No, Getting Vaccinated Was Not “Doing the Right Thing”

Why the Propaganda Campaign for the COVID-19 Shots Matters Today

With our expectations having dwindled for the ability of the COVID-19 vaccines to end the pandemic, and with growing unease surrounding their longterm side effects, those of us who got the shots are left with the consolation prize of having done the right thing.

But rolling up our sleeves wasn’t a matter of right versus wrong, even though our leaders wanted to make it seem that way.

The prospect of saving lives made it easy to frame vaccine mandates as a moral imperative, but to some that promise was a carrot on a stick they were unwilling to follow. And there was nothing wrong with that.

From the beginning, the pandemic response had us running in lockstep towards unprecedented safety extremes that we were discouraged from questioning, even as those measures began to look increasingly unnecessary. In the back of our minds we had hoped that a vaccine would end the outbreak along with the authoritarian streak that seemed to have been stalking us.

But when the vaccine arrived, it only traded us up from one level of tyranny to the next.

Instead of being leery of the power we were handing our leaders, we let them convince us that snap, unquestioning acceptance of it was a moral urgency.

The science we so dutifully had been following happened to have bent and wended in just such a way to make it necessary that a single QR code scan would stand between every citizen and their access to society, healthcare, education, and employment — perhaps in perpetuity.

The new normal, which we thought couldn’t demand any more from us — between lockdowns, masking, and distancing — now wanted a sacrifice of our bodily autonomy and to install a non-theoretical, centralized mechanism for shutting off disobedient citizens from society.

No amount of moralizing about saving lives was going to convince a conscientious minority that such mounting edicts were a fair trade for our safety. And as we careened toward a future that looked indistinguishable from an authoritarian one, it was precisely their counterbalancing voices that we desperately needed.

So as the majority of us complied, doing our duty to stop the germ, we should have felt solace that others were doing theirs also, doggedly pushing back against a control system we had just given a blank check and all of our trust.

But instead of being leery of the power we were handing our leaders, we let them convince us that snap, unquestioning acceptance of it was a moral urgency.

What we got looked like wartime propaganda, once used to galvanize a nation against an external enemy, now used to turn us against our neighbours and to radicalize support for objectionable government policy.

We were given an hyperbolic choice between total compliance or mass death and were bombarded with daily examples of the good citizen — masked, jabbed, and willing to prove it — compared with the bad — selfish, ignorant, distrusting of authority and clinging to stupid ideas like freedom.

An entire caricature emerged of the “anti-vaxxer,” putting a stink around the mere thought of resistance. Doubt stayed silent and proud displays of compliance became a way to spite the disobedient.

What we got looked like wartime propaganda, once used to galvanize a nation against an external enemy, now used to turn us against our neighbours and to radicalize support for objectionable government policy.

And so we now either hold onto the mobilizing notion that getting vaccinated was “doing the right thing” — in spite of the alternative response being just as principled — or we realize that we lived to experience, first-hand, the kind of mind control that reshapes societies into dystopias overnight.

If we didn’t come close to permanent social restructuring, we went through all of the motions for it. And the backbone of that change was the effort to foist an exclusionary moral ultimatum onto a policy we should have seen in a spectrum of greys. What’s left to be done is to understand that goodwill can be hijacked and to recognize from the example of COVID exactly what it looks like when it happens again.