For Deniers, COVID is About Anything BUT the Virus

“I don’t want to get the vaccine,” deniers tell us, “because it hasn’t been tested enough.”

All on its own, the statement is easy enough to fisk — more than 100 million people have gotten fully vaccinated in the US alone and mysteriously aren’t dropping dead of it. They aren’t magnetized. Their uteri are not shriveling up. What is happening to these unfortunate souls is: they’re not catching COVID as readily or as badly as all the brave vaccine holdouts. Yes, the vaccine clinical trials were done quickly, but it’s obvious to any smart consumer of information that the trials were done well. The questions about Astra-Zeneca’s data showed how robust of a process it was.

What gives away the game on what denialism is all about comes from what the deniers are willing to put in their bodies. Then, it was hydroxychloroquine. Now, it’s ivermectin. Surging demand for the latter has necessitated public health officials who really have better things to do with their time to come out with statements like this:

“Don’t do it; there’s no evidence whatsoever that it works and it could potentially have toxicity… with people who have gone to poison control centers because they’ve taken the drug at a ridiculous dose and wind up getting sick,” he said. “There’s no clinical evidence that indicates that this works.”

Thanks, Dr. Fauci. I wish they would listen, but of course they won’t. They just don’t like the messenger. They refuse to be told what to do by a certain kind of person.

Chances are: they know ivermectin is snake oil sugar water. They don’t care. An appropriately contemptuous figure on the internet told them it was a cure, and that gives them something better than relief from COVID. It gives them a salutary surge of energy that comes from the sheer glee of putting themselves above others.

They trust scientists to save them, but only when scientists are their obedient servants. Got cancer? Save me, doc — the customer is always right. Water shortage? Build me a dam, pencil-necked engineer. Brown-skinned country getting uppity? Drop a laser-guided bomb on their heads, physicist.

When the scientists dare to ask for something they want, suddenly it’s a different story.

“Please wear a mask.”

“FREEDOM!”

“Please get this vaccine we recombined some recombinant nucleic acid to engineer.”

“SAFETY!”

I used to think the hypocrisy was a glitch in the system, but I’ve come to realize that the hypocrisy is the point, which makes co-existing with the deniers in a civil society very challenging. You can’t resort to “reason.” You can’t attack without making things worse. If life were a court of law, you would have permission to treat them as a hostile witness, because that’s what they are. They don’t want to cooperate.

They will blindly follow someone of their choosing, someone who makes them believe that they are in charge and that things are the “way they’re supposed to be.” They will do almost anything to make the point as to exactly how those things are supposed to be arranged.

For them, COVID is not about the physical reality of a virus. It is about who gets to decide what the reality of the virus is. They want to exercise willful neglect just to show they can, and certain people need to remember their proper place.

For them COVID is just another fight over the right to feel superior, and that feeling is worth dying for. It always was, and it still is.