Sunday Times E-Edition

If you do anything, do it for love

● One of the saddest things about the global coronavirus pandemic — second obviously to the millions of dead and bereaved — is the virulent antagonism it has caused between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers.

Incidentally, these neologisms have now had to be included in dictionaries by lexicographers guided by the frequency of word use. Both words have been topping the charts for a year.

Another chart-topper, in his time, was Meat Loaf Aday. I used to think his surname was part of his chosen stage name (“eat a meat loaf a day” would not have been an unlikely mantra for the well-built singer) but he was born Marvin Lee Aday. As an adult he had his first name legally changed to Michael because of a fat-shaming advertisement featuring a chap called Marvin. And when songwriting legend Jim Steinman entered the picture and provided soaring rock‘n’roll ballads for that stellar voice, Michael Lee became Meat Loaf.

Oddly enough, Meat Loaf was a vegetarian for at least part of his life. That did not make people mock him. Now, however, two days after his death, he is being pilloried by those who say he deserved to die of Covid because he refused to be vaccinated.

Reports that Meat Loaf succumbed to Covid remain unconfirmed, and there is no reliable source to indicate whether or not he had the vaccine. Even if it is true that he refused it and died after being infected, the vicious attacks on social media are sickening.

I don’t abide by the maxim that one should not speak ill of the dead, at least not if the dead did such bad things that they deserve to be spoken ill of, but this does not fit into that category. Claiming that Meat Loaf or any other person who allegedly scorned vaccination deserves to die is not just heartless, it dehumanises the person saying it.

Vaccine hesitancy is not in itself an inexplicable or irrational reaction. The anger expressed by those who fear the vaccine stems from a range of anxieties that need to be addressed, not vilified. But it seems almost too late for that, because that fear-born anger has been harnessed for ideological purposes. It has been stoked and fed by opportunists who make accusations of the abuse of authority and the erosion of “rights”.

Anger is a necessary emotion and it is frequently justified, but it is also an unstable element that can be warped and misdirected. Anger clouds rational judgment, causes innocent cats to be kicked and fuels conspiracies.

In Franz Neumann’s 1954 paper titled “Anxiety and Politics”, the political scientist who analysed Nazism tried to establish a link between the harnessing of fear and the flourishing of conspiracy theories. He wrote: “Hatred, resentment, dread, created by great upheavals, are concentrated on certain persons who are denounced as devilish conspirators.”

This could apply to both pro-vaxxers, whose anxiety about public health has morphed into fury at anti-vaxxers, and antivaxxers, whose science-doubting anxiety has mutated into free-floating anger at governments. In many ways the anti-vaxx movement is no longer about antibodies administered in a syringe; it is a political insurrection without any clear manifesto.

In politics, where labels for changing dogmas and doctrines shift and circle like wax in a lava lamp, “left” and “right” have become somewhat nebulous terms to describe what used to be called liberals and conservatives. The vaccine battle (which has gone beyond a “debate”) has once again hardened and separated these terms so that, in the main, those who refuse the vaccine are seen as far-right nationalists, and those who advocate it as soft leftie socialists.

We need constantly to be reminded that we are all human, no matter what beliefs divide us. Dissent is healthy; hatred is not. Disagreement turns to tragedy when any person on either side of the vaccine wall rejoices at the death of an adversary.

More than one callous pro-vaxxer has suggested on social media that we now know the meaning of Meat Loaf’s cryptic lyric: “I won’t do that.” It was perhaps a badtaste joke waiting to be made, but it is still unacceptably cruel.

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2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://times-e-editions.pressreader.com/article/281749862733376

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