What the anti-vaxxers get right, and what they get terribly wrong

Over the past weeks, I’ve spent hours with hardcore opponents of vaccination and vaccination mandates in eastern Europe, as well as among my social circle, travelling down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and weird science.

While the anti-vaxxers get many things wrong about broader issues of public health and social ethics, there is one thing they get a bit right. Their hostility to rules that require people to show “health passes” before entering restaurants and cafes, boarding planes or hitting the gym is probably a healthy instinct.

“Scan this,” says one anti-vax T-shirt, with the image of a middle finger superimposed on a QR code. But if the health passes seem like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie, it is a film that began decades ago, and this is what the anti-vaxxers get dreadfully wrong about them.

Whether self-described democracies or authoritarian autocracies, governments, often in league with big technology firms, have been violating the privacy of citizens for many years, as exposed by the massive leak of documents by Edward Snowden, and other revelations. Just last month, a trove of documents showed how the police in Los Angeles were working with a tech firm to monitor social media accounts in search of crimes or even potential crimes. That’s not to mention the massive streams of personal data every person with a smartphone unknowingly gives up.

Anti-vaxxers sudden awakening to the privacy violations by big tech and government only when it comes to the health pass is arguably disingenuous, but it’s also potentially counterproductive, allowing the authorities to justify their abuses of power.

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The philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in a podcast interview, likened the modern surveillance state to a husband who beats his wife every day. The anti-vaxxers ignore his transgressions 364 days a year, until the one day when he’s not beating his spouse but actually trying to dislodge a piece of food stuck in her throat.

“Hey, stop beating your spouse!” the anti-vaxxer says.

“I’m not beating my spouse! I’m saving her life!” the abusive husband says.

By calling out the health passes and not any of the other violations of privacy, the anti-vaxxers allow the state to argue that they are spying on people for their own good, and letting them off the hook for all their many, many other abuses of privacy.

Yours,

Borzou Daragahi

International correspondent