Why I remain Unvaxxed
or how to shrug off Dystopia
ANTIGONE
Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.
Not through dread of any human pride could I answer to the gods for breaking these. Die I must,—I knew that well (how should I not?)—even without thy edicts. But if I am to die before my time, I count that a gain: for when any one lives, as I do, compassed about with evils, can such an one find aught but gain in death?
So for me to meet this doom is trifling grief; but if I had suffered my mother's son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have grieved me; for this, I am not grieved. And if my present deeds are foolish in thy sight, it may be that a foolish judge arraigns my folly.
LEADER OF THE CHORUS
The maid shows herself passionate child of passionate sire, and knows not how to bend before troubles.
CREON
Yet I would have thee know that o'er-stubborn spirits are most often humbled; 'tis the stiffest iron, baked to hardness in the fire, that thou shalt oftenest see snapped and shivered; and I have known horses that show temper brought to order by a little curb; there is no room for pride when thou art thy neighbour's slave.-This girl was already versed in insolence when she transgressed the laws that had been set forth; and, that done, lo, a second insult,-to vaunt of this, and exult in her deed.
Now verily I am no man, she is the man, if this victory shall rest with her, and bring no penalty. No! be she sister's child, or nearer to me in blood than any that worships Zeus at the altar of our house,-she and her kinsfolk shall not avoid a doom most dire; for indeed I charge that other with a like share in the plotting of this burial.
And summon her—for I saw her e'en now within, raving,— and not mistress of her wits. So oft, before the deed, the mind stands self-convicted in its treason, when folks are plotting mischief in the dark. But verily this, too, is hateful, when one who hath been caught in wickedness then seeks to make the crime a glory.
Sophocles’ Antigone (Translation by R.C. Jebb: http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html
I will not begin this essay with the marked platitudes some begin with, that I am not an “anti-vaxxer” but…(a charge now semantically inert and empty), nor that I and all of my children have received all of our vaccines, nor that I am a big proponent of vaccines, nor that the current incarnation of COVID vaccines have surely saved 100,000s of lives (in spite of their obvious issues). Such incipits foreground a narrative and discourse that I don’t find particularly useful or interesting.
I prefer to begin this essay with a marked argument: under the current political and health regime there is no possible way that I can give consent or approval to take these vaccines. As I see one of Trudeau’s many faces, foam at the proverbial mouth, shouting “racists and misogynists,” or Legault’s mumbling out some incoherent mandate that violates basic principles of human rights and civility (“No Soup for You!”), or the wild eyes of Macron, as he spits out some black soul-ed venom against those who have come to a different conclusion than his own deep profundity of wisdom, as he himself drives all of France and French culture into a wall of “piss,” as I see their collective madness and hysteria, their attempt at mass demoralization and their employment of “nudges” (what is merely a rebranding of the term “propaganda”), I do not even consider taking the vaccine.
It is not something I entertain. It is not something I can entertain.
So give me the benefit of the doubt for a few moments before you immediately call me an “anti-vaxxer.” What you will read here you have not read in your Montreal Gazette, or heard on NPR or the CBC (your state run media outlets), or written in the grand narrative forming “Old Gray Lady.” I gesture to what used to be a liberal sense of tolerance, empathy, and understanding. And before we embark on our current navigation through the twists and turns of aggregate data, risk, safety, life and death, know that I support your decision to do whatever you feel like you need to do to feel safe. Know that this does not mean you are safe. That you have adopted the Grand Narrative does not mean you are correct or right, or that your sense of virtue and goodness actually represents true virtue or goodness. I support whatever narrative you need to tell yourself in order to survive what has been the dystopian onslaught against reason and objective discourse. So, drop your mask (or dare I say masks), and lower your face shield. Take your surgical gloves off. Read this like one human being to another. Understand that your dystopia does not necessitate my acceptance of your dystopia. I shrugged it off a long time ago. It is time for you to shrug off your fear, anxiety, and state-sponsored hysteria. It is time to shrug off your dystopia as well.
I remember the first death, then the second, then the third over 2020. Three dead. They did not die from COVID or with COVID. Three died of heart related issues. They died because of the lockdown. They died because COVID became the only healthcare concern of the health care industry. There are many more like these three. We ignore them. We do not talk about them. But they are the ghosts and shadows haunting our world right now, lurking in the corners of a policy that denied their life. We cannot call it murder. We need to imagine some other word that can shape the reality, so as to prop up these deaths in acceptable terms. What terminology do we use? Slow the spread? Overwhelm the Hospital? Death from heart disease is an acceptable outcome (17,000,000 a year globally)? It is not for me to come up with language to authorize your dystopia. I will leave that to you.
I went to the funeral of the third dead man. What I mean by “went to the funeral” is that I logged onto zoom and watched as a sparsely filled church with faceless, masked family members—distant and separated—would make their way to the pulpit and speak their eulogies. Only a few were allowed in the church for the deadman. More people were allowed into the deadman’s home, as banks, real-estate agents, potential buyers and family members moved in and out of his assets, selling it bit by bit. The only thing more cannibalistic than this would be actual cannibalism.
I had watched the bio-medical state intrude into government policy, into schools, businesses, cafes, bars, and restaurants, then into phones and onto people’s faces. And then on this day I watched it intrude into people’s souls, into their mourning, into their sadness. I looked up from the computer screen and my Classicist’s mind thought: Antigone.
If you have not read Antigone or have not read it recently….read it. Sophocles’ classic tragedy was performed sometime around 441 BCE. It dramatizes the critical tension between the state and the individual, between the right of the state to establish mandates and edicts that in deep and profound ways violate the natural, divine, and universal rights that belong to the individual and family. Polyneices was deemed an enemy of the state by Creon and his corpse is banned from burial. In violation of the tyrant’s mandates Antigone buries her brother (seemingly twice) and commits suicide. The tragedy is complex and nuanced, and there are certainly many ways to read this sophisticated work of art. But there is no debate on this point: for Antigone it is better to die than to live in Creon’s state. As I zoomed into the burial and witnessed the bizarre influence of the bio-medical state encroach on mourning rituals and death rituals, an emotion swept over me, one whose valence comes without a name. What do we call emotions that derive from witnessing the hubristic state violate sacred rights and institutions? Latin would employ the term dolor, a mixture of grief and anger. In our current society, the only allowable emotion is fear of COVID.
But I hear the criticism: “his family was still allowed to bury him!” This is missing the point. Burial is not a matter of conditionality or contingency. If the family *chose* to bury their son and brother in this way, that would be a different matter entirely, but that the many-faced Trudeau could demand the family bury their son and daughter in the way mandated by the bio-state, this is a violation of something sacred.
Of course, we are in the process of desacralization of our culture. This is not unknown during periods of intense plague, as for example during the plague of Athens (431-429 BCE) which killed anywhere between 20-35 percent of the Athenian
population. Thucydides more than highlights this:
The bodies of the dead and dying were piled on one another and people at the point of death reeled about the streets and around all the springs in their passion to find water. The sanctuaries in which people were camping were filled with corpses, as deaths took place even there: the disaster was overpowering, and as people did not know what would become of them, they tended to neglect the sacred and the secular alike. All the funeral customs which had previously been observed were thrown into confusion and the dead were buried in any way possible. Many who lacked friends, because so many had died before them, turned to shameless forms of disposal: some would put their own dead on someone else's pyre, and set light to it before those who had prepared it could do so themselves; others threw the body they were carrying on to the top of another's pyre when it was already alight, and slipped away. (Translation P.J. Rhodes)
There is a key difference between the collapse of the sacred in Thucydides and the violation of the sacred in Montreal: one was induced by such a profoundly destructive plague that all normative social and cultural institutions collapsed because of the sheer magnitude of disease and death; the other was induced by the bio-medical establishment through improper policy.
COVID has not caused this dystopian hellscape we find ourselves in; COVID policy has caused this. These are two very different causes.
My father is old. His body has been trying to kill him off and on for the last twenty years. At this point he is an assemblage of body parts and medical miracles stitched together into a composite whole of an elderly man. He is afraid of COVID. He ought to be VERY afraid of COVID given his age and relative health profile. According to the COVID Risk Calculator developed by Oxford University (https://www.qcovid.org) if he caught COVID he would have a 1/3 chance of hospitalization and a 1/2 chance of death, that is *if* he were unvaccinated. Vaccination has a profound impact on a potential negative outcome from a COVID positive test. He has a 1/1733 chance of being hospitalized with COVID and a 1/37 chance of dying with a positive result. Of course, a 1/37 chance of dying after being admitted to the hospital should still cause him fear.
If I were my father the title of this essay would have been: “Why I am vaxxed or shrugging off near certain death of COVID.” But I am not my father. Unlike my father I have exercised my entire adult life. I have watched what I have eaten and take proper care of myself, knowing that in the decades to come my body will be actively looking for ways to kill me. This is the hard truth of mortality, and something I have told my father. COVID will not be killing my father, even if he were to contract it and die. He would not be succumbing to the disease, but succumbing to decades upon decades of poor health choices, which have slowly but surely rotted his body from the inside out. And it goes without saying that he has already surpassed the average age of death among American men.
With or without COVID he is on the precipice of his mortal fall into the abyss that awaits us all.
Yet he lives, if you can call it a life. He is still afraid. He does not leave his home. He does not see his family, but once over the entire pandemic. He has not hugged his grandchildren, and he has not even met his newest granddaughter. He watches the View and local news. Those are the main vectors of his information. He has had surgeries on his heart and hip over the lockdown. The last surgery had a significant potential for death, but he did not want to be an invalid. He wanted to be able to walk or at least try to walk. Now he walks in his house, afraid of COVID.
He is more than afraid of COVID, he is afraid of me, the unvaxxed menace. Is his fear rational? Fear is never rational. He seems unaware that the vaccines are non-neutralizing and sterilizing, and that vaccinated individuals can and do spread the disease. He seems unaware that the vaccine is the only thing that can truly protect him and that as far as it is efficacious, he ought to reorient himself to a life worth living. He should shrug off the dystopia.
He seems unaware that unvaccinated does not mean sick. In fact, it has been one of the great social and cultural disasters of the pandemic that the bio-medical state has enacted policies and mandates that assume everyone has COVID. Everyone is a potential threat. We even see the poor lost souls walking alone in the park, masked. The campaign of demoralization was so fantastically successful that even a totally healthy person without COVID could imagine that they themselves were in fact infected and that even when alone outside without anyone near or far their mask would block the pestilence from its release upon the planet even though they were not infected with the pestilence. In what rational world do we assume everyone is sick or treat everyone as a potential vector of death?
And so my father alone with his vaccinations and hardly functioning body refuses to see his child or his grandchildren as each and every day the pale shade of death comes nearer.
And when he is buried, his coffined corpse will come through in a pixelated image on my computer screen as I will see through the video camera my masked family sparsely dotting the pews—triple vaxxed and safe (though still able to contract COVID)—keeping their distance from one another as they follow Creon’s edicts.
This is his choice. It does not change my choice to remain unvaccinated.
Like all medical decisions I have made throughout my life and I will continue to make throughout my life the choice of vaccination is made through Informed Consent. One can find a succinct summation of Informed Consent here (though I recommend further and more detailed reading):
https://www.emedicinehealth.com/informed_consent/article_em.htm
In general, Informed Consent requires that the patient/subject have the cognitive ability to give consent, that the doctor has fully articulated the costs and benefits of the procedure, in addition to any other procedures that may be available, that the patient/subject understands the procedure, and that the decision to undergo the procedure is voluntary, without any compulsion or coercion. One even has the right of Informed Refusal, to refuse a medical procedure even if that procedure satisfies all the conditions of informed consent.
I will leave aside the shifting sands of medical knowledge on the vaccines’ efficacy and safety profile. That the knowledge is in a constant state of flux does raise the real spectre of one’s ability to consent to a medical procedure.
I will not take any vaccine under any act of coercion under any circumstances. It is frustrating that the Canadian and Quebec Governments have felt coercion was an appropriate part of their COVID policy. It is one of the great policy blunders of the bio-medical and political establishment that they chose to employ coercive measures to compel vaccination. They turned what should be a medical decision into a political decision. Under these circumstances, I would rather be Antigone than Creon. The forms of coercion are multifaceted and grotesque.
The most barbaric of coercive measures—and the embodiment of the banality of evil—the QR code, or vaccine passport, what had been called a Gesundheitpass at one point in time. The Vaccine Passport is coercion incarnate. It denies access to places that are part of the lifeblood of a free and open society. They bar entry into bars, restaurants, cafes, and churches. They are being used to bar entry into “essential services,” which in Quebec—and this is another sign of dystopia—state run liquor and weed stores (the irony escapes almost everyone in Canada). Now the practitioners of informed consent are banned from stores such as Walmart. There is an active and open discussion in Quebec that the QR code will be required to enter grocery stores.
Had I chosen to become vaccinated this last summer and been considered “fully vaccinated” (a phrase whose valency changes with each additional shot), under NO CIRCUMSTANCE would I have downloaded the QR code or entered any business which employed a QR code. I have no interest in sitting in a bar with people who cannot see the moral and ethical hazard of vaccine passports. I have no interest in entering a business which employed vaccine passports. They simply became complicit in the coercion. Every business owner should be ashamed. But this is the profound impact of demoralization: otherwise good people can become so demoralized that they will do bad things. Discrimination at every level of our society has been weaponized—from the young children in our schools up through the burial of our loved ones—and this weaponization is simply Canadian policy under the Trudeau government. Quebec and Canada are on the verge of never recovering from the government’s policy of anti-viral discrimination. The harm is deep, and very possibly permanent.
The Vaccine Passport and its attendant discrimination are a violations of informed consent. I simply cannot take the vaccine.
In addition to the coercive acts of social exclusion Quebec is discussing an indemnity on those who choose to practice informed consent (whom Quebec calls “anti-vaxxers”). Legault calls the penalty a “contribution,” but it is simply another form of coercion, and therefore a violation of informed consent.
Again, I simply cannot take the vaccine.
Then you have the man of many faces, Justin Trudeau. Over the last few months he has likely violated Canada’s own policies against Hate Speech, marginalizing and othering—nearly de-citizenizing—those who practice informed consent by calling them Racists! Misogynists!, saying there is no room in Canada for the great menace of the unvaxxed. Well these threats and abuse violate informed consent.
Again, I simply cannot take the vaccine.
I would be more than happy to revisit the idea of vaccination once the Quebec and Canadian governments allow medical procedures to return to its proper place in society: a personal and private medical decision, based on the ethical dictates of Informed Consent. Remember, if you do not have the right to say no, you have no rights at all.
I do have a couple of caveats to the above. I think it goes without saying that there is a possible disease and a potential vaccine that could could come about, which would require the violation of Informed Consent. Frankly, this disease or these vaccines do not warrant its violation. Had the human population decreased by 81,000,000 people last year, and the year before—rather than increasing by the same number each of the last two years—then we would be having a very different conversation. Likewise, if these vaccines were neutralizing and sterilizing—that is after two shots COVID is negated—then there is a different conversation to be had. Frankly, who would not take two shots not to get sick from any disease, in addition to no longer transmitting them? Again, if these vaccines promised this sort of efficacy then my decision making process would certainly be different.
But what of my risk from COVID? Should I be scared of hospitalization or death? Should I be making the same calculation as my father? The data here is clear. According to the Covid Risk calculator out of Oxford University my risk of catching and dying from COVID is 1/100,000. There is a risk. I could die. There is a danger. If I am vaccinated the risk becomes even smaller 1/143000. There is still a risk. I could still die. There is still a danger.
I caught COVID last month. I didn’t die. It was a less than a mild cold.
But even Quebec’s own health statistics play some role in my decision making process, as we see below. In Quebec, to date not a single person under 40 years of age has succumbed to COVID, who had one or fewer comorbidities. In fact, the statistical breakdown of age and comorbidity are marked. These numbers matter, and they MUST inform policy and they MUST inform the rhetoric of our political leaders.
Now, could I die from COVID? Absolutely. I certainly am not taking the vaccine because I think there is a risk of a negative medical outcome from the vaccines. While there are negative outcomes in people, they are very rare, or rather as rare as my current risk from catching and dying from COVID. But they are not without risk, and if there is any amount of risk, there MUST be choice.
Sadly, there are those reading this who hope I die from COVID because I am not adopting their narrative or wishing to participate in their dystopia. Informed Consent makes them incredibly angry. This is the current state of our world. But we shrug off the dystopia. I do hope though that for a few moments, they understood why I remain unvaxxed, and that while I remain unvaxxed, I support their decision to consent to the vaccination. That is the key to Informed Consent, mutual respect among people who make decisions different from your own.
I do hope some day soon that the bio-medical and political establishment return to a properly moral and ethical balance when it comes to Informed Consent.
But under the current state of things: again, I simply cannot take the vaccine.
