MAYBE THEN I'LL FADE AWAY AND NOT HAVE TO FACE THE FACTS

Trigger warning: I suspect that this post will upset some readers.  I’m about to opine on a sensitive topic – what is known euphemistically as “vaccine hesitancy.”  Spoiler alert:  I’m agin’ it. 

As my first witness, I’ll call the Father of Our Country, George Washington.  In 1775, a smallpox outbreak stopped the attempted American invasion of Quebec in its tracks, and threatened to decimate Washington’s Continental Army.  Washington took the law into his own hands.  He quarantined his entire army and – in violation of colonial laws against the procedure – had them all vaccinated.  In those days it was a process called variolation, which meant rubbing live pus from smallpox victims into a cut on the arm of a healthy patient.  If Washington hadn’t inoculated his army, the American Revolution would have died aborning, and we’d all be speaking English today. 

As my second witness, I’ll call a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onada.  You may not have heard of Onada, but you’ve heard of Wuhan, China.  Long before it became famous for bat soup and pangolin souffle, Wuhan was the site of a Japanese trading post where Onada worked as a teenager.  In 1940, Onada enlisted in the Japanese army.  He was serving in the Philippines in the final days of World War II. 

Onada’s last orders were to avoid capture at all costs.  Boy howdy, did he follow those orders.  He hid in the jungle for 29 years after the war ended, living off the land and launching occasional raids on local farms.  In 1974, a Japanese tourist found him and told him that the war was over.  Even then, he refused to surrender until the Japanese Army sent an officer to give the order.  Onada lived to be 91, illustrating the power of sheltering in place.

I’ve been sheltering in place for about two months.  So far, I haven’t needed to raid any farms, because Albertson’s takes credit cards.  I think about Onada and his 29 years in the bush.  I try to remember what I was doing 29 years ago, and to imagine what it would have been like to have been in hiding since 1991.   I can’t even do it in my mind.    

If Hiroo Onada had views on vaccination, I’m not aware of them.  The lesson I draw from Onada’s self-imposed ordeal is that virtue ceases to be virtuous when it’s disconnected from reality.  Whatever else we might say about his 29 years on the run – praise for his devotion to duty, his self-sufficiency, whatever – he accomplished nothing of value for himself or his country. 

We’re seeing Onada levels of fanaticism among Trump followers today.  Three years ago, I wrote that “The most dangerous gap between us and them is a reality gap,” but I had no idea how far or how fast the reality gap would spread, and the madness has spread beyond the MAGA fever swamps.

I’m not surprised that wingnuts on the Right have developed crazy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.  I’ve seen that kind of thing before.  It reminds me of the early 1960s in my hometown, when the hot button issue in local politics was fluoridation – a proposal to add fluoride to the municipal water supply to help prevent cavities.  The debate was not about whether fluoride worked, or whether it was cost-effective.  No, the paleo-Plandemic crowd insisted that adding fluoride to our water was a communist plot.  These same folks were convinced that President Eisenhower and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren were communists. 

If you’ve seen DR. STRANGELOVE, maybe you remember the line from General Jack D. Ripper:  “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”  In the film, it was a big laugh line.  In Wichita, Kansas, in the early 60s, it was barely an exaggeration of the actual beliefs of the Kennedy-era lunatic fringe.   

Now, thanks to Donald Trump, the lunatics are no longer on the fringes.  They’ve taken over the Republican Party.  Or rather, they’ve found their niche among the GOP rank and file, alongside the other lunatics – the motley collection of racists, prosperity gospel hucksters, and gun nuts that serve as the Trump’s shock troops. 

Authoritarians, and especially right-wing authoritarians, are notoriously hostile to science because it weakens their ability to control their subjects.  It’s harder to keep women barefoot and pregnant when they have access to birth control.  It’s harder to sell cigarettes when scientists demonstrate a clear link between smoking and cancer.  It’s harder for farms and factories to turn a profit when environmental regulations frown on dumping toxic waste into the nearest river, or burning it and letting the smoke go wherever the wind takes it.    

Donald Trump is an authoritarian, but he’s a remarkably weak authoritarian.  He just plain gave up when confronted with COVID-19.  Predictably, con men of various descriptions rushed to fill the leadership vacuum, insisting that the problem wasn’t all that serious, and that a cure was just around the corner.  All those scientists and medical professionals who offered nothing but doom and gloom were the enemy, part of the Deep State Obamagate conspiracy.

Incredibly, all that has become par for the course in the Age of Trump.  What worries me is that I’m seeing a similar lunacy begin to infect people on the Left side of the political and cultural spectrum.  Old school anti-vaxxers are fishing for new converts on social media, and they’re finding sympathetic ears among people who should know better. 

I may not look it, but I’m a reasonably bright guy.  Educated, too; arguably even over-educated.  I’m at least as qualified as the average layperson to understand virology and epidemiology.  Which is to say: I AM NOT EVEN REMOTELY QUALIFIED TO UNDERSTAND VIROLOGY AND EPIDEMIOLOGY. 

Reasonably bright people know that they’re susceptible to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.  They know the internet is full of hoaxes.  They’d never send money to a random Nigerian prince.  Maybe they’ve even studied logical fallacies and know the difference between correlation and causation, etc. 

But it’s hard to think straight when your world suddenly tries to kill you, and you realize that no one in charge has any idea what to do about it.  You’ve got time on your hands, you find a YouTube video with decent production values, and you begin to wonder.  You hear about a friend of a friend who got really sick last fall and is convinced they had COVID-19 weeks before it was officially recognized, and you begin to wonder.

There’s lots we don’t know about the virus and how it spreads.  We aren’t sure when the first cases appeared, or how many cases there are.  In the United States, basic research and data collection has been slowed by Trump’s incompetence.  It’s reasonable to be cynical about the politics of the pandemic.  Trump and his minions are, in fact, lying to you.

But granting all that, I don’t understand why so many people believe they’re qualified to have opinions on the science of the pandemic.  They aren’t.  I laugh when QAnon followers say, “do your own research.”  That’s good advice for professionals with training in the relevant disciplines.  For anyone else, it’s an invitation to madness.  Going down the rabbit hole is easy.  Climbing back out again is a different story.

Here’s a clue.  If you begin to entertain the possibility that Bill Gates created the virus so that he could use 5G towers to forcibly vaccinate and enslave 300 million Americans, it may be too late.  It won’t be long until you’re ranting about pedophiles in pizza parlors, reptilian humanoids, and adrenochrome harvesting.   You’ve gone over to the Dark Side. 

Some people argue that vaccination is a personal decision.  I suppose that’s true, in the sense that every decision is a personal decision.  But a lot of personal decisions have public consequences, and personal decisions about how to behave responsibly in the presence of a deadly and highly contagious virus have far-reaching public consequences. 

Justifying a refusal to vaccinate by calling it a personal decision is the tantamount to saying that the only thing that matters is your personal well-being, and that any risks you take are nobody else’s business.  But you live in a community and interact regularly with others.  If you take that risk and catch the virus, and then pass it on to someone else, you’re responsible for what happens to them, just as surely as if you’d given them poison.  Why shouldn’t the legal consequences be the same?

My mother was a nurse.  She made sure I got every vaccination that came along, as soon as possible.  I can’t remember any adverse reactions, apart from a sore shoulder.  Those shots helped keep me healthy; some of them probably kept me alive.  My mom would have been flabbergasted by all the people who claim they’d rather get sick and die than get a simple vaccination.  I get flu shots every year.  When there’s a COVID-19 vaccine, I’ll get that too.  Maintaining a safe and respectful social distance, of course.  I hope you do too.

For the moment, my pandemic mantra is “let’s wait and see.”  It’s not the hottest of takes, but it strikes me as sensible.  I’d also add “be careful,” both in terms of physical risks and intellectual risks.  The mysteries of COVID-19 will be solved eventually – by doctors and scientists, not by YouTube influencers or Adderall-addled presidents.  In the meantime, the best thing the rest of us can do to beat the virus is to live long enough to vote on November 3.