As the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was warning that Pfizer, the company the produced the Covid-19 vaccine, not bearing responsibility for any side effects it may cause would leave it unaccountable if it “turned you into a crocodile,” the television station affiliated with the Lebanese president’s party was waging its own vicious campaign against the vaccine. It claimed that it is a global conspiracy orchestrated by Western governments, business people and intelligence services aimed at allowing them to impose their domination of the world.
The sentiments expressed by Bolsonaro and those who run OTV, a mouthpiece for the Free Patriotic Movement, are part of a broad climate surrounding the launch of vaccination campaigns and apprehensions about them in many countries, though they are manifestations of the most extreme forms of this opposition. It is not difficult to graph the positions that vaccine skeptics from around the world have held since the beginning of the outbreak. Indeed, most of them are brought together by an initial denial of the dangers posed by the disease, followed by belittling its magnitude and then a consensus that it is a conspiracy of some kind (either Chinese, American, or orchestrated by big corporations seeking to make billions in profits and install electronic chips into patients’ brains). Now, their minds are set on the dangers of the vaccine and its side effects, with a focus on the first one to arrive at clinics and hospitals: the Pfizer vaccine, an overview of the company’s history, its ties with governments, and its aggressive promotion of its drugs.
Skepticism and caution are two rights that no sane person could deny. An untested vaccine that utilizes a completely novel technology (mRNA) cannot be injected into human bodies without careful monitoring of its effectiveness and side effects. Both (efficacy and symptoms) are not easy to monitor in the short term. Most experts speak of 15 years being needed to understand the overall impact of the vaccine thoroughly.
It seems that the caution that stems from an awareness of the science behind any new treatment and emphasizes the importance of following up on it and studying it deeply is one thing and submitting to superstitions and conspiracy theories is another. Critical and scientific thinking should have separated the two. But today’s tragedies have broken the barriers between scientific and superstitious thinking and elevated irrational discourse that stimulates visceral reactions to the level of absolute truth, whereby those who repudiate this discourse are seen as elitist agents of agencies and corporations that spread evil across the world who don’t care about the lives of the poor. Meanwhile, opinion polls indicate that in some countries over 50 percent of the population refuses to take the vaccine.
The campaigns we see today, most of which are tantamount to pathological delirium about the vaccine, are an extension of populist deliriums, identity politics, isolationism and xenophobia. If a researcher were to put some time into tracking the positions of governments, parties and political forces, he would find that a straight line connects the views of the extremist white-right based in the United States, Hungary, Brazil and all the way to Lebanon.
They had united on their positions on social and political issues before huddling together in anti-vax trenches. More glaringly, their visions for salvation - which are also one and the same - can be summed up to blaming others: refugees, foreign workers, non-governmental organizations, and shadowy forces seeking world domination, a project that begins with robbing those who hold these views of their privacy and their ethnic, civilizational and cultural superiority or forcing them into subordination to totalitarian global governance led by a handful of billionaires, whose shift from controlling the world to seeking to destroy it is not explained... In other words, these people have no solutions on their agenda; there is no way to escape crises but to evade dealing with them. Illness, like immigration, multiculturalism, individual freedoms, and openness to the world, are parts of a devilish plan prepared by “others” who meet in dark rooms and map out the fate of the people of the world who have succumbed to their fate. The peoples of the 21st century are incapable of choosing between right and wrong, between treatment and disease, between submitting to a corrupt evil clique and living with dignity.
This is the backdrop against which the vaccine is being opposed, not out of necessary scientific skepticism but out of a drive to generalize their vision of the world and shape the future in accordance with that vision. A frightened world besieged by an environmental crisis, hatred for others, limited horizons and ignorance; a world where manipulating the poor and simple people are headlines for imposing a darker and more oppressive hegemony than that which they warn us about.
Pharmaceuticals are not angels concerned with ending the world’s suffering, and governments will not abandon the inclinations for domination built into them, regardless of their stance on the vaccine. But fear-mongering to spread nonsense and superstition, in the final analysis, reinforces greed for quick profits and legal and popular unaccountability. Anti-vaxxers thereby serve their supposed enemies and make their prophecies fulfill themselves by drowning the world in unfalsifiable rhetoric that cannot be scrutinized and which engaging serves no purpose.
