Who politicized the vaccine?
Taking the vaccine or not, as with any medicine, is a personal decision to be made in consultation with your doctor. However, because the vaccine has been politicized, some people did not take it that probably should have taken it, and many others took it unnecessarily.
Who is to blame for this politicization? Mainstream liberal media produced many segments trying to uncover the motivations of people who chose to stay unvaccinated, with the underlying assumption that getting vaccinated is the right choice for everybody. Do the unvaccinated suffer from irrational fears? Have they been brainwashed by unscrupulous Right-wing politicians and pundits, who abuse this irrational fear to gain a larger platform? Liberals see their own position as perfectly rational (“scientific”), and the other position as irrational, emotional, ideological.
The other side suffers from a similar confusion. Covid is harmless to the overwhelming majority of people, the vaccine is experimental and it doesn’t even stop you from spreading it, so why are these crazy liberals trying to force it on everybody? Some suspect a sinister conspiracy involving Bill Gates, others are convinced that liberal elites are all in the pocket of Big Pharma companies who make billions off the vaccines.
Though conspiracies and corruption do happen, it cannot quite explain the vigor with which the Covid measures have been embraced by liberals. Power and money can do a lot of things, but it can’t tell masses of people what is right and what is wrong; for that you need ideology. So what is it about late liberal ideology that makes the pandemic hit in this particular way?
For a while now, liberalism feels like the world is ending. This could be through climate change, a deadly virus, or even war with Russia. These crises are of course generated by the contradictions of liberalism itself, but liberals see them as external threats made worse by asocial deplorables who don’t separate their trash and don’t get vaccinated. The truth is however that it’s liberalism, not the world, that’s ending. The crises provide both an outlet for an anxiety that would otherwise remain inarticulable, and a way to pretend that the current system could still work if it weren’t for these external threats to it.
How is the pandemic generated by liberalism? You could take it literally by investigating the lab leak theory, or Fabio Vighi’s theory about how lockdowns were needed to stave off inflation threats caused by massive quantitative easing just before the pandemic started. But the more important thing is how the pandemic was received in public consciousness: how it confirmed an unspoken fear of the world ending, and how it confirmed the role of “those people” in its demise.
In Freud’s theory of trauma, a child is not simply happy and innocent until something traumatic happens. First, a fundamentally unanswerable question about sex or death creates an opening for trauma to appear. Then, some memory is slotted into that traumatic space, making this memory traumatic in retrospect. A similar thing happened with the pandemic: liberalism creates an unsolvable antagonism between individual liberty and public interest, and then a pandemic (or climate change, or…) slots into that point of rupture.
