time, for some reason, the vaccine-resistant crowd also includes a large percentage of Republicans who are not pock-marked and whose children get a whole raft of vaccines so they can go to school. Then throw in a bunch of members of religious covens whose leaders are chatting with their god about this issue and then let the flock in on the big secret that their god definitely isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19 (even though there seems to be some disagreement about god’s smallpox vaccination status).
“Freedom”
There are more ironies here than I can keep up with. Let’s start with “freedom” of choice. Many of those resistant to vaccines resist government “interference” in personal health choices, even though many of those same people are fully engaged in trying to get that same government to prevent women from making their own reproductive choices. Think about that for a moment.
More ironic yet, many of those in the “freedom” crowd seem untroubled by most government health mandates, yet all of a sudden, putting a vaccine in their bodies to help themselves and others avoid the ravages of a relentless virus has become some political and social litmus test for them. Seatbelt requirements, drinking and driving prohibitions, no smoking in restaurants, a host of required vaccines for employment, travel and schooling all make the good health mandate list. Meanwhile, mindless resistance to life-saving COVID vaccines and masking requirements has become a right-wing badge of honor, generally until the bodies of right-wing family and friends start piling up.
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However, maybe the grandest irony of all is that the leader of the pack of virus resisters, Donald Trump, is himself fully vaccinated, as are at least his wife and the precious Ivanka. It is bad enough that the Trump clan lied its way to prominence and supposed wealth and that when empowered to do the right thing almost always did the wrong thing. Then, when a pandemic was inserted into the mix, the whole crew conspired to undermine any meaningful national response while over 500,000 people in America died on their watch. While others were gasping for their last breath, Trump got vaccinated just to make sure it wouldn’t be him on that ventilator.
You would think that as the actions of the Trump clan played out before adoring eyes, those ignorant and selfish acolytes would be pushing others out of the way to get vaccinated. But instead, they can’t wait to parade their “freedom” from vaccine tyranny at every super spreader event they can find, while the vaccinated and protected leader of the pack cheers them on. This seems to work really well until that stairway to heaven leads to a COVID ward in a local hospital surrounded by other ignorant and selfish people, many of whom now use their last breathes to beg for the vaccine.
Another Wave
In the face of this insanity, it seems that it is slowly dawning on some public officials that another wave of deadly COVID disease and disorder is closing in. Lots of parents are suddenly worried about their children, some private concerns are worried about something other than their short-term bottom line, and lots of people anticipating a return to crowded workplaces and those already there are staying home. There are even a few people with September travel plans suddenly concerned that playa wherever will be a petri dish when they get there. More importantly, it may be sinking in that there is only one way out of this: mandated vaccines wherever the authority exists to mandate them.
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To do this, there can be no more coddling of the ignorant and selfish. Get vaccinated or get out. Everywhere that the federal government has the authority to do so should require proof of vaccine for employment and entry. Start with federal buildings, museums and entertainment venues, airplanes and trains, and the military and military bases. Examine every interstate commerce authority for ways to tighten the vise. No vaccine, no entry, period.
In those pathetic states and localities where resistance overwhelms public health, everything that can be done to isolate those populations from the rest of us needs to be done. No conventions in Atlanta, no cruise ships docking in Miami, interstate highway dead zones, hotel and restaurant chains shuttering their venues, testing and mask mandates for those who knowingly come in contact with the unvaccinated while engaging in interstate commerce, and no event licenses or advertising dollars to sports and entertainment venues that won’t mandate vaccines for entry.
If this gets done before the viability of today’s vaccines begins to wane or is crushed by new COVID-19 mutations, Americans, at least, have a chance to put the pandemic behind them. We are lucky that we have this opportunity at all, but we can only take advantage of it if we move swiftly and decisively to mandate vaccines and isolate those who won’t comply. If accomplished, America might then have the moral authority, the scientific and manufacturing strength, and the financial resources to lead the rest of the world to the same place.
*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
OpinionCoronavirusContempt for the unvaccinated is a temptation to be resistedDan BrooksThe narrative of a dangerously ignorant minority may appeal, but it is not good for democracy Mon 2 Aug 2021 11.50 EDTLast modified on Mon 2 Aug 2021 13.38 EDTThe Covid-19 pandemic was the perfect disaster for our cultural moment, because it made other people being wrong on the internet a matter of life and death.My use of the past tense here is aspirational. The emergence of the more contagious Delta variant threatens to undo a lot of progress – particularly here in the US, where active cases of coronavirus infection are up 149% from two weeks ago. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that fully vaccinated people return to wearing masks indoors in public spaces. The hope that this summer would mark our return to normal is curdling fast, and the enlightened majority – the fact-based, Facebook-sceptical, and fully vaccinated – are looking for someone to blame.A moralist might argue that the Delta variant is poetic justice in light of the US government’s reluctance to provide free vaccines to places such as India, where it first emerged. The notion that doses should be saved for Americans or exported at profit was selfish and shortsighted, and now the chickens (germs) have come home to roost (sickened millions). But this sort of pitiless self-recrimination is so old-fashioned. The modern person prefers to lay blame where it rests more comfortably: on other, dumber people. Take this tweet from a sportswriter, which implied that the people of Alabama – where the vaccination rate lingers at about 34% – would get the jab if the alternative meant no American football. Such remarks often play on the association between the American south and a certain type of person: culturally conservative, frequently undereducated, more interested in sports on TV than pandemics in the newspaper. This person, a kind of back-formation from various statistical trends, has become a familiar scapegoat during the coronavirus pandemic. They represent the obstinate minority – 30% of adults in the US – whose refusal to get vaccinated threatens to mess up the recovery for the rest of us.This narrative, which has become especially popular among American liberals, excoriates imaginary dummies instead of confronting the problems that have discouraged people from getting the jab. These problems include an employer-based healthcare system that favours professionals with permanent jobs and makes it difficult for many Americans to form trusting relationships with doctors. According to Kaiser Health News, the demographic with the lowest vaccination rate in the United States is uninsured people under the age of 65. The difficulty of reaching this group has been compounded by a world-historical explosion of misinformation and a political culture bent on pandering to it.The insistence, among the Republican leadership in the spring of 2020, that Covid-19 was a glorified version of the flu guaranteed that responses to the pandemic would shake out along political and, therefore, cultural lines. In places such as Alabama, not getting the vaccine has more to do with socio-economic identity than with scientific literacy. This is a fatal flaw in the reasoning of unvaccinated people, who are absolutely wrong in a way that endangers not only themselves but also others. But given the haughty reaction of many liberals, can you blame them? Even as the cost of their obstinacy has become grimly clear, the cost of admitting they were wrong has risen; to get the vaccine now would be to kowtow to a class that holds them in contempt. The notion that a vocal minority of our fellow citizens threaten to undo us with their ignorance has become something of a master narrative in anglophone democracies over the past five years. Trump did it for a lot of American Democrats in 2016, and Brexit – which, unlike Trump, won popular support at the polls but, like Trump, was overwhelmingly opposed by the urban and higher-educated – had a similar effect in the UK. The current Republican mania for making voting more difficult seems to be a product of Trump’s loss in November. Last week, a Pew Research Center poll found that 42% of respondents agreed with the statement: “Voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited.” This attitude is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.Don’t blame young people for vaccine hesitancy. The vast majority of us want to get jabbed | Lara SpiritRead moreThe belief that the masses are fundamentally decent and capable of governing themselves – or at least qualified to select leaders capable of governing for them – has been badly dented by social media, which confronts us with the ignorance of strangers at high volume every day. Basic forms of empathy, emerging from real-life communication, are fading from modern democracy, washed out of our assessment of the average stranger by a high-pressure spray of anonymous idiots on the internet.I think we should resist the urge to hold the unvaccinated in contempt. Their premises are wrong, but they are doing what we want citizens in a democracy to do: thinking for themselves, questioning authority, refusing to submit to a class they perceive as bent on ruling them by fiat. The fact that they are doing these things in the service of dangerous misinformation is a terrible irony, and it threatens the stability of 21st-century democracy.Covid-19 might be the most convincing counterargument to the western liberal tradition we see in our lifetimes. It offers a counterexample to two foundational ideas: that ordinary people can recognise their own best interests, and that the minority who do not can be afforded their freedom without endangering the rest of us. A plague is one of those classic exceptions that appears in the literature of political science again and again. I don’t know if existing systems can withstand it. I do know that, like a marriage, a democracy can survive anything but contempt.
Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana
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