Vaccination makes sense for most people in most situations. I'm fully vaccinated and so are most of the people I know. But public perceptions of the pandemic have been greatly distorted by misinformation coming from both mass media and public officials. And the situation is evolving in a way that appears to be very bad for freedom.
Media coverage of the pandemic in the US is extremely biased. According to the New York times: "About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals. Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News)."
Beyond this strong negative media bias, public officials are subjecting us to messaging about vaccination that makes no sense. There is no connection between vaccination rates and the spread of the virus. Vaccination protects against serious illness. It does not stop the virus from spreading. But false claims to the contrary are loud and abundant. And these false claims are coming from the top, as illustrated by the words of President Joe Biden in his September 9 speech: "This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And it’s caused by the fact that despite America having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot."
So media coverage is negatively biased, instilling fear in the population. And the president is parroting the lie that the unvaccinated are responsible for the pandemic, giving us someone to blame for this thing that we're unreasonably afraid of due to the media bias. Bastions of the military industrial complex such as MITRE are working feverishly to transform this fear into acceptance of widespread medical surveillance programs. These programs can be sold to the masses in ways that "protect privacy" even as they reduce our freedom by design.
Sadly, talking in terms of simple freedom has become taboo. In the same way that discussions of income inequality prevent wealth distribution inequality from being considered, a focus on privacy is used to avoid more substantive consideration of actual freedom. But freedom is not just a term being avoided in public discourse. It is every human being's natural right.
I was surprised and dismayed recently when Noam Chomsky said that the unvaccinated should be segregated from the rest of society because their very existence is threatening to the vaccinated. Remember, vaccination doesn't stop the virus from spreading. The threat represented by the unvaccinated isn't medical. Yet everyone from Biden to Chomsky is talking about this threat.
If the goal was optimal public health, society would be a very different place. Food wouldn't contain pesticide residues and everyone would have access to healthcare, for starters. In the context of a toxic environment and a broken healthcare system, ideas like medical surveillance and segregation seem more like dystopian fantasies than serious propositions. And yet, these ideas are gaining traction, even as common sense responses to the pandemic like protecting the vulnerable and isolating the sick are regarded as insufficient or unfeasible.
It's troubling that dystopian fantasies have replaced common sense in public discourse. Everybody knows that fear is the mind killer, yet no one with any power appears capable of dissolving society's fear of the virus with a measured and rational response. Instead, the response has been to curtail freedom, and to call for its further restriction. The disappearance of freedom is bad for everyone, but almost everyone seems to be on board with sacrificing their freedom on an altar of fear and misinformation.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
Read my novels:
Check out the comic I wrote:
