Fighting for Infection as if it were Wellness: On the Anti-Vax Moment

There was a moment in the beginning of the COVID pandemic when I thought to myself that surely this would be the end of the anti-vaccination movement. It is one thing to be against vaccines when diseases are rare, and pandemics a distant memory, but another to be against them in the midst of a pandemic in which tens of thousands were dying each week in the US alone. The anti-vax position always seemed like a luxury position, a position of privilege, an individual refusing vaccines is taking advantage of the fact that others are vaccinated around them and cases are rare. Like many things in US politics and culture, individual autonomy is made possible by the existence and occlusion of collective action. It is for that reason that I thought such a position would collapse in the face of an actual pandemic.

I could not have been more wrong. Not only has anti-vaccination sentiments increased dramatically, they have even been extended to dogs. Measles are on the rise, and even rabies is coming back. This rising sentiment is now official US policy thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has ended research into mRNA vaccines, and made it difficult to even acquire current COVID boosters, soon perhaps the whole country will go the way of Florida, eliminating vaccine requirements.

Fighting for infection as if it were wellness, to twist the Spinoza line. There was a brief period where I considered writing a series of blogposts, or even essays, all with variations on that title, fighting for exploitation as if it were liberation, ignorance as if it were knowledge, etc. What held these together, beside a kind of memeing of the mind, was not so much voluntary servitude, but the topsy turvy world in which domination is actively desired and not just passively endured. Abandonment, abandonment to the demands of capital, to work more, to have less protections from the rapacious search for profit, appears as liberation. 

 Earlier I wrote that much of conspiracy thinking, and I would include anti-vax movements in that, is an attempt to make the imagination, the first kind of knowledge, in Spinoza's terms, into the only standard of knowledge. How something affects you is what it is. If vaccines seem intrusive, repressive, and unnecessary they must be those things. In his recent hearing before the Senate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that "The people at the CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving."Such a statement not only expands the suspicions beyond vaccines to any public health measures, it seems to fundamentally invert things, replacing effects for causes. The pandemic is not the bad thing, the thing that caused so much death and suffering, but the CDC is at fault for trying to contain it. The paranoid fear of the overreach of government contains a kernel of a fantasy that COVID never happened, or was never something to take seriously.  

At the level of affective composition conspiracy theories always bring together the greatest fear and the biggest hope. The fear of a government agency implanting chips through vaccines, shutting down schools, and forcing people to wear masks all in the name of some vague control is inseparable from the fantasy that pandemics do not happen, that we do not need to worry about infectious disease. In the same way that the fear of a secret cabal of people feasting on the blood of children is inseparable from the fantasy of a righteous avenger who will smite them all. Fear and hope are always intertwined, as Spinoza argues, conspiracy theories seem to bring them to their maximum point of ambivalence. It is hard to know if a conspiracy theory is the darkest fears or the greatest hopes because it is often both. 

Kennedy's statement that he intends to eliminate not just vaccines, or vaccine mandates, but also masking and social distancing is an example of fighting for servitude as if it were salvation. What appears as liberation from an excessive and intrusive state bureaucracy is subjection to the rule of capital, to employers's ability to demand work without concern for well being. The conspiracy lines up perfectly with the agenda of removing any restrictions public health would put on corporate profits. To butcher another phrase from Spinoza, the order and connection of conspiracy thinking is the same as the order and connection of the interest of capital. 

However, in making such a claim, on ascribing anti-vax and anti-masking to a first kind of knowledge, to a sort of wishful thinking, I am not sure if I am doing anything more than reacting with my own first kind of knowledge, with my own frustration and anger. In many ways anti-vax is like pro-Trump, MAHA like MAGA, as much as I struggle to understand it I am confronted with something so alien, so outside of my thinking that I cannot make sense of it. As much as I have tried to theorize Trump, to understand his appeal at the level of ideology and affects, I still cannot get past the fact that he just seems to me to be transparently a horrible person. I do not understand how others just do not see that. It doesn't help that the most ardent Trump supporters seem to project so many qualities onto him that are simply not there, like strength, bravery, even the ablity (and inclination) to teach someone how to fish. It is hard to see Trump not as a person, or even an agent, but as a weird screen that people can project their fantasies onto.

How is this supposed to be the same person 

In a similar way,  vaccines seem to be a kind of anchor point for so many fantasies and fears about government and health. Fears of government control, of the prevalence of chemicals in our lives, and of surveillance, and so on. The anti-vax position seems more like a series of overlapping nightmares about the modern world than an actual stance or position. Refusing one of the most successful forms of modern medicine, something that has saved millions of lives and eliminated many diseases, just seems absurd, especially when what is offered in its place is raw milk or cooking fries in beef tallow. (Which is not to say that we should not fetishize modern science, especially as such fetishization comes with a fetishization of the corporations that profit off of it). 

Critique, like knowledge, needs to move beyond this tendency to imagine the other in its own image. One such failure is various criticisms of hypocrisy. For example the hypocrisy of opposing vaccines in the name of bodily autonomy while still denying women the right to choose. Or the hypocrisy of being opposed to vaccines because "we do not know what is in it" amongst a population that ingests a variety of chemicals in Mountain Dew or seems to have no problem with injecting Ozempic. Such assertions of hypocrisy imagine the position of the other, deriding rather than understanding. 

I did get some insight when I learned that RFK jr is not only opposed to vaccines, and masking and other forms of mitigation, but that he subscribes to a version of miasma theory. Such a theory, the idea that disease stems from exposure to contaminants, to lifestyle choices, not viruses, would seem to reveal what it at stake in the assault on public health. It is the public part, the fundamental idea that health is not a private concern, something that I do with my own body, drinking raw milk, etc., but is part of my relation to not only other people, to intersubjectivity, but to the preindividual and supraindividual conditions of existence. As Etienne Balibar writes in a piece on the human species as a biopolitical concept. 

"What I submit is that, in this case, ‘humankind’ or the human ‘species’ as an ensemble, in its great majority if not in its totality, becomes materially unified in a ‘passive’ manner. Borrowing a formula from Husserl and Deleuze, I am tempted to speak here of a ‘passive synthesis’ of the human species. This is a phenomenon of trans-individuation of the human, whose specific conditions lie both at the pre-individual level of the pathogenic circulation of viruses, which connect bodies and cross every frontier despite the prophylactic obstacles, and at the supra–individual level, formed by the ‘global’ system of production and communications, the institutional circulation of persons and things. But to describe the emergence of the ‘specific transindividual’ as construction of an ontological unity, even if negatively linked to illness and death, would be utterly insufficient. It is equally important to indicate that, right away, the process of unification is also a process of radical divisions, which I propose to call ‘anthropological fractures’, because they generate rifts and oppose the human to the other human within what we may call their common ‘species-being’ (Gattungswesen), an expression borrowed from Feuerbach and the young Marx.  This is of course the political dimension that official discourses carefully put aside, or minimise, when they refer to the ‘universal’ character of the problems created by the pandemic and the crisis, invoking common interests of mankind and the necessity of addressing them in a collective manner, arguing that ‘we are all in the same boat’.

Or as Balibar puts it elsewhere, "At the moment at which humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally “united,” it is violently divided “biopolitically.” The pandemic as a common condition for the species of humanity cannot be separated from the way that it traces or even deepens the divisions of that species, exacerbating the rifts and divisions. To assume that we would experience it as a collective condition, as something that unites us, is a failure to recognize the world we live in, one in which the common human species is always already divided. Many people argue that we are seeing with RFK Jr. is just eugenics pure and simple, an attempt to privilege the well being of the healthy over the sick, the former should not have to sacrifice their enjoyment, have to deal with vaccines, masks, or the frustration of closed schools and businesses, to protect the latter, who should be left to die. Given that most of these restrictions were short lived, existing more in the fantasy or fears of some than in reality, we can see a repeat of one of the persistent threads in contemporary fascism, the imagined fears of one group are taken more seriously than the real threats to another less powerful group. If it is eugenics it is a strange one. While all eugenics are in some sense predicated on the fiction of race, and the idea of races as distinct genetic groups, the eugenics we have seen emerge post-COVID is one in which there is a division of the sick and healthy that is more imagined than anything else. There are many who believe themselves on the side of the healthy, believe that their lifestyle and genetics will protect them from illness who are wrong. In fact, we could argue that they are all wrong, because increased vulnerability to disease is everyone's fate as they get older.

There are thus multiple ways to think of the anti-vax movement. It can be understood as eugenics, as a refusal of the excesses of modern medicine, or resistance to  the arrogance of a techno-scientific elite, but it seems to me that the post-COVID anti-vax hegemony is predicated on a violent refusal of the  fundamental relational and dependent nature of our existence, what Balibar calls species being.  Of course modern society, modern social relations are on a whole predicated on such a refusal, on the fantasy of individuality and individual self interest. As Naomi Klein argued, the entire COVID response, from renaming all of those faceless people that make our lives possible and we prefer not to think of as "essential workers" to the half-hearted imposition of measures to mask and social distance to protect others, was itself a weird break in the governing logic of our society. There is no wonder that many people could not process it. It is easier to imagine vaccines as an attempt to control society with microchips than it is to imagine that "we are all in this together," that suddenly a society predicated on individual competition would foreground collective well being. 

The COVID-19 pandemic was a socialism or barbarism moment. We could have either recognized, on some level, the fundamentally transindividual nature of our existence, our dependence on each other and the natural world, or we could have doubled down on the fiction that we are all "kingdoms within a kingdom." As a society we picked the latter, and RFK Jr. is just the culmination of that process, as ugly as it it is.