Fear of a Vax Planet, by @DegreeStudies

Journalists have concluded that hyper-partisanship defined the local responses to COVID public health measures like social distancing, masking, lockdowns and vaccines. This analysis is not limited to the media, and has been echoed in research from prestigious academic institutions and publications from think tanks. The implication of this analysis is that there are objectively superior responses to the pandemic, but the public is unable to adopt them universally because of political dynamics; specifically the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats. Both parts of this analysis are wrong. 

First, the argument assumes the existence of neutral institutions capable of producing objective recommendations but such institutions are a fantasy propagated in service of specific political objectives. In his 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault explained that institutions that can cloak their political motives in scientific legitimacy are particularly powerful and dangerous. As Foucault put it, “institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent” must be criticized so that, “the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked.” In the public health measures adopted in response to COVID, we see a political preference for the economic needs of the middle and upper classes justified in the language of public health. Sections of the public that have resisted these measures, in many cases because their economic survival depends on resisting them, are exposing this political violence. This exposure accounts for the strong punitive reaction from the state and other institutions. 

Journalists and scholars are also wrong to identify party affiliation as relevant in determining responses to COVID and its associated policies. The ideological distinction that governs compliance with public health measures is not partisan political identity but trust in institutions. Although democrats are more likely to trust the advice of public health officials than republicans, the lowest-trust segment of society is made up of non-voters who do not identify with either party. Ultimately, Americans that are skeptical of social distancing, masking, lockdowns and even vaccines are not driven by partisanship or ignorance, but by an impressive record of institutional failure and dishonesty from supposedly objective institutions like medicine and science. A refusal to account with this record of failure is not just an intellectual error, but a deliberate political project to drive accountability away from the responsible parties. 

1. Neutral Institutions

It is not difficult to substantiate a record of bias and failure from supposedly neutral institutions as these institutions themselves will concede the historical influence of ideology on their decision making. For instance, the medical community now concedes that its slow response to the AIDS crisis was linked to the social position of homosexuals and universities concede that historical admissions processes were driven by racism and sexism. But despite these contemporary concessions, the language these institutions used at the time to justify their decisions featured the same cloak of objectivity that is deployed today. For instance, elite universities at the turn of the century did not justify the exclusion of female or black applicants out of social preference for white men, but because women and blacks were supposedly incapable of the intellectual rigor required by these schools. The Atlantic documented that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Harvard did not explicitly ban women or racial minorities from admissions, but required knowledge of Greek, Latin and classical literature: “These criteria largely shut out those who couldn’t afford to attend prestigious preparatory schools, and wealthy white Christian men continued to dominate student bodies”

Given that it is trivially easy to identify the influence of ideology on so-called neutral institutions throughout their past, is it reasonable to believe that we are living in the first moment where such influence is no longer present? I don’t think so, and in fact the COVID pandemic was extremely valuable in clarifying the values of contemporary society. For instance, the parameters of masking, social distancing and lockdown are optimized for the safety and economic survival of a person who can work from home - not the average American worker. In fact, the number of jobs that were deemed “essential” indicates that American society is willing to tolerate a relatively high level of perceived risk for those near the bottom of the economic ladder. We can all understand why grocery stores need to remain open even at the most dangerous points of the pandemic, but does Chipotle? 

Foucault tells us that the more an institution is able to cloak its motives in apparent objectivity, the more powerful this institution will become. An obvious example of this is the legitimacy a politician gains when they are able to launder a decision through a public health official. As Foucault implies, this arrangement means that access to this kind of scientific legitimization is among the most valuable political currencies available.  Consider for instance the tepid argument that took place over new, draconian measures instituted in the wake of 9/11. It was certainly the case that critics of the patriot act and security theatre were maligned and to some extent ostracized, but there was still a space for this argument on television and in the pages of prestige newspapers. This modest space for critique may have endured because the risk of terrorism, while very real in the minds of most Americans in 2001, was still presented as an essentially subjective evaluation by security experts. In other words, the people selling the War on Terror had broad emotional legitimacy, but less scientific legitimacy. There was no similar limit on the influence of COVID hysterics with scientific credentials, and I imagine the War on Terror goons looked on with awe and jealousy as the scientists and doctors got free peoples all over the world to freeze their lives. 

This ability to disrupt and reorder the normal shape of life is somewhat explained by Agamben’s “state of exception,” which applies to instances where the judicial order is suspended to deal with a specific crisis or threat to the state. Power is revealed by who takes up the space formerly occupied by the judicial process and how the exception is justified. In applying Agamben’s concept to the two crises mentioned above - we observe that a public health crisis was able to justify a broader state of exception than a security crisis. For instance, Bush era laws exposed American citizens to unprecedented levels of surveillance, but the most egregious violations of historical rights were focused on foreigners. Not only did the pandemic achieve far broader social change than the war on terror, there was clearly also a greater social cost to questioning its justifications, and narrower spaces available for critique. This reality demonstrates the value of both Foucault and Agamben’s observations, with Agamben supplying a model for the application of totalitarian policy in liberal societies and Foucault correctly predicting that those institutions deemed most “objective” or “neutral” would have the greatest power to enforce such policies. 

2. Why it makes sense to be an atheist of institutions

Democrats have an interest in linking the supposedly irresponsible rejection of expert advice to the republican party, but in truth there is more compelling evidence that suspicion of public health officials is most common among those who have exited electoral politics all together. This is a difficult conclusion for other institutions to accept, because rather than implying that the republican party is the central source of dangerous views on the pandemic, it reveals the presence of a growing bloc of Americans for whom no institution holds any valid authority. Furthermore, while the historic impacts of institutional failure targeted marginalized communities, additional fallout was somewhat randomly distributed. I will offer a personal example below. 

When the COVID pandemic got into full swing last March, I recognized the name Anthony Fauci but couldn't place it. As my mother reminded me, this was because Dr. Fauci had also been an omnipresent health official during the AIDS crisis, and my father had contracted HIV in the late 80’s from a tainted blood transfusion. At the time of the transfusion, there was some evidence that superheating donated blood would eliminate the threat of transmitting HIV, but this process was time consuming and expensive. As a result, the pharmaceutical companies that managed these transfusions did not elect to heat the blood, and exposed thousands of people to HIV. After my father died, my family and a few dozen others were each paid $100,000 by these pharmaceutical companies in recompense for our dead relative. 

I think my family’s story is illustrative of how random the secondary damage caused by institutional failure can be. The indifference to the death and sickness of AIDS victims was driven by indifference to the fates of homosexuals, but nevertheless that indifference ultimately threatened the lives of hemophiliacs of whatever sexual persuasion. In other words, even if you can anticipate which populations are disdained by power, you can never be sure you won’t be collateral damage. 

And so in part, this whole piece is a justification for my own vaccine skepticism, which is not acceptable in my social surroundings. But I don’t think I’m unique, and I bet each of my friends could identify a time when objective expertise injured them or a family member. But there are no incentives to come to such a conclusion, it only happens if you are a paranoid hypochondriac like me. But i am a well-read and well-educated hypochondriac and so ironically, I can validate my irrational position with a well-reasoned piece like this. 

But there are other consequences to being well-educated. Ultimately, I am too well-socialized to avoid vaccination indefinitely, and the growing chorus of “have you been vaccinated yet?” — which acts as a sort of informal vaccine passport — will get the best of me in the end. But whenever I do sit in that chair, I will imagine the scene when my father sat down to get a different injection that ultimately killed him. He was doing the responsible thing too, you see. All the doctors said so.

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Illustration is Nicolas Poussin’s “The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31”