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anti vaxxer
Facts, Not Blind Ideology
Ideology grounded in facts, not blind ideology, is what we must strive for.
Mar 12, 2022
"In 1959, the BBC asked [Bertrand] Russell, [public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate] what advice he would give future generations. He answered: 'When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at the facts." -- Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Roger Bregman, p. 253
This advice from Bertrand Russell, one of the 20th century's most prominent progressive intellectuals, toward the end of his long life is very sound. It resonated with me when I recently read it. I've been thinking for a while about how and why intelligent, well-meaning people sometimes hold onto beliefs or a particular ideology even when new information, or just the basic facts, should lead to a different view of things.
Unfortunately, my life experience has led me to realize that though most people do generally agree that an approach of facts and the truth of things, actual reality, must always come before ideology, this is too often not the way some human beings function, particularly when it comes to politics. And this very big problem transcends political ideology. It's true on the political right, center, and left and always has been.
As far as progressives, the biggest, most recent example is the Covid-19 anti-vaccination campaigns--not just individual points of view but public campaigns--of people like Robert Kennedy, Jr., Gary Null, and others. Despite over a year of successful experience with vaccines dramatically reducing deaths, hospitalizations, and total cases of the virus, these vaccine deniers, not just clinging to their general anti-vaccine ideology but actively campaigning against people getting vaccinated, have almost certainly increased the numbers in all three categories. It is shameful.
Then there's the public political position of the national Green Party--which I was a part of for many years, though no longer--that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016 or between Joe Biden and Trump in 2020. Jill Stein and Howie Hawkins, the GP Presidential candidates, took that position over and over, which turned out to be very unpopular on the left. Most people on the left did the right thing and put facts over ideology: Stein got 1.1% of the vote and Hawkins got about 0.4%.
I am fully aware that on too many issues, particularly the appalling US military budget, US foreign policy. and acceptance of corporate/big money domination of our society, there are similar approaches between Republicans and the usually dominant corporate wing of the Democratic Party. But if you think that overt racism, denial of women's and LGBTQ rights, denial of labor rights, poverty, and neo-fascism are very big issues, the common sense approach to take when voting for President under the existing US electoral system (it needs to be changed!), particularly if you are in a swing state where the vote is usually very close, is to vote for, yes, the lesser evil. Practically, that makes sense.
We're seeing a similar thing right now as far as the political left and the Ukraine war. Despite the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face reality that this war is happening because Putin invaded Ukraine with 150,000 or so well-armed troops, with no provocation by Ukraine, a small percentage of those on the left who see themselves as part of the US peace movement are letting their particular brand of leftist ideology guide the positions they take on this huge issue.
The primary example is the United National Antiwar Coalition. What are their main demands, as listed on their website? No War With Russia. No to NATO. No Sanctions.
Contrast this with the demands of CodePink, one of the leading organizations on the left organizing mass demonstrations against the war: Stop the War in Ukraine. Russian Troops Out. No to NATO Expansion.
Both agree that NATO's expansion over the last few decades, since the Soviet Union dissolved, is an underlying reason why Putin took the action that he did. From a geopolitics standpoint, it is understandable why not just Putin but many Russians would be upset about having NATO military bases and missiles 100 miles or so from their western border, just as the United States 60 years ago was upset about having Soviet bases and missiles 90 miles away in Cuba.
CodePink, however, in its first two demands, addresses the fact that the reason for this war is Putin/the Russian government's unprovoked decision to invade Ukraine militarily, and Russian troops must leave if there is to be peace and national self-determination for Ukraine.
UNAC's "No War With Russia" demand completely obfuscates the fact of who started this war. There's nothing about Ukraine. Indeed, if you look at their three demands in their totality, there's nothing there that Putin disagrees with. He doesn't want the US or European countries to get involved in this war, he wants Ukrainians and their supporters to stand down or be defeated so he can seize their land. He's obviously against NATO. And he obviously doesn't want any sanctions on anybody in Russia, in general or on the oligarchs.
Ideology is not a bad thing. It's of value, very important really. Each of us as individuals should have a fact-based and justice-seeking worldview which guides us as we go through life, day by day. But when that worldview doesn't fit with the facts, as history and our lives develop, it's time to make some practical and ideological adjustments, look at things more closely. Ideology grounded in facts, not blind ideology, is what we must strive for.
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Threadbare US Social Safety Net: The War on Science, Medicine, and Equality for All
Across the nation, elected Republicans at every level of government display a callous disregard for the health and lives of the American people, sowing disinformation and resistance to public health efforts to contain and defeat the pandemic.
Nov 05, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic is a global health emergency that requires a coordinated and mobilized medical response, one based not only on public health expertise but also principles of social cooperation and solidarity. But in the United States cooperation and solidarity are almost alien values in a nation rent by growing political divisions and more substantively defined by extremes of wealth and class inequality.
In the hyper-capitalist United States, a threadbare social safety net is the norm and even people's health needs are commodified for financial profit.
In the hyper-capitalist United States, a threadbare social safety net is the norm and even people's health needs are commodified for financial profit. The culture of solidarity required to meet the challenges of a public health emergency is not exactly the default setting for a social system dominated by financial and political elites.
But it's worse than that. Today, the Republican Party operates as open saboteurs of public health. Across the nation, elected Republicans at every level of government display a callous disregard for the health and lives of the American people, sowing disinformation and resistance to public health efforts to contain and defeat the pandemic. In place of a united front of preventive community health action, Americans instead must contend with endless propaganda and nonsense from a far-right circus of liars and science deniers.
Far-Right Political Demagoguery
From the first days of the pandemic, when the spotlight of a public health emergency put President Trump's sociopathic misleadership on full display, the Republican Party was forcefully revealed as an entrenched lobby of billionaire lovers and public health defeatists. This is less a political party than a Trumpian cult of unabashed opportunists and far-right ideologues, willful traders in people's lives and health for whatever scraps of power and largesse they can hoard for themselves. Even basic public health measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, such as mask requirements for indoor settings, temporary restrictions on indoor gatherings, and more recently encouraging use of effective vaccines, have been demagogically politicized and resisted by Republicans.
To the extent his public health pronouncements run counter to the Republican agenda, even Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has had to endure slanders and threats from the malodorous swamps of the Trump milieu. In fact, harassment and abuse of scientists who give media interviews or otherwise comment on the pandemic is now common, according to a survey by Nature. This is actually a global phenomenon, thanks to the rise of far-right extremism in multiple countries.
Indeed, inspired by former President Trump's contempt for science, many among his base of supporters have come to view the scientific community as just another interest group out to promote its own self-serving agendas. The scientific consensus of the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, for example, is viewed by many right-wing climate change skeptics as just one opinion among many. And since everyone is entitled to their opinion, take your pick which one you like!
The public health Covid-19 vaccination campaign is now under assault by many Republicans, motivated less by reasonable health concerns than just politically charged scare tactics and propaganda. Its source is the same far-right political milieu that perpetuates the lie that Donald Trump won the last presidential election. It's no wonder this same political milieu considers it a priority to force women to give birth against their will, promoting highly restrictive abortion bans in Texas and other states regardless of their harmful impact on women's health. These dissemblers of knowledge and justice have become the norm in the Republican Party.
The hypocrisy in all this reaches particularly stunning heights at Fox News, where masks, vaccines, and science expertise are regularly impugned by right-wing hosts out to discredit the current public health campaign. The hypocritical rot at the core of Fox News is evident in the fact that the media company actually requires all of its employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19, or undergo daily testing. While many among Trump's base of supporters express a kind of casual skepticism on social media and elsewhere toward use of face masks to reduce the spread of Covid-19, indoor masking in the Fox News offices is strictly enforced. Of course, this doesn't stop media propagandists like FoxNews host Tucker Carlson from ridiculing the "cult of mask-wearing" as pointless. You just have to wonder if these posturing media cynics think medical masks are used in surgical settings just for dramatic affect?
What's next? Will Fox News eventually come up with an expose of Ignaz Semmelweis, the 19th Century German-Hungarian physician who in the 1840s championed hand-washing to prevent the spread of infectious disease, as a secret communist friend of Karl Marx? Dr. Semmelweis originally developed his ideas about hand-washing based on clinical practice and observation, before the germ-theory of disease could clearly establish the value of preventative hygiene measures.
Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy
Certainly not everyone who avoids Covid-19 vaccination is an "anti-vaxxer" opposed in principle to all vaccines. Nor are they necessarily right-wing malcontents who reflexively oppose any public health measures supported by liberals or Democrats. There are actually many reasons why so-called vaccine hesitancy influences a segment of the U.S. population. First, as has long been true, some people worry about the safety or side effects of vaccines. These legitimate concerns deserve to be addressed, not ridiculed. In fact, there's research to suggest large numbers of the currently unvaccinated are more "confused and concerned" than "absolutely opposed" to vaccines," as New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci notes in a recent commentary.
Interestingly, Tufekci cites research from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that shows lack of health insurance is the single most powerful predictor for who remains unvaccinated. But Covid-19 vaccines are provided free to the public, so why would that be? For one, lack of insurance is also a likely indicator of a more tenuous social relationship to the health care system. The uninsured are more likely to be among the 25% of the U.S. population who lack a primary health care provider to turn to for advice or information.
This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The United States is one of the few modern nations that does not have some type of non-profit single-payer or national health care system. As a result, an everyday lack of access to affordable health care, especially in poor and minority communities, is a familiar aspect of American life.
The lack of access to affordable care is indeed a major failing of the U.S. health care system, experts note. "Some 30 million Americans are uninsured, and mostly shunned by doctors and hospitals," write physicians David Himmelstein, Steffi Woolhandler, and Adam Gaffney in a recent British Medical Journal (BMJ) commentary on vaccine hesitancy. "Even those with insurance encounter ever-larger out-of-pocket costs. Having disciplined patients for decades to expect financial roadblocks, we now expect them to suddenly understand that covid-19 vaccination is different--a fact many apparently doubt." Indeed, they observe, vaccination rates are lowest in the states with the highest uninsurance rates and among those most excluded from access to care.
Vaccine hesitancy may also express historic distrust among racial and ethnic minorities who have experienced a legacy of discriminatory treatment in the health system. Some people may be concerned, despite reassurance from public health authorities, that Covid-19 vaccines, initially approved for emergency use, were developed so quickly. Tufeckci also reminds us that there exists a surprisingly large sector of the population who have a fear of needles.
To be clear, people have the right to ask questions and seek assurances about vaccine safety and policies. The antidote to "anti-vaxxer" opposition isn't just blind faith in vaccine science. Medicine doesn't need uncritical "pro-science" sycophants constantly shouting its praises any more than it needs its imprudent deniers. Actually, it is in society's interest for the general public to be as informed and educated as possible--to think critically--about the science behind public health guidelines and recommendations. In turn, medicine also works best when health care practitioners value and respect their patients' input and perspectives.
At this juncture, the consistent right-wing Republican opposition in the United States to public health measures is less absurd than it is just deeply tragic. In the United States, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reports 751,349 Covid-related deaths as of November 4. Worldwide, 5,027,964 deaths have been reported. Notably, the United States fares poorly in global comparisons of Covid-19 morbidity and mortality rates.
Nor is the Democratic Party establishment without blame in all this. For decades, neo-liberal austerity policies supported by both major political parties have taken their toll on the public health infrastructure. In fact, pre-pandemic spending on public health has been in decline for years, reports the BMJ, more recently constituting only 2.6% of total health spending. Driven by corporate profit, hospital bed capacity and stockpiles of available medical resources have been gradually reduced over the past four decades.
What does a fractured public health infrastructure look like in practice? Here's one example: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently reports only "breakthrough" cases of infection among vaccinated populations that involve hospitalization, according to Johns Hopkins. The more complete data reporting necessary to track the virus is left to state health departments, many of which fail to report all the data necessary to track surges, variants, and vaccine effectiveness. In fact, 14 states do not report any data on breakthrough infections.
A Vision for Social Justice and Health
Rich in technology and wealth, but poor in leadership, equality, and justice, the United States is a dysfunctional outlier compared to other rich nations when it comes to providing basic social infrastructure and a robust social safety net for its citizens.
None of the public health shortcomings or current political divisiveness over even the most basic public health measures should come as a surprise. Rich in technology and wealth, but poor in leadership, equality, and justice, the United States is a dysfunctional outlier compared to other rich nations when it comes to providing basic social infrastructure and a robust social safety net for its citizens. This is a society that expects to spend $8 trillion on military spending over the next 10 years, but somehow can't manage to pass a $1.75 trillion social spending bill that would mandate even modest expansions in Medicare or establish for the first time national policy on paid family and medical leave for working families, without a contentious and likely losing political battle in Congress.
"The covid-19 pandemic casts a harsh light on America's lethal inequalities, but also illuminates a path forward," conclude single-payer advocates Himmelstein, Woolhandler, and Gaffney in their BMJ commentary. "Contending with tomorrow's health emergencies will require reversing austerity and adequately funding public health agencies. We must go further to democratize care: implement universal coverage and abolish out-of-pocket costs; equalize the distribution of health infrastructure; and reverse the privatization and commodification of medical services."
These are dangerous times. In the United States, millions of Americans are under the sway of a megalomanic ex-president Trump, a corrupt, inveterate right-wing liar described by his own niece as an "instinctive fascist." While many Republican leaders continue to bow down to this malignant anti-democratic menace, a majority of Republican voters in their political stupor continue to deny this scourge of a leader even lost the election.
These are the agitated know-nothings who want to ban mask mandates, criminalize abortions, ban teaching in schools on the history of racism, and undermine the democratic right to vote. They are crawling in a muddy trench with their dystopian visions of authoritarian repression and ever harsher specter of social and class injustice. The expectation that the cautious elites of the Democratic Party, with their penchant for moderation in all things, can prevent this irrational base of aspiring neo-fascist Republicans from destroying what remains of democracy is not an optimistic one.
If there is a public health lesson here, it is that no one is safe until everyone is safe. The dangerous dynamic of the pandemic is that the longer it lasts, the more likely even more dangerous variants of Covid-19 will emerge. Worldwide equality in access to affordable medical care, including vaccine equity, is in the interest of the whole planet. Worldwide solidarity, scientific internationalism, democracy in everything and social and climate justice for everyone, including mass resistance to the growing far-right threats to our future, has never been more urgently needed.
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Shut Up and Drivel
Once a target of conservative scorn, Kyrie Irving is now a hero to those who want to remain unvaccinated.
Oct 16, 2021
A quote often attributed to Groucho Marx before he was born and after he died goes like this: "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
Whether the famed comedian really said it or not, it feels vaguely "Marxist"--as in the Groucho variety. Principles, like sponges, can be fungible in the wrong hands.
A laissez-faire attitude toward vaccination during a pandemic that has killed 700,000 Americans is not admirable.
But that's life, isn't it? One day, you're Kyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics defending his right to protest police brutality; the next, you're Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets refusing to obey New York's mandate to get vaccinated to keep your multimillion-dollar annual salary.
Same guy, different days generating furious push back and praise. It reminds you of what Groucho Marx probably didn't say: "These are my principles..."
Fox News' Laura Ingraham famously scolded LeBron James for daring to express political opinions--especially those that were contrary to her own. "Shut up and dribble," she screeched at James, who was then with the Cleveland Cavaliers. It was an update of her acidic comment "shut up and sing" aimed at the Dixie Chicks years earlier after they criticized then-President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
She singled out James for being "barely intelligible" and "ungrammatical" because he insisted on being outspoken about Colin Kaepernick while also criticizing Donald Trump.
"It's always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball," Ingraham said, sneering at the notion an athlete's opinion was worth anything.
Irving called Ingraham out for attempting to marginalize his colleagues for expressing opinions that she felt Americans weren't obligated to respect.
The more Irving and his colleagues insisted that professional athletes had the right to be heard on the most important issues of the day because they were citizens, too, the more they were mocked on social media as "semi-literate millionaires."
It was also around that same time that Kyrie Irving took a detour from defending every athlete's First Amendment rights to testing it in the most absurd way imaginable: questioning whether the Earth was round.
"This is not even a conspiracy theory," Irving said on a podcast. "The Earth is flat. ... It's right in front of our faces. I'm telling you, it's right in front of our faces. They lie to us."
Presumably, Irving has flown on enough luxury planes and commercial airliners to know better than to take Flat Earth Society notions seriously, but there he was, a Duke University alum, espousing pre-scientific gibberish because he'd fallen down some rabbit hole on YouTube.
This time, the ridicule he got was bipartisan, even though he said his comments were only meant to generate discussion. In June 2018, he backed away from his flat Earth fundamentalism a bit to say he wasn't entirely sure whether the Earth was flat or round. He was round Earth agnostic.
"I do research on both sides," Irving said, resorting to the strained tautology that he would fall back on during his vaccination folly a few years later. "I'm not against anyone that thinks the Earth is round. I'm not against anyone that thinks it's flat. I just love hearing the debate."
Just to be clear--there has been no serious debate about whether the Earth is round since the Greek mathematician Pythagorus settled the matter over 2,000 years ago. Irving had simply fallen under the influence of a persistent conspiracy theory that has continued to flourish wherever "open minds" unbothered by thousands of years of science congregate.
Though millions continue to believe it, it's a dumb American myth that Christopher Columbus and his crew ever believed there was a possibility the world was flat when they set sail in search of new maritime trade routes to Asia.
Acknowledging the fact that he's a role model to minority kids already at an academic disadvantage in this country, Irving apologized eventually for entertaining flat Earth theories, but the jocular way in which he did it made people think his heart wasn't in it.
"To all the science teachers, everybody coming up to me like, 'You know, I've got to reteach my whole curriculum?' I'm sorry," he said in a press session intended to clear the air. "I apologize. I apologize."
Suspicion of Irving's sincerity is reinforced by something he said during the height of the controversy when he was trying to deflect from his lack of intellectual seriousness:
"Even if you believe in that [Earth is flat], don't come out and say that stuff," he said. "That's for intimate conversations, because perception and how you're received, it changes."
Fast forward to these sad, pathetic pandemic times, when more than 3 billion people worldwide have gotten at least one COVID-19 vaccination and billions more are clamoring for it. Here in America, where it is most accessible, COVID-19 vaccination has become a political litmus test.
There are a variety of reasons for this obstructionism, ranging from fear of being injected with a "tracker" by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates to the belief that COVID-19's deadliness is being exaggerated for political reasons. Before YouTube cracked down on anti-vax videos, it was full of "testimonies" that the shots "magnetize" recipients and "change" their DNA.
Another persistent conspiracy theory that many of the refusenik NBA players who are following Irving's lead may have bought into is that vaccines are part of an elaborate plot to sterilize and kill Black people who have allegedly failed to learn from the lessons of the Tuskegee Experiment.
LeBron is vaccinated but refuses to use the same leadership capital he expended on supporting Kaepernick and protesting police brutality to influence his fellow players or the millions of vulnerable, gullible Black Americans who believe the conspiracy theories.
James says that getting vaccinated is "a personal decision" best left to the individual. There's no hint of any understanding that there is a larger social dimension to the decision.
By refusing the vaccine, Irving is forgoing as much as $15 million in salary this year now that he has been cut from practicing or playing with the Brooklyn Nets.
For separating himself from his team and his livelihood, Irving has been applauded by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter, and Tucker Carlson and Brian Kilmeade on Fox.
Irving is now beloved in conservative places where he was once scorned because he refuses to do something that would potentially spare him from a horrible death if he were to contract the coronavirus.
After surrogates insisted that Irving wasn't an anti-vaxxer, despite refusing to get a shot that would make it possible for him to continue making millions, he spoke for himself this week.
"Do what's best for you, but I am not an advocate for either side," Irving said in a statement. "I am doing what's best for me. I know the consequences here, and if it means that I'm judged and demonized for that, that's just what it is. That's the role I play."
Irving told skeptics and admirers that he wants to be a "voice for the voiceless." The voiceless are apparently those who will lose their jobs because they refuse to follow either government or private sector mandates to get vaccinated. He insists he's neither for or against vaccines and that he's only "pro-freedom."
A laissez-faire attitude toward vaccination during a pandemic that has killed 700,000 Americans is not admirable. It is morally incoherent, especially when Black people are disproportionately victims of this kind of selfishness and irrationality.
Irving once "researched" whether the Earth was flat and remained skeptical of its roundness as recently as 2018. That is not an impressive track record--even if Laura Ingraham finally approves.
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