As a pretty hardcore vaccine advocate, I really struggle to understand any opposition to them. And as these fairly small “freedom” protests continue, it becomes more and more clear that the remaining antivax community, shrinking every day, is growing more and more defensive and hostile. As they should, because literally everyone is attacking them, daily. And I’m fine with that.
Civil society needs the commons to include public health, as it has for centuries. You do not have the freedom to run your sewage down the street. Vaccines are the new sewage. It makes no difference that this is an injection, honestly. When society is faced with a killer like COVID-19, extreme public health measures are totally appropriate until the killer is identified and defeated.
So what are these remaining antivaxxers about? I’d argue it’s nearly 100% virtue signaling. The antivax community are the snowflakes of 2021. I remember all the hostility they directed at the women’s marches and gay pride marches, and going after the universities and high schools. Even today, these people attack the school boards. The SCHOOL BOARDS. Why? Because their version of events is the tribal version that HAS to be accepted. It’s a signal of strength. Of virtue. For them.
As my wife pointed out last night, participating in a protest or march, even if it is a form of signaling, is ALSO true support, almost all the time. So the antivaxxers do in fact currently believe or support the idea that vaccines are bad, it’s true. But support, and belief, do not make for substance.
One clear warning sign about any protest movement is when there is no substance to the protest. There is no there, there. Is it a legitimate argument for any public facing employee, like a teacher or police officer, to argue that they should be free to not protect the community by getting vaccinated? No. Liberty, true liberty, comes at the price of mutual and positive social participation. It’s the social contract. There is no social contract at the heart of antivaccination crowds. No interest in the common good.
Antivaxxers are pretty much exclusively virtue signalers at this point. Signaling that they support Trump, support a return to the old ways. Support illogic. Dystopia. Breakdown. A generation of people raised exclusively on dystopian and societal breakdown media, can’t see an alternative.
The alternative? Positive, cooperative social participation. This small percentage of Americans who refuse to be vaccinated are the opposite of that. Vast majorities of Americans today, and nearly all people over 65, have been vaccinated. They are participating in society positively. These antivaxxers? Nothing more than signalers that they will embrace any leadership to continue their illogical ways.
