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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Lushington D Brady.
What the Vaxholes and Anti-vaxxers Have in Common
Far More Than They’d Like to Admit — And One Key Difference.
The past two years of the China virus have engendered public debates as rancorous as any others: lockdowns versus liberation, mask mandates or not, vaccines, coercion and freedom. Except, they’re not debates so much as mutually-exclusive shouting matches.
Except when it comes to the latest excrescence of the pandemic, the vaccines, both sides are almost as bad as each other — whether they want to admit it or not.
One of the most notable aspects of what passes for public discourse at present is that it is less a marketplace of ideas than a cacophonic segregated lunch counter. In this hyper-polarised atmosphere, instead of a spectrum of views talking to each other, almost every issue of public debate quickly degrades into two circles of wagons armed with megaphones. But the megaphones are not directed outward: rather, each camp competes with itself to see who can shout the loudest inside the echo chamber.
Each likes to imagine itself as the polar opposite of the other in almost every way: not just in opinion, but in rationality, truth and virtue. Unfortunately, too often, this is just a comforting lie each likes to tell itself.
Because the truth is that on the issue of vaccines, as in so much else, both sides (let’s call them, for convenience’s sake, the “vaxholes” and the “anti-vaxxers” — insofar as we’re talking about people adamantly opposed to the covid vaccines in particular, and not merely hesitant, as many so-called “anti-vaxxers” really are) have far more in common than they would like to concede.
Both sides peddle outrageous fear porn, misused data, towering ignorance, and outright lies. Both sides are less engaged in public than preaching to their own choirs. They are not so much trying to persuade as to reinforce: to shore up their overwhelming conviction that they alone are right and pure and good, and the other side are wrong and evil.
There is just one difference — we’ll get to that later.
Outrageous fear porn has been a constant in the Chinese pandemic. At first, of course, it was the remit of what would eventually become the “vaxhole” cohort. The endless screeching that we’re all gonna die from the ‘rona, it’s the Spanish ’flu, the Black Plague, and wrath of Mother Gaia combined. Piers Morgan bloviating about “bodies piling up in the streets”. Ginned-up horror stories about Italian hospitals.
All that changed with the advent of the various Covid vaccines. Now, the folks who had resisted the lockdowns and the mask mandates had a hot, new issue to rally around: vaccines. Now it was their turn to jump on the fear-porn bandwagon. Blood clots, DNA, magnets and Bill Gates, oh my!
It never seemed to occur to anyone, too, that it was the same mainstream media which had hyped the Covid fear porn relentlessly, which was the earliest adopter of vaccine fear-porn — before doing yet another U-turn and relentlessly demonising anyone who doubted the vaccines. It’s almost like the mainstream media are driven by a desperate need to generate clicks, with little regard for how they do it. But, I digress.
The fear-porn is, of course, part and parcel of misused data and towering ignorance — for both sides. Each side claims to be “on the side of the science” — yet neither seems to have the foggiest clue about actual scientific reasoning.
The vaxholes got in early on the wilfully-misused data, of course. First and foremost was the total reliance on computer models. The models were presented as fact, beyond any doubt. Never mind, for instance, that almost all models relied on the work of the UK’s Professor Neil Ferguson, whose track record of being absolutely wrong about disease outbreaks was as steady as the Wallabies’ losing the Bledisloe Cup. But at least the Wallabies have the decency to be embarrassed at losing again: Ferguson has publicly stated that he doesn’t worry about being wrong, because he’s “wrong in the right direction”.
But perhaps the most egregiously-misused data has been that of “Covid deaths”. Covid deaths have, without doubt, been grossly over-exaggerated. Probably wilfully so. In the UK, government agencies counted as a “Covid death”, “individuals who have died within 28 days of first positive result, whether or not COVID-19 was the cause of death”. It wasn’t just the UK using this ludicrous yardstick, either: Germany, Italy, and the US all used similar methods.
Worse, almost all of the people who died “of” covid were not only extremely old (most older than median life expectancy), but had at least, often two or three serious co-morbidities, including cancer, heart disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s, kidney failure and diabetes. These were people already at death’s door.
It’s been estimated that, in fact, the majority of people died “with Covid”, not “from Covid”.
Yet, with barely a blush of embarrassment, the anti-vaxxers are doing exactly what they condemned the vaxholes for doing.
The anti-vaxxers are just as hysterically reporting every case of a person who dies subsequent to being vaccinated as being because of the vaccine. Anti-vaxxer social media posts cite the deaths of anyone who died after being vaccinated — no matter what they died of or how long much time lapsed in between — as “because of” the vaccine.
Anti-vaxxers also love to cite the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as proof of rampant “vaccine injury”. But there are some glaring problems with VAERS (which critics have been pointing out for years), such as unreliable reports and poor data quality. To prove VAERS’ unreliability, one activist successfully lodged a report that a vaccine had caused him to turn into a green giant every time he got angry. VAERS also does nothing to prove a causal link between the injury and the vaccination. All it does is show a correlation.
This is just “with Covid” on steroids.
This is not to say that no-one dies or is injured by Covid vaccines any more than any other vaccine. Of course it happens, inevitably: no vaccine, any more than any other medical treatment, is 100% safe. When a vaccine is being distributed in massive quantities in a very short time, it also means that all the usual side-effects are going to manifest almost at the same time, making them much more noticeable.
All this shows is that the anti-vaxxers neither understand, or are unwilling to consider, relative risk. Which is exactly what so many of them spent most of the pandemic criticising the vaxholes for. “Life is about risk,” the freedom advocates routinely argued against the “save lives” propaganda of the vaxholes. Yet they seem utterly unwilling to apply their own argument to the vaccines.
Finally, there are the outright lies.
The vaxholes, from politicians down, through the mainstream media to social media users, peddled lie after lie. Whether it was denying the Chinese origins of the virus, let alone the likelihood of its origin in a Wuhan lab, to lying about President Trump calling the pandemic a “hoax”, to lying about hospitals being “overwhelmed”.
But the anti-vaxxers are no slouches at blatant lying, either. For instance, anti-vaxxer social media is currently buzzing with claims that NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian “has been forced to resign because she and her cronies took $65m in bribes from Pfizer and AZ”. The only truth in this is that Berejiklian resigned. The rest is utter bollocks.
Berejiklian resigned because she is accused of improperly funding community groups. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the only source of these astonishing claims is infamous mining billionaire and politician Clive Palmer, who is notorious for making outrageously false claims and is also currently on trial on fraud charges.
But there is one key difference between the two groups.
The vaxholes are all about power and control. The vaxholes have, from the first, leveraged fear, ignorance and lies in order to maximise their control over others. From lockdowns, to mask mandates, to vaccine mandates, the vaxholes have been relentless busy-bodying control freaks. The vaxholes are determined to deny their opposites even the means of making a living.
To damn them with faint praise, at least the anti-vaxxers are on the side of liberty. Whether made in ignorance or under deception, the decision to take a vaccine or not should always be up to the individual. Their body, their choice, to coin a phrase.
The anti-vaxxers may be wrong about a great many things, but at least they’re not totalitarians.
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