Vaccine Heresy

While the invasion of our capital city by a minority of anti-Covid vaccine mandate and restrictions protesters was concerning, I am perhaps even more worried by the majority’s instinctively hostile reaction to it, and more broadly to any questioning of the government response to the pandemic. When we lose the ability to hear the other side, one of the key senses that enables a democratic society to function is numbed.

I see it in the extremely unsympathetic media coverage of the protests, with interviews of local residents and business owners adversely affected by the protests vastly outnumbering interviews with the protesters themselves speaking of their grievances, or with the too easy dismissal of the entire protest because of the abhorrent actions and beliefs of a few of its members. When our local paper, the Low Down, ran a balanced story that gave voice to both sides of this debate, it got flak from many readers, and felt the need to repeatedly reaffirm their conviction in the rightness of vaccination.

I see it in my personal and social media interactions with people whose faith in vaccines and restrictions has seemingly immunized them from nuance and critical thinking. When I make a relatively uncontroversial point like, “The restrictions we are now living under are unprecedented in modern times,” I get responses that try to deny a reality that should be self-evident. And when it is suggested by myself and others that the Omicron wave sadly showed that vaccination was not the bulwark against Covid infection and transmission that we hoped it would be (but thankfully still kept many vaccinated out of hospital), others still try to argue that vaccination is our “silver bullet”, our one and only true path out of the pandemic, and is substantially more than a personal choice to protect yourself from more severe illness.

I get it. We’ve never lived through a pandemic before and this can all be very scary. Thousands have died in Canada, and millions around the world. Those who push back against government mandates only make it scarier, and we generally react to fear with anger. This particular group of dissidents who had their way with our capital city provided a group to focus our anger on, and they are a group easy for liberals to hate: largely white, rural, uneducated, and blue-collar, they are a shocking contradiction in a diverse metropolis abundant with white-collar workers. By denying the necessity of extreme government measures, they prove that they are at best misinformed, unscientific, selfish, and irresponsible; at worst racist, thuggish louts, undeserving of their continued freedom or of medical treatment should they fall ill with Covid.

For most of our society, science is our only religion, and vaccination is its holy rite. We bare our arms and offer ourselves to science, taking its creation into our very blood in a way few other technologies penetrate. Thus we prove our faith. Those who refuse this rite are treated like heretics. How could they possibly refuse something so mundane as a needle, and yet so beneficial to society as a vaccine? What the hell is their problem?

Many people end their thought process at this point of righteous indignation –  unfortunately a more and more familiar mental state in this age when dialogue rarely goes beyond social media name calling. For those who would like to try to better understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, I highly recommend reading the exhaustive four part series Needle Points, written by Canadian Dr. Norman Doidge, himself a believer in vaccination. It might convince you that someone can have less than full trust in the safety and necessity of vaccines and still be a rational human being. You might still disagree with them, but at least you may see them as someone you can have a relatively calm conversation with.

I did get two doses of Covid vaccines, and am glad for the protection they offer, but I also lump myself into the “hesitant” category. Vaccines in general are not for me the “no brainer” they are for many. They are a potentially serious medical intervention, and I don’t like to turn to Western medicine, which tends towards a harsh “attack thy enemy” approach rather than the softer, more holistic approach of other healing modalities, unless I feel the intervention is really needed.[1] In the case of Covid, I felt it was.

But I don’t judge those who’ve made a different decision. I don’t see the choice against vaccination as proof of some essential character deficiency, or necessarily the product of misinformation. I find it sad whenever I hear of friendships falling out over this issue. After I wrote World War Covid, my mom asked someone I’ve been friends with since grade six if we were still friends. He said, “Of course,” but the fact that she felt like she needed to ask is telling of the state we’re in. If you’ve fired friends over this issue, then either they weren’t very good friends to begin with, or you’ve elevated this issue far beyond its true import. Vaccines have been raised to the level of religion and politics and money – issues you tread carefully around lest irreconcilable disagreement erupts. But they’re really not that big a deal.

Basically the choice to get vaccinated or not comes down to trust in authority. Some populations have historical reasons to have less trust in authority than others, and some people, such as those who’ve experienced Adverse Childhood Events, naturally struggle with trust more than others. That explains why 15% less of the total population in the US is double vaccinated than in Canada; the Canadian government has proven itself more trustworthy over time by looking out for some Canadians, through Medicare and other strands of the social safety net, whereas the US government has left Americans more to look out for themselves. Americans see a government that doesn’t seem to care much about their welfare, so why should they trust it?

For myself, my distrust of authority is more foundational. I had a happy childhood, and I have much faith in the general good intentions of those in government. But I have a deep distrust of the entire worldview of modern Western society. I look at the effects of this worldview, in all its individualistic, rationalizing, hubristic, grasping, homogenizing, separate, centralizing, materialistic, dehumanizing, oppositional, death-denying, nature-hating, beauty-killing, body-loathing, future-focussed, spiritually impoverished, competitive, distracted, human-exceptional, reductive, mechanistic glory, and I want no part of it. This is the society that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe, bristled the world with nuclear weapons, doubled down on wealth inequality, devised a financial system that forbids any considerations other than profit, imposed colonisation upon most of the planet, developed political systems that breed polarization, created new diseases of affluence as quickly as medicine has dispensed with the old, and continues to push more technology as the solution to every problem brought about by technology in the first place. You could say that our society leans too heavily towards left brain awareness.[2] While there are admittedly some bright spots to Western civilization (recent progress towards gender, sexual orientation, and racial equality; free speech; the rule of law; elections), on the whole it doesn’t inspire trust, and talk of its supposed superiority calls to mind what Gandhi reportedly said when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.” So when the same establishment of corporate and government leaders who created this hot mess tell me, “Don’t worry, we’ve tested this medicine and it’s perfectly safe and effective,” I naturally have my doubts.

The past few months have been a fertile time for me, as my mind has been tilled by fresh perspectives, and new seeds have been planted. (Forgive the attempt at agricultural metaphor – I am a farmer, after all.) As an avowed lefty, to hear conservatives saying things – about vaccines and the trucker protest specifically – that I actually agreed with was an experience in cognitive dissonance. I’ve spoken to other lefty friends, who also have misgivings about vaccines and Covid mandates, and they feel the same way. It has offered me a window into conservative thought that I think has been mind-broadening.[3] In the same way that environmentalists serve an important role in reminding us to look at the ecological impacts of our actions, right-wing thinkers remind us of the importance of things like freedom and civil liberties – which we sometimes take too much for granted. No one group has all the answers, and no one can look at things from every angle. That’s why a diversity of opinions, matched with the ability to listen to them, is so beneficial to achieving a political consensus that carries our best ideas forward.

I am now less politically partisan than I have ever been in my life; the lines between left and right are blurring and shifting. This pandemic has been politicized, of course, and for awhile I followed my tribe of lefties towards a hard pro-vaccine, pro-restrictions position. But now I am starting to realize that “good” and “bad” beliefs don’t adhere together in neat little packages, labelled “left” and “right”; that good ideas can be found on both sides of the political divide, and it’s our job to think for ourselves and pick and choose from both sides what we believe in. The hyper-partisanship of the pandemic has actually led me to a less partisan place.

The trucker protest was about a lot of things, some of them downright ugly or nonsensical, but one worthwhile question it did bring to the table was this: how do we find a reasonable balance between safety and freedom? I think most people can agree that focussing solely on as much safety from Covid as possible would lead to a lot of unwanted consequences in other areas of our lives, just as I think we can also agree that allowing complete freedom in the face of Covid would be a costly mistake. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle, and it’s only by having a healthy public airing of all opinions that we can arrive at that ideal point of balance. But people who lean towards the side of freedom have not felt heard during the past two years; they have felt shut down, censored, demeaned, ostracized, and ridiculed. The trucker protest was an eruption of 23 months of building anger and frustration over this. Was it often messy, offensive, and threatening? For sure. Was is predictable, in this climate of repression of opinion and action? Certainly.

The hateful reaction of the majority of Canadians against this protest, and the invocation of the Emergencies Act, has only made things worse. I do not follow right-wing media, but I am sure that conservatives – rightly or wrongly – feel they are the victims of a double-standard. They have noted a gentler tone from the media and government towards indigenous people blockading railway lines, or environmentalists blocking pipelines and logging roads, or protesters toppling statues, and wonder why they are so fiercely condemned for blockading Ottawa or “defacing” (i.e. outfitting with a ball cap, a sign, and a Canadian flag) a statue of Terry Fox. While it’s true that the police seemed to treat the trucker protest with more restraint than some anti-globalization protests of recent memory, the public discourse against them has been much more vitriolic. This has only cemented the idea in the minds of the right, many of whom hail from the west, that they are outsiders in the Canadian family.

And while many cheered on the application of the Emergencies Act, the more thoughtful paused to worry about how this legislation could be used against them the next time they join a movement they are passionate about and take to the streets in large numbers.

If we could put aside our hatred and fear and anger, could we find some common ground with those saying that the state has overstepped itself with Covid mandates? I would have thought that we could all agree, as a liberal, rights-based, democratic society, that strongly coercing people (through the threat of job loss or other sticks) into accepting a medical treatment would be out of bounds. That our bodies and what we choose to put in them would be an inviolable personal decision. That those in favour of a woman’s right to choose what to do with her uterus would also support anyone’s right to choose what to inject into themselves.

I was wrong, of course – in the short term. But will I be wrong in the long run? Has a transformation in attitude already begun? An early February Angus Reid poll found 54% of Canadians agreed with the statement: “It’s time to end restrictions and let people self-isolate if they’re at risk.” Sweden – which lefties like me often like to look to for guidance – has decided against recommending Covid vaccines for kids under 12, arguing that the benefits do not outweigh the risks. Finland and Norway have both taken similar approaches.

It’s obviously still a highly divisive issue, but it does feel like the tide is shifting. We are beginning to realize that this virus isn’t going to go away anytime soon, and we need to learn to live with it, and get on with our lives, managing the risk as best we can. Governments too seem to sense this shift, and are dismantling passport regimes and other restrictions as quickly as they were erected. The Quebec government misread the public this January and had to quickly walk back their curfew. It makes one wonder how much governments were really following science when they first instituted various restrictions, and how much they were simply responding to public sentiment. Now that that sentiment is shifting, so are their policies. How much do governments follow the science, and how much do they follow the polls? Science doesn’t get them re-elected.

Unfortunately, partisanship does tend to get them re-elected. But I hope that we as Canadians can rise above that, and demand better from our leaders. I hope that our leaders realize their responsibility to bring citizens together, not divide them, and that we can learn to see past our prejudices, accept our fallibility, and listen openly to the other side, seeking not victory in the field of verbal battle and righteousness, but simple understanding and empathy for people who may look, act, or think differently than you do.

[1] Just to be clear, I do recognize the benefits that Western medicine has brought us. I was a big fan of it as it was saving my wife and unborn child’s lives with an emergency C-section, and when it saved my dad’s life with heart surgery. And it has been particularly effective at pushing back the infectious diseases that have been the scourge of humanity for millennia. But its reductive approach is ill-suited to dealing with more complex biological conundrums, of which health is a subset.

[2] To know what I’m talking about, read The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist

[3] I’d recommend the Substack and podcast, Lean Out, for some very thoughtful explorations on issues that have been mostly abandoned by the left and are only talked about on the right, but really should be universal concerns: https://tarahenley.substack.com/.

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