Spare me Your Individual Covid Shaming...
...Start Demanding More From the Systems & Elites That are to Blame
I like Daniel Levy a lot. Before I ever became aware of that writer and actor’s work I was a big fan of his father Eugene Levy’s own great productions.
The two of them got together and made ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ which is just a marvelous show that you should definitely watch and enjoy and share with friends. Anyway, Dan seems great, and by all appearances he also seems to have a good heart and has been doing some serious good with his platform.
A recent public service announcement video of sorts from Levy encouraging people to get vaccinated against covid-19 uploaded to social media is also certainly going to do much more good than harm. Even so, his likely well-intentioned message reminds of something that has been bothering me for quite some time about popular discourse around covid-19 inoculation specifically and girding ourselves against the pandemic more broadly.
“It’s very late in London and I can’t sleep and I just thought, ‘You know, maybe there’s someone out there that’s just waiting to be convinced to get the vaccination’,” Levy says in the video.
“And this is me saying, do it. Get that vaccine. If you’re on the fence, fucking get it.”
Cool.
I got vaccinated for covid-19 as soon as I was able. I’ve told family members and students at my academy to get vaccinated if they’re able.
Levy is likely intending to speak to a quite privileged audience with that message, of course. No, not just people who can relate to being sleepless in a nice London hotel room while traveling, but also members of the Global North/West who increasingly have access to free covid-19 vaccinations while our governments actively work to make it harder for millions of people in the Global South/East to get vaccinated because of our trade embargos, sanctions, and outright destruction of their medical facilities with our bombs and missiles.
A more international perspective from Western celebrities who care about people being protected from covid-19 would certainly be helpful because then they’d realize that hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people are currently unprotected because of our governments’ imperialism, not because they are individually ignorant, indifferent, or obstinate. Perhaps then we’d get more videos from celebrities admonishing governments like the United States’ for choking nations we’ve destroyed with sanctions that make medical care and vaccinations difficult to get into their borders, or for choosing to throw out millions of unused doses instead of sharing them with nations who aren’t our allies and who refuse to go along with our policies of neo-colonialism.
An international, anti-imperial perspective might lead celebrities to make videos and post messages directed not at individuals supposedly simply too emotional or irrational to choose to get vaccinated but instead at those actually in power who have actively encouraged this pandemic to rage on with their negligent and cruel policies.
To Levy’s credit, the language and tone of his video message come off, to me at least, as characteristically non-judgmental and caring. Still, no covid message directed at individuals with a universal prescription or a high level of certainty about anything is going to be free of blindness.
Leaving aside the all-important global perspective alluded to above, there are indeed privileged people among our ranks here in the U.S. who are hesitant to get vaccinated not because they need a celebrity to give them a pep talk, but because they are autoimmune compromised or live with those who are and so are unsure of how to precisely balance risk at this point in time.
There are also those rare cases of people who got a first dose but then received such bad side-effects from them that their doctors advised them against getting the second, so they too are uncertain of how to balance different risks and are doing their best to stay home as much as possible while still trying to make ends meet. I have little doubt someone as good willed as Levy would likely show compassion to people in those tough situations, were he thinking of them.
Far too many others in the public eye, however, don’t show any trace of good-faith or compassion as they mock and deride people who struggle with mixed messages from current officials or with distrust that is the result of long histories of ethnic cleansing and dastardly experimentation with needles on marginalized peoples over the years, or suffer from God-awful education paid for by our government.
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The propaganda efforts to get Black and Latin people vaccinated in the United States have been insulting. I’ve heard a cartoon rapping doctor character in a commercial targeting Black people tell them that they need to get vaccinated, basically because it’s cool.
I’ve seen a commercial using older celebrity rappers rhyming and telling Black people to get the vaccine because, among other reasons, that’s how Black people can get back to fucking on the regular. I’ve yet to hear or watch a commercial with hospital or government officials discussing and apologizing for the long history of American medicine intentionally but secretly torturing and infecting Black people with needles and explaining the reasons why now will be different.
I’ve yet to see a public service announcement acknowledging that the current American medical establishment is so fundamentally racist that 50% of polled doctors believe, right now, things like that Black people have thicker skin than White people, and that they feel less pain than White folk resulting in unconscionable treatment disparities and outcomes for Black people, apologizing for it, and announcing in full detail how that is going to change.
Basically, I’ve not seen any campaigns around covid vaccination where either or both the U.S. government and the medical establishment acknowledge that Black people have reason to distrust them, and where they apologize for that and present a plan to finally cease their history and ongoing practices of racist medical treatment of Black people.
Believing that we can convince Black people to get vaccinated for covid-19 with emotional manipulation, ie. rapping and talking down to them means we believe any hesitancy on their part is due to superstition, ignorance, and selfishness instead of due to their perhaps actually being well-informed by historical knowledge and possessing a deep desire to fight against an oppressive super structure in order to preserve one another. It is also entirely racist.
Hesitancy from Black folk to get vaccinated could reasonably be due to an acute understanding of American medicine’s targeted and ongoing abuse of them, which leads to a justifiable mistrust. Black individuals who are hesitant to get vaccinated are not the problem – the United States medical establishment and government is.
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One of the top reasons survey data tells us working Americans are hesitant to get vaccinated is because they fear experiencing even mild side-effects would make them miss work or have to work while feeling a bit ill. These are reasonable fears.
In and of themselves, mild and short-lasting side effects from vaccinations are more than worth being protected from covid-19. In the real world for millions upon millions of largely Black and Brown working class people who work on erratic, corporate-controlled schedules in a nation that does not guarantee paid leave, even during a pandemic, the threat of even cold symptoms could mean serious loss of wages, a threat to their job stability, and a series of tightly chained subsequent events that can easily lead to homelessness or bankruptcy.
When I went to get each of my covid-19 shots I scheduled myself so that I would have the following days off after hearing friends and family describe the mild symptoms they experienced after being vaccinated. Good for me.
Most aren’t as privileged as I am and can only dream of making their own work schedules. Acting as though reticence on the behalf of some working people to get vaccinated is based merely on ignorance or selfishness ignores the realities of their day-to-day lives and the almost infinite amount of difficult choices and wagers they have to make in order to attempt survival and it is classist. And, because our White supremacist society chooses to make low-wage work disproportionately done by people of color, it is also racist.
It is the fault of our brutally oligarchical society that requires so many of the tough choices workers have to make contradictory, ie. take a day off or use a rare day off to get vaccinated to protect against covid-19 – if it is even available near me at no cost – and risk getting sick for a day or two with side-effects, angering my boss and possibly losing my job, or neglect getting the shot because I couldn’t carve out time in my schedule between 12-hour suicide shifts on six or seven day cycles, running errands, caring for my kids, and sleeping four hours a night, but remain unprotected from covid-19.
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There is nothing preventing this Democratic presidential administration and congress from requiring at least emergency paid leave from companies for all Americans so they can get vaccinated. There is nothing preventing them from providing healthcare for all Americans so that they can easily and with no fees consult with doctors about covid and all other health concerns.
Yet, politicians won’t even discuss those options. Workers have exposed themselves to unbelievable covid-19 risk the past year and a half in order to keep the nation running, working extra hours and days every week, in often horrid conditions, for no extra pay, despite creating record profits for their corporate masters.
Those working people don’t need lectures about health and risk and selflessness. They need material aid and support from the government and medical establishment which has failed them for our nation’s entire history.
Popular CNN analyst, attorney, Ivy League professor, and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa recently took to twitter to dance on the possible deathbed of covid-19 patient Scott Rowe who was recently interviewed on television while hospitalized and said he stands by his decision to not get vaccinated because he doesn’t trust our authoritarian government.
“’Don’t shove it down my throat’,” Rangappa quoted him mockingly.
“’Don’t shove it down my throat’ say the people who demand prayer in school, flying Confederate flags on government property, etc. etc.” Obviously Rangappa knows nothing about this specific man and doesn’t seem interested in getting to understand him better, so she resorted to all sorts of caricature stereotypes to make claims about him and his “type” of people.
Yes, it is true that this private citizen is unwise. Would it be possible, however, for elites and celebrities like Rangappa to spare just a bit of admonition for those actually in power, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? After all, both Biden and Harris shared almost those exact types of sentiments last fall when they ran against Donald Trump as he sat in office, mocking the notion that a trustworthy vaccine would be available in 2020.
It, in fact, was. Biden and Harris’ vaccine fearmongering proved inaccurate, and we’re still seeing the fruits of their cynical misinformation. “If Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I’m not taking it,” Harris said during the campaign.
Biden went even harder, casting doubt on the safety of a vaccine if it came out during his political opponents’ time in office. “When we finally do, God-willing, get the vaccine who’s going to get the shot? You going to be the first one to say, ‘put me, sign me up! They say it’s now ok!’? I’m not being facetious.”
If you think that Joe Biden, a serial plagiarist and one of the key supporters of lies that led us into war with Iraq in 2003 is inherently more trustworthy than Donald Trump, I won’t bother re-hashing the past fifty years of his deceitful career for you. The point is that now, while themselves in office, they tell us to uncritically trust the same vaccines they said wouldn’t be ready in time and, even if they were, wouldn’t be trustworthy. Now, once in office themselves, Biden and Harris wag their fingers at individual citizens who took up their prior vaccine skepticism and still refuse to give Americans economic relief, healthcare, or increases in educational funding.
I’ve watched enough videos, heard enough commercials encouraging individual action to take on covid-19. I’ve seen absolutely none from establishment organizations, institutions, celebrities, or experts specifically admonishing the U.S. government for not doing the bare minimum things other wealthy nations have to support people and fight covid-19 with actual resources, healthcare, employment and housing guarantees, pharmaceutical patent opening, and cash.
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There are far too many Americans at all economic levels who have resisted common-sense covid-19 fighting tools like wearing masks and getting vaccinated. For today we’ll leave aside the reality that the U.S. government including our leading public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci initially and admittedly lied to us intentionally about masking, spreading the first anti-mask lies here that have taken hold and never left, and killing unknown scores in the process.
For the sake of argument let’s ignore that recent and likely powerful influencer on covid treatment skepticism from our existing public health officials and look instead at groups like White Christian American Evangelical vaccine hold outs in more of a vacuum. They make up a sizeable chunk of those in America who are choosing not to get vaccinated and could end up being a large obstacle to enough of us getting vaccinated to successfully end the pandemic (since our country has clearly decided against the type of economic relief sufficient to keep us all home and prevent spread that other countries used with great success).
To this day, these politically reactionary, and magical-thinking Christian Evangelicals and their educational institutions hold the ear of Republican and Democratic politicians alike, and receive millions of dollars of funding for their religious fundamentalist schools from our taxes. If we don’t like the ideas that people being raised in American Taliban-style communities and schools are spreading, especially since they now contribute to spreading covid-19, how about we call upon our Democratic and supposedly science-loving President and Congress to cut off funding for their hate-factories?
Why give millions of dollars to their churches and schools? The government ceasing funding for disease and hate-spreading religious institutions with our tax money might be a bit more messy than simply condescending poor, Black, and Brown people, but it is likely time we demand that they do exactly that if we’re serious about turning back anti-intellectualism broadly and covid-19 treatment skepticism more specifically.
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Any self-respecting, historically literate Black American has reasonable, justified reasons to distrust their government and the medical establishment. If we’re serious about making sure all Black folk who are healthy enough get vaccinated for covid-19 do so, it’s time to demand that our doctors acknowledge and apologize for centuries of abuse, torture, and taught racism which has resulted in outcomes that are beyond a horror story, and explain how, specifically, that is going to end.
It's time we demand that our government offer immediate reparations, and other targeted benefits and payments to Black people and detailed promises of how they will end systemic oppression against them in at least the medical field. For workers and other poor people it is time that we demand our government join the 21st century and – at the bare minimum – guarantee housing, education, and healthcare, income protection, remedial cash payments, guaranteed paid work leave and childcare, to go with emergency infrastructure and public transit overhauls.
It is time that we demand out government stop funding religious fundamentalist institutions which help spread lies about medical treatments, and who refuse to respect common-sense rules about mitigating covid-19 disease spread during this pandemic.
Individuals, banding together, are what have kept the United States afloat throughout our history and during this pandemic. We are doing so poorly as a nation at ending the covid-19 pandemic not because of individual actions of working people, but because we live in an oligarchy designed to be unresponsive to the majority’s needs and instead profit the few, those same few who have seen record profits during the pandemic as we rot and die.
We’ve failed not because of your stubborn neighbor or silly aunt, but because even when forced to face our structural and intentional inequalities under the specific light of this pandemic, our government has refused to implement the common-sense policies and relief that all other nations who’ve been more successful at dealing with covid have implemented.
Regular people oppressed by America’s uniquely devastating matrix of cruelty don’t need to be shamed into compliance. They need understanding and compassion, while we show no mercy to the oppressive systems themselves.
I’ve had enough shaming of individual, anonymous people. It’s time to name those at the top of our society, make them ashamed, as well as afraid, so much so that they finally do what is needed to stop this bleeding.