Watching Anti-Vaxxers Die of Covid is Emotionally Mangling Me

When I wrote Covid Deniers Prove You Can Die of Stubbornness I began to notice it having an effect on me. Not the article per se but the deaths themselves. It’s easy to smugly sit in judgement of people who self-destruct due to poor, politically motivated choices. But seeing their family members mourning their deaths made me realize I’m not separate from them.

I have a family. I’d feel as broken, lost and distraught as these anti-vaxxers do if I lost the people closest to me, in my life. When it’s radio hosts, senators and televangelists my conscience is mostly clean, but family/spouse mourning posts are the point where the laughter stops and the confusing, conflicted feelings start.

Weirdly, I’ve been scolded for expressing this sentiment. By people who, I suspect, realize how ghoulish all this schadenfreude has made them and would rather kill the messenger than re-activate their empathy gland. “Stop empathizing” they’re basically saying, “you’re making me look/feel bad”.

Even when it is someone influential, who urged all their followers to refuse vaccines, something in me still rebels against my inclination to celebrate their passing. What’s causing that, I wondered? Surely these deaths are a net gain for humanity. Generally anti-vaxxers have a lot of comorbid qualities, related to their views on religion, race and politics that make them hard to sympathize with, especially when they are the cause of their own demise.

So early on, I was nothing but smiles, laughter and applause every time one of these cretins self destructed. But lately I’ve noticed internal corrosion, as a consequence of the buildup of vitriol inside me. A deterioration that I despair at my inability to slow or reverse. Worse still, like anti-vaxxers who die of Covid, I have nobody to blame for my condition but myself.

From these feelings I’ve concluded that it’s possible and even common to feel more than just one way about something. Conflicted/mixed feelings are normal and valid. You can cry for your enemy as you bury him, even though you don’t want him back. You’re crying for your own sake more than his.


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The overwhelming majority of these cases being conservatives, and many of them funding their treatment via GoFundMe has a certain irony. These are the people who don’t want everybody to have access to healthcare, not wanting to pay into a system they somehow don’t think they’ll ever need.

These are also the first people to argue that you shouldn’t try to force anybody to make good choices. That people have to be free to make their own decisions, even if they’re bad ones. I happen to agree with them on that point, it’s just especially unfortunate when bad decisions have contagious consequences that impact strangers.

It’s a personal choice in the way that smoking around other people is a personal choice. We’ve not outlawed smoking, but it’s been sufficiently stigmatized and taxed by now that smoking is at an all time low in terms of popularity. I wish we had time to do the same with vaccine refusal.

It’s controversial to suggest the media we consume influences our feelings and behaviors. I think because most associate it with the moral crusade against violent videogames. I’ll be a contrarian here and affirm that we’re absolutely influenced by our surroundings and what we consume.

At the same time, it’s lazy and convenient to react to a ghoulish world by letting it transform you into a ghoul. It sounds and feels justifiable to become a “reflection of the world”. But that reasoning absolves you of any responsibility for your own personal development.

Anybody with enough self consciousness to have these kinds of thoughts also has the agency needed to become who they know they ought to be, despite all of the terrible lessons the world teaches us. At the end of the day, we decide who we’re going to be, and it’s never too late to change course, like Anakin near the end of Return of the Jedi (pardon the Star Wars reference).


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This is the realization that got me to slow my roll and perform a critical self-analysis. There’s only so much gallows humor I can take, it turns out, before it begins changing me into somebody I don’t want to become. In the process I also began to suspect that the schadenfreude was a coping mechanism.

It was an excuse to suppress empathy, with a plausible sounding justification. But really, if I didn’t suppress my empathy, I would be forced to process an awful lot of secondhand grief from how many people are losing their parents, grandparents, sons, daughters, siblings and extended family to something easily preventable.

The political dimension to vaccine refusal only deepens the tragedy. In a sense they were tricked. Even if they spread misinformation, they often didn’t originate it. They were just passing it on from elsewhere. Just 12 people are responsible for nearly all of the vaccine disinformation on social media.


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I meditated on this problem at the advice of a friend. Meditation isn’t something I do a lot of. I am pretty bad at performing self-care, having been socialized in a very traditionally male way, where the solution to emotional injury is just to ignore it and soldier on.

Meditating on it raised further troubling possibilities. The thoughts you’re supposed to allow to float into your mind, examine them, then let them leave on their own instead persisted and multiplied. What if I’m not being transformed by all of this?

What if this is who I’ve been all along, deep down? What if that person is just being gradually uncovered as the world grows more raw and ruthless, scraping away at the civilized, personable facade I’ve created over the years. Isn’t that what masking is? Didn’t I pay a therapist big bucks to learn how to do that?


Facebook profile of Presley Stutts

What do I do with that information, even if it’s true? Should I re-bury the ghoul hiding at the core of my being and pretend I never saw it in there? Should I confront and try to change it? Alan Watts talks about how everybody masks without even knowing there’s a word for what they’re doing.

Basically that our “self” is not who we really are. It’s a mask, like an RPG character we create to represent ourselves as we’d like others to see us. We then go through life thinking the character is really who we are, unable to separate the two or even recall all the subconscious choices we made in designing our “self”.

I hope the me who laughed at these deaths isn’t who I am, at my core. I feel ashamed of it. Even if it’s only my “self”, that isn’t how I want to be represented. I’m trying to perform some self-surgery on both fronts, with my emotional inexperience working against me.


ABC13, Twitter

I’ve also been trying to reverse-engineer anti-vaxxer reasoning. You can’t change someone’s mind without first convincing them that you understand where they’re coming from. Many of their arguments are based in truth. For example, it’s absolutely true that the government uses fear as a tool, including using disasters as a pretext to seize emergency powers which they do not later relinquish (Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act).

It’s absolutely true that the government has done shady, sinister stuff involving vaccines, like the Tuskegee Incident. It’s absolutely true there have been provable vaccine harms that resulted in successful lawsuits. It’s absolutely true Covid has a 98.2% survival rate in the US.

All of this is true, yet they die of Covid. How can that be? How can your reasoning be valid, only for your conclusion to be incorrect? In this case it’s a flaw in the premise. The overall survival rate being 98.2% doesn’t mean everybody has the same individual odds of catching Covid, or dying from it.


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There’s a list of comorbid conditions that greatly increase susceptibility, like age and BMI, which Covid victims were in many cases in denial about. It’s a very normal, human thing to be in denial about your age and weight. It’s also unfortunately very common for that sort of denial to have medical consequences, like losing your foot to diabetes, or (in this case) spending the last miserable hours of your life on a ventilator.

On top of being in the most susceptible groups, these people went out of their way to take unnecessary risks. They refused vaccines, didn’t wear masks and in many cases made a show of attending parties, rallies, the January 6th insurrection or megachurches, all places jam packed with people who also tick all the boxes for increased Covid susceptibility.

But when you try to warn people like this, they quote the averaged Covid survival rate at you as if it’s a blanket of protection they’re also safe under, when statistics don’t work that way. They greatly magnify the instances of viral harms and government medical impropriety until that’s all they can see from inside their echo chamber.

By design, from inside the echo chamber, their conclusion seems airtight. So it always comes as a shock when they find themselves in the hospital, going on ventilator, some still in denial about what’s happening or their own culpability. They saw SO MANY shared posts which all made it seem like they made the only safe choice in going unvaccinated. How could this happen?

From an external vantage point, it’s pretty clear how this happened. Their guy lost the election. They associate vaccines with the new guy they didn’t vote for. Refusing vaccines is primarily a form of passive aggressive political protest. But that by itself would just look like what it is: An adult tantrum.

Working backwards from their desired conclusion, they gathered everything they could find that would make it seem as if they arrived at it by dispassionate, objective analysis of the available evidence. They did such a good job, they fooled themselves, though as Richard Feynman once said “you are the easiest one for yourself to fool”.


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The meme machine they created didn’t stop or slow down just because they started dropping like flies. Above all else, they do not want to be wrong, nor are they willing for their hated political enemies to be right about this issue. So rather than change their minds as they watch family members carted out of hospitals in body bags, they conceal their illness.

They spread their own home grown fake news, using for example a photo of a girl who sought out the vaccine despite being afraid of it, changing the story to the vaccine being forced on a scared, crying, unwilling girl as seen below. I myself have also seen some examples of anti-vaxx fake news.

I did not think to save it at the time as this was before I wrote the first article. A table of Covid related data was modified to indicate that most deaths had been from vaccines. The URL was included in the picture as a source. Only upon visiting the URL, you got a 404. Checking the parent website, finding the table of data for that same month and year, it showed totally different figures.


Twitter, The Daily Beast

Why would someone do that? Is it really more important to be right than it is to survive? Is scoring political points important enough that you’d mislead others in your political tribe to the point that they die in the hospital for it? Because they saw fake news you created, and believed it?

What will be the long term political ramifications of facilitating the mass death of a huge, reliably right wing voting bloc? The ghoul in me doesn’t want to tell you this. It wants you to keep doing what you’re doing. For all I know, those fake news memes are made by left wingers to thin the enemy’s ranks.

Somehow that’s the only conspiracy theory that hasn’t occurred to anti-vaxxers. Or that the government is using reverse psychology to persuade anti-government citizens to voluntarily increase their vulnerability to a pandemic, while government loyalists are the only ones to take proper medical precautions.


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I don’t know. I don’t understand it, even after watching it happen over and over for the past year. How should I feel when stubborn people I wanted gone anyway voluntarily march into their graves by the hundreds of thousands? Sun Tzu allegedly said “do not interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake”.

Am I just avoiding processing all of this by repressing my empathy? How am I supposed to contextualize scores and scores of what are assuredly terrible people throwing themselves under the bus, as if for my benefit? Should I charitably conclude that they sacrificed their lives in order to make the world a better place?

I accept my conflicted feelings now. I accept I don’t have to settle on feeling just one way about all this. I can be happy and sad, at once. To love your enemy isn’t just good for your personal development, per the teachings of Jesus. It’s also a critical part of understanding them well enough to fight them effectively, per the teachings of Orson Scott Card.

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