Chronicle Editor
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Most serious observers of world and human affairs are agreed that the most serious threat to life on earth is the ecological crisis that manifests in rapid climate change. The earth is heating up rather too fast and water threatens to overtake land as ice melts.
The same water is becoming more acidic because of increased carbon content. As usable and life-sustaining water becomes scarce human, plant and animal life are endangered. As scientifically and existentially proven as the reality of climate change is there are movements that forcefully argue that the whole climate change saga is a hoax, the earth is doing just fine. Among these disputants are some naturalists who believe that human beings have no business worrying about nature that can take care of itself the way it knows how.
There seems to be a stubborn habit among human beings to be denialist and ignorant of some of the grave threats to life. Some of us tend to generate and embrace some comforting and denialist myths in the face of threats to existence and life on earth.
This is a tragic human habit that is as dangerous as any pandemic. The same mythical and denialist habit is wagging its ugly head around the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccination drives that are being advanced by governments of countries. Like those denialists and mythmakers that dismiss climate change as a hoax, the anti-vaxers as they are called, advance many false but persuasive arguments against Covid-19 vaccines and the virus itself. They are so convinced and also convincing in their arguments and have thrown governments’ efforts at vaccinating as many people as possible into confusion and much pessimism. What philosophers call the “fragile absolute” is exactly that false but strong and persuasive information that fools even some of the most discerning people around us. Some anti-vaxers are informed and learned people that are compelling in their arguments against anti-Covid-19 vaccination. These are apparent role-models in society that have become wrong-models in the way they mislead huge populations and lead them away from the true, right and correct effort to vaccinate the world against Covid-19.
These wrong models are true prophets of alternative facts and champions of the post-truth global era that had a leader and a face in US former President Donald Trump.
The mythology of Anti-vaxers
Anti-vaxers have been some of the most privileged beneficiaries of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They have populated and taken full advantage of the world’s latest information technological developments. They patrol the streets of the social media advancing their dark mission of discouraging the world’s population from anti-Covid-19 vaccinations. Their mis-information and dis-information agenda has grown to what can be called an “infodemic” in that it is as dangerous as the pandemic itself.
Unsuspecting populations of the world have been fed a diet of scary falsehoods that include that vaccinations are turning people into guinea-pigs upon whom scientists are testing their medicines.
The religiously inclined and spiritually vulnerable of the world population have been told that vaccination works to implant some devilish chips intro their bodies as Satan is moving to finally take over the world towards the end of times. Those that are spreading vaccines and defending their use are only agents of Lucifer that are advancing the ends of New World Order where most of us will be turned into zombies of the ruling elites. In the same way in which companies that manufacture computer anti-viruses are alleged to manufacture computer viruses to create business markets the anti-vaxers believe that pharmaceutical companies have manufactured the Covid-19 virus in order to sell vaccines and make billions in profits.
Like climate change in the view of denialists, some anti-vaxers argue, Covid-19 will naturally die-off or it is a hoax, does not exist at all except in being another flu strain that we should not lose sleep about. Some daring denialists and conspiracy theorists among the anti-vaxers argue that one day we will all wake up with immunity from Covid-19; we should not worry about vaccinating but wait for that good day that is coming soon.
What is called “herd immunity” is that natural condition when as many people as possible have had a disease and develop natural immunity against it. My honest but pessimistic view of the anti-vaxers is that they are modern day nihilists that are possessed with what Freud Sigmund called a “death-drive,” a true but unconscious desperate desire to die. Some anti-vaxers use the name of personal choice and freedom to resist vaccination. Democracy itself is used to defend nihilism.
The fragile absolute
It is a specific tragedy that the world has to fight Covid-19 and also fight against those human beings that are denialists and myth-makers around the pandemic. Much like the biblical Moses who fought to liberate the Israelites from Egypt and had to fight some Israelites that insisted on going back to Egypt the good world has to fight a double layered and contradictory struggle.
The nihilists are fighting on the side of the pandemic but use fancy democratic and apparently informed vocabulary to defend ignorance and death itself. The trouble is that most of us are taken in by the sweet and mesmerising language of myth and denialism that is more compelling than cold and dry, if boring, scientific truths. It is a well-understood piece of wisdom that lies can run half the world naked while truth slowly puts on its clothes to follow in the race.
Tragically the anti-vaxers seem to have captured more hearts and minds in the world as the truth and justice of vaccinating takes its own good time to unfold and take its rightful grip of the hearts and minds of the world population.
The truth about Covid-19 and the vaccination against it needs to grow more teeth and achieve more bite in order for many lives to be saved from modern day nihilism and death-drives.
The starting point is for scientists, public health practitioners and policy makers at a world scale to expose the gospel of anti-vaxers as the ‘fragile absolute’ and sweet poison that it is, nihilist propaganda, alternative facts and post-truth nonsense.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
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