Reconsidering The Vaccine Religion

💉💉💉 Reflecting on the last one-and-a-bit years 💉💉💉

Hello 💉,

Just a short post today – there should (hopefully) be one or two longer ones in the next month or so.

As the last year-and-a-bit’s vaccine fervour peters and is replaced by a – probably temporary – vaccine lacuna, we now have some space to breathe. Spared the relentless fear messaging, the threat of mandates, and open, vitriolic scorn, we can begin to reflect on what occurred, on how we were governed and on how we responded – we can try and consider why we did what we did. Put aside the calls to ‘move on’ – the last two years have been momentous, transformative, and revealing of the limits or vacuity of much of what was taken to characterise ‘liberal’ ‘democracy’ and this bears careful reflection. Do not allow the media or polite opinion do it for you.

Amongst the things that we might come to reflect on is our collective attitude to vaccines, or, too bookishly, the symbolic role that vaccines have come to play in our collective imagination¹.

‘False Idol’ by Bob Moran

In short, the last two years have revealed the sectarian attachment that we have to vaccines. From the pandemic’s start, there was no ambiguity – vaccines would eventually be our salvation from this plague, and nearly 3.9 billion people were placed under some form of house arrest, partially on basis that there existed no vaccination against COVID-19. And like with any good dogma, we had a mantra to justify the predication of our basic freedoms on the existence of a vaccine – this was just Following The Science.  

Deviating from the dogma earned you much the same treatment as any other religious heretic – first, you were scorned and denounced, and then you were scapegoated and punished.

In the first instance, the ghoulish ‘anti-vaxxer’ label yawned open to swallow up anyone who dared question any aspect of this dogma²: the dodgy clinical trials, the complete lack of long-term data, the ambiguous cost-benefit balance for many, the serious side-effects, the general untrustworthiness of the companies turning profits, the conflicts of interest, even the mandates that cost many of the unvaxxed their livelihoods and their freedoms. This last thing – the mandates – were especially revealing of the vaccine religion. It was simply inconceivable to many of the faithful that anyone could question the unimpeachability or necessity of The Vaccine, and, so, many agreed that those who did deserved to be punished for being irresponsible, selfish chuds.

Now, this vaccine-sectarianism did not emerge from nowhere. As a term or notion, “vaccine” was already laden with its own mythology, and is tied up with our slavish, post-industrial faith in the inextricability of scientific and social progress. By the bright, white light of Science, the story goes, we were lifted from the oppression and squalor of before, and vaccines played no small part in this. They delivered us smallpox! From tuberculosis! From Polio, even! They are simply one of Science’s man-made miracles. Consequently, to many, raising questions about any technology labelled “a vaccine” (including the relatively untested mRNA) seemed like an intolerably blasphemous scepticism of science, and maybe even progress itself.

But, I think that the last year or so has shown that this simply not a sensible attitude to hold about any technology, let alone one as caught up in a web of conflicts of interest and philanthrocapitalistic ambitions as vaccines. This sectarian attitude has made us vulnerable to exploitation by commercial interest, and to accepting terrible, brutalising policies like mass firings, social exclusion, and a quasi-apartheid. Part of our reflection on our vaccine attitudes should be wrestling with their sectarian quality. This is not, of course, to endorse an out-and-out scepticism of vaccines – which is often as dogmatic and blinkered as vaccine sectarianism – but to defend a more measured, reality-informed collective approach. Professor Didier Raoult makes this point in the introduction to his The Truth about Vaccines:

We should not try and establish if all vaccines are good or bad, but to evaluate each in terms of its risks and its benefits for our health. We need to identify which vaccines can be of benefit to which individual, depending on their sex, age, country, way of life, epoch… The answer to this question depends on the benefit promised to the individual to protect them against serious illness, or to the whole of society in the case of an epidemic.

[…]

A proper vaccine strategy would constantly review the appropriateness of each vaccine, considering an individual’s particular needs and their environment. Information making this review possible must be trustworthy and up-to-date and must be communicated to doctors who are the principal prescribers of vaccines.³

If Raoult is correct, contrary to the strictures of vaccine sectarianism, vaccines are not miraculous. They often work – sometimes amazingly so – but they also fail, and the risk-benefit balance of taking one will always vary from person to person and community to community. No technology should lie beyond reproach, and especially not one as lucrative as vaccines. Further, any narrative that invites the easy demonisation of vast swathes of people merits an unrelenting scrutiny.    

So, consider it – can you bring yourself to imagine any technology labelled “vaccine” by health officials or pharma companies failing or having dangerous side-effects? If not, you may need to reconsider the nature of your faith in them.

Anyways – until next time,

Max 💉.

P.S. – In light of this little post, I have found myself wondering about what other technologies we entertain a quasi-sectarian attitude towards, and I think that I have come up with one plausible or, at least, possible answer: hormonal/chemical forms of contraception, including the birth-control pill. Does this sound plausible to you? If not, why not? And can you think of others?

1. I should specify that I am mainly addressing the vaxx-accepting majority who enjoy high levels of trust for Public Health and The State.

2. Having been hit more than once by the ‘anti-vaxx’ label and having been accused of being a contrarian or ignorant for raising a number of these questions, I can say that it still rankles.

3. Raoult, D. 2021 (1st ed. 2018), La Vérité sur les Vaccins, Éditions Michel Lafon, Neilly-Sur-Seine