The war on the unvaccinated

Yes, people really should get vaccinated. Vaccines really are the way to tame the pandemic. But the blind rage against the unvaccinated helps no one. It certainly isn’t going to persuade those who are merely hesitant to get vaccinated. They need to be reassured of the vaccine’s minimal side-effects and of its efficacy in preventing severe disease. It should be explained how a higher vaccine uptake can slow the spread of the virus – that vaccination can benefit your community and society more broadly, even if it’s not much benefit to you. But when authority figures tell the hesitant that their doubts are idiotic or that they are just plague-ridden scum, then they are far less likely to trust the help being offered to them.

Worse, the othering and un-personing of the unvaccinated becomes a pretext for harsh crackdowns on liberty. And it is never solely the unvaccinated who suffer here. If our civil liberties are conditional on our health status, that makes all of us less free. It turns freedom into a licence, granted temporarily by the state, and taken away just as easily.

The war on the unvaxxed is also leading to the abandonment of hard-won principles, like bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy is such a fundamental liberty that even authoritarian China feels the need to cynically proclaim that its vaccine rollout is based on the principle of informed consent (even though, in practice, forced vaccination is common, according to human-rights observers).