The long shadow of vaccine resistance

Last Monday, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh warned of the spread of the super-infectious delta covid19 variant in the population. Yet it failed to impress the huge majority of Trinis, who seem determined to remain unvaccinated.

Are their heads hard, are they scared or simply wilfully defiant?

They are not alone; people all over the world are resisting the vaccine.

This is a new challenge for governments that is as philosophical as it is practical and should not to be taken lightly. for it bodes of an increasingly troubled future.

Human beings thrive on certainty. It may be paradoxical, but it is the reason why so many people flee their countries to face uncertain futures elsewhere. At any one time there are millions of people on the move, seeking a better life, which usually means a secure job and income, the freedom from fear of violence or starvation, a safe roof over one’s head, the reassurance that tomorrow will dawn, like yesterday.

It is also why, apart from economic reasons, we live in communities, where we know one another, our traits and follies and whose loins begat whom. Knowing is a form of protection.

It is also why we believe so deeply in God and the organising principles of religion that ground our societies. People are prepared to die to defend the faith that must remain unshakeable because we derive our sense of wellbeing from it and a sense of purpose to this life and death.

For me and many millions, to be vaccinated is a duty owed to society and ourselves. No man is an island, and if I can infect those around me and threaten their lives, then it is up to me not to let that happen.

I have had to weigh up the risk between subjecting myself to a new vaccine or contracting the virus and perhaps dying. I also had to mull over the possibility that the projection of covid deaths had been exaggerated, that the reaction of governments was another form of panic in the face of uncertainty – something they cannot control by force, coercion or argument – and to acknowledge the shameless greed of the pharmaceutical companies. But, in the end, I feel we are either in or we are out.

Millions of others regard the scientists as interlopers, pretenders who appeared out of nowhere to challenge the certainties that they had hardly considered consciously. They disregard the fact that, particularly here in TT, so many people with non-communicable diseases live on drugs and therapies developed by scientists, in laboratories where experiments might well have gone wrong on the path to a safe treatment.

They may be ignorant of the fact that deadly diseases once made life expectancy average 40-60 years, while infant mortality kept populations low. Diseases that were rife in my childhood are unknown to today’s young people because of widespread vaccination programmes.

The difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, though, is not just about what information we get, but about what we want to believe and how we act. We all heard what the scientists had to say and some of us decided to trust them. We agreed to belong to the community of the vaccinated. Many more decided not to be vaccinated for other disturbing reasons.

The stories on social media are incredible, literally. A quarter of TT citizens are functionally illiterate, which means they cannot read the CMO’s words, so they rely on people telling them “things” –and we know our love for a good story and our Anancy DNA, so no surprise that simple ideas get seasoned and curried in the sharing. They conjure up a bleak, Mad Max dystopian world in which the vaccinated are scorned for being transmitters of coronavirus through shedding, or being marked by the Devil, etc. To protect themselves from mob rule, vaccinated individuals are keeping quiet about their status. I have been told of and know people who even pretend to be unvaccinated, and some are well educated advocates of non-vaccination.

There is something wilful in the masses challenging orthodoxy and authority. I am beginning to think that vaccine non-compliance is a defiant exercise of power, perhaps in retaliation for perceived injustices and historic disregard of people’s needs and views. Maybe having a voice is more comforting than the promise of a marginal life.

However, the prevailing discord definitely presents an opportunity to the agents of misrule and those who harbour deep resentments to politicise the virus by exploiting people’s ignorance and their apparent profound lack of trust in governments, institutions and outsiders. It’s worth reminding ourselves that false saviours emerge in such times.

We must analyse where our seismic divisions are leading and see these developments as part of a historical trajectory, a continuum, and as a critical moment we are living through.

If we do not make a concerted effort to listen to and unite people we could well end up living an even more dangerous and twisted reality.

Vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of a severe disease of the body politic, desperately in need of a cure.