The other day, while walking home from lunch at the Pancho Villa cafe, I ran into my favorite anti-vaxxer, who remarked that I wasn’t wearing a mask. Her tone was anything but censorious — she was maskless as well — leading me to believe she was hopeful that I’d joined the tribe of vaccine refusniks. I was sorry to disappoint her, pointing out the obvious — I was outside and alone — and the not so obvious — I’d been vaccinated. “You know what’s in those vaccines, don’t you?” she asked. I replied that I had a pretty good idea what but that it probably wasn’t the substance she had in mind. Indeed it wasn’t. “Mercury and aluminum,” she informed me. “And a naturopath I read online has said that she will NOT accept patients who have been vaccinated because they give off stuff like mercury and aluminum.” I asked, “Do you mean like it’s on their breath or comes off as vapor from their pores?” My friend only smiled, and backed away a foot or two, apparently afraid that I would infect her with mercury-aluminum poisoning if she stood any closer. Her version of social distancing. I offered to put on a mask if it would make her more comfortable, she inquired what color it was, I answered that it was a standard pale blue surgical mask. She shook her head. Blue masks were the worst! “If you knew what they’re putting in them…” She trailed off, leaving me to guess who ‘they’ were and what toxins had been injected into facial coverings. I broke off our conversation, sensing that it would soon drift into the domain of space aliens, QAnon conspiracies, and government plots to rob us of our vital bodily fluids.
As i mentioned in the previous post, #29, I’ve given up arguing with people who think like her (if their mental processes can by dignified as thinking), but the brief encounter reminded me that the Pandemic has exposed a kind of social cancer in our society, one that has metastasized, possibly, to Stage 4. American individualism, our strength and our virtue, has been pushed to an extreme and has become a flaw and a weakness. David Brooks points out in his New York Times column today that we are no longer capable of collective action, of pulling together to achieve a national goal, in the present case eradication of the COVID19 virus. The response to it has been, at first, complete denial, as expressed by former President Trump’s assurance that it would soon vanish, “like a miracle,” to a reluctant and uneven acceptance of its reality, with vast numbers of our citizens refusing to obey the most basic public health requirements, and now to get vaccinated. If that endangers ones fellow countrymen, well, that’s the price of liberty, right? My friend, she of the mercury-aluminum school, is not a lonely outlier but representative of the thirty percent of our populace who decline inoculation or who mindlessly shout “USA!” at anti-mask, anti-restriction rallies.
The last time I remember a spirit of unity in the U.S. was in the wake of 9/11, and that didn’t last long. Our lack of coherence as a society is a river with many sources, but its main one is distrust of government. It sprang up fifty years ago on the left, in response to the Vietnam War, but eventually flowed to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan, and has now spread just about everywhere. If we’d been as we are today in 1941, we could not have mustered the cohesion to win World War Two.
Eye-opening reasons why people don’t get vaccinated. Without social media contact (I can’t get into it) I only hear about stuff like this from a friend who is on a facebook page for (race) horse enthusiasts. Lots of anti-vaccers there. But then, why DO they get their race horses Vaccinated ? Why not let ‘herd immunity’ work, the way it was described to me in a course in Wild Animal Pathology at Cornell U in 1975 when I was earning a degree in Animal Science – you let the vulnerable ones get it and die, and the survivors are immune. Like canine distemper or equine encephalitis, we have a protection against those in the form of a shot . . . or maybe take the gamble that your dog or horse might be among the .0000002% who actually survive . . . they’d be immune. and the disease goes away. Sends me back to the early 50’s, when a beloved dog died of distemper. . . I got my shots; hope I don’t get the ‘milder’ form of covid, and realized part of me enjoys social distancing. Thanks for your work.
Being anti vaccination of any sort is not new. It’s a trend that seems to have been growing long before Covid. I don’t understand it. I’m old enough to remember classmates in school in braces and am quite happy to not have had polio. I’m especially glad my kids didn’t either. Because of vaccines they were also spared some of the common childhood diseases I had way back then.
So I’ve had my Covid shots and am grateful for them as we’ve had a few friends who caught the disease, two of whom suffered greatly while another cruised through it like it was just the sniffles. Go figure.
However, the issue of trust is an interesting discussion. It starts with the obvious question of are people wrong to distrust the government?
People should not give government blanket approval or disapproval. But thinking that everything government does, like organizing a drive to vaccinate its population, is suspect is wrong, as well as stupid.
Well Phil what are you going to do when the lunatics take over the asylum? Gee I steer clear of those and I’ve actually everywhere in any chance any place I can
I learn from your post that I am unable to tolerate certain viewpoints, and more’s the pity for me. I find your friend viscerally repulsive from two thousand miles away.
America has become infected with a new breed of crazy in the past few years. Quirky has always been around the fringes but bat-shit crazy was not common place.
I just finished A Rumor Of War and look forward to reading your other books.
I’m 63, and was a few years short of being drafted (I remember my mother anxiously watching something on the TV announcing the draft lottery results). As a teen, I tried to make sense of of the swirl of events that engulfed this country (and my formative years: my first memory is of being sent home from a friend’s house to find my mother in the “parlor” sobbing in front of the TV. President had just been assassinated, and the death of her beautiful Irish Catholic hero crushed her…she remained bitter forever after).
I think often about “myth” and the need for some kind of common narrative to unite a country.
I can find no narrative now. I agree that individualism-that peculiarly American original sin-is, finally, revealed for it’s inherent immorality and evil.
Thank you for all your writing. You’ve helped make (some) sense of my fading memories of that time.
My high school friend Fenwick grad Mike O’conner was warned by his doctor that his COPD could be affected by the vaccine. He took it on Friday and died Saturday night.
A friend with MS and a stroke has been advised not to.
My sister has been advised by her doctors not to get the shot due to her blood disease, ITP, her stoke a few years ago and other issues.
There are people dying days after getting shots. Had you done real journalism, you would have read this. several 1000 since Jan 1.
Operation Warp speed worked, thanks ex President. We were at a million a day when he left, but Joe took the credit.
He probably should not have gotten the shot because 2 nurses in my family who got Covid, have been advised since they have antibodies, and it actually can complicate their immune system,.
But, hey if you’re like the Ex President., it can be borderline effective or negative.
So, there are millions who have had the disease, like my sons mother in law, who was told, not to take the shot after she recovered.
The world is not as simple as our new president.
The debt he will accrue and the bad relations with Israel, Mexico, Canada ( now the Michigan governor is closing another pipeline, GB ( he opposed Brexit) is mounting.
Do more research
As my dad said, it’s not about your feelings, it’s about facts.
While you’re giving journalism lessons, you might take on Tucker Carlson as a student. He is partly, if not largely, responsible for spreading disinformation that the Covid vaccines are deadly. In a recent report, he stated that the vaccines were responsible for 3,362 deaths between late December and late April. A fact check reveals that he got this statistic from an unverified, unreliable database, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS is known to be a source that mixes facts with fiction. It is not designed, is not able, to determine a cause of death, like, say, a coroner. Someone can get jabbed and die afterward, but that doesn’t mean the vaccine was what killed him or her, as noted by Dr. Amesh Adalja, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. One example among many: a man who died after inoculation was listed in the VAERS database. Cause of death — injuries suffered in car crash. I am reporting facts, not my feelings, as your dad said.
What? Is there a New mexican restaurant in Patagonia???Now THAT is news..
It serves only burritos and tacos, and they’re damned good.
It was actually the Russians who won WWII, but if we had been like this at that time we might have joined the Axis instead of participating in its destruction.