I sometimes think I’m the only person on Earth who strenuously opposed the COVID-19 measures – the lockdowns, the masks, the mandates – and got five COVID shots. If others exist, I certainly haven’t met them among the hundreds, if not thousands, of people I’ve talked to.
March 11 marks the fifth anniversary of the pandemic – five whole years since the world imploded. Five years since the most polarizing event in recent history split people into two resolute camps, each with its own lexicon of snarl words: COVIDians vs. COVIDiots, collectivist drones vs. selfish individualists, sheeple vs. freedumb lovers, alarmists vs. minimizers … Now that years have gone by, we have enough road in our rearview mirror to conduct a rational post-mortem on the madness. Here’s mine.
Let’s go back to the beginning: my visceral recoil against lockdowns. Not only did these measures screw over the working class, the poor and the dying, they also betrayed a complete disregard for the young. Although I’m hardly young myself – my 69th birthday is staring me in the face – the injustice against young people enraged me more than anything else. Nobody talked about what the young were sacrificing to keep grandma away from the virus. The fervor around masks troubled me, too – especially the smug pronouncements that the face rags would stay with us forever. And when the vaccines rolled out, my sympathies lay with the many friends who objected, on both medical and ethical grounds, to the coercion.
At the same time, I had no concerns about getting the shot myself – not because I trusted the purity and integrity of big pharma (I write for big pharma, so I have no such illusions), but simply because I figured the odds were on my side. I had never worried about COVID, so I saw no reason to worry about the vax: statistically, neither one posed a serious threat to me.
Being cavalier about COVID but petrified of the vax – the stance adopted by many of my fellow lockdown skeptics – did not seem logically consistent to me.
I got the five shots with neither pride nor trepidation. Two AstraZeneca, two Pfizer, one Moderna: in no case did I experience the slightest of side effects, not even a sore arm. I have yet to catch COVID and continue to feel fine.
When reports of vaccine-related death began flooding the internet, I wasn’t surprised. If you vaccinate billions of people in a short time, some of them are bound to die within days or weeks for the simple reason that people die every day. Some are bound to get heart attacks, cancer, diabetes and miscarriages as well – because these things happen all the time. Correlation vs. causation, and all that. The reports of myocarditis in young men were concerning, yes, but I wasn’t a young man. I continued to not worry.
By this time my COVID essays were getting picked up by various publications and I was hard at work on my book Blindsight Is 2020, a showcase of public intellectuals who opposed the COVID measures. Desperate to connect with like-minded people, I had organized a motley crew of dissenters called Q-LIT (Questioning Lockdowns In Toronto). Virtually all of them were unvaxxed, and many insisted the mRNA shots were poison. Meanwhile, my “normie” friends kept posting pictures of booster shots entering their forearms on social media and swapping their old cover shots for masked selfies.
It appeared we had exactly two menus to choose from: the pro-lockdown/mandate/vax menu or the anti-lockdown/mandate/vax menu. Two cafeteria trays, pick one. Having dared to order a la carte, I faced opprobrium from people on either side. A lockdown skeptic who got five shots didn’t compute for them. It was like an atheist speaking in tongues at a revivalist church. A vegetarian feasting on roast pig. An impossibility.
We all put people in boxes, dozens of times a day. In moderation it’s a useful strategy – a cognitive shortcut that allows us to navigate the world without devoting hours of brain power to figuring people out. If I meet a marathon swimmer, I assume she’s not a regular smoker. I don’t expect to find an oil magnate at a Greenpeace rally. But according to Mónica Guzmán, author of the book I Never Thought Of It That Way, we’ve taken these shortcuts too far. Way too far.
To make her point, Guzmán describes an online quiz run by the New York Times during the U.S. presidential election of 2020. The news outlet displayed photos of the contents of various refrigerators and asked readers to guess which belonged to Biden voters or Trump voters. In making her own choice, Guzmán admits reaching for stereotypes: “If I saw a lot of mass-branded stuff – Coke, Velveeta, Kool-Aid – I’d think, that’s a Trump fridge. If I saw specialized, snobby stuff – almond milk or Greek yogurt, I’d think, that’s a Biden fridge.” She did terribly on the quiz – as did most other participants. Of the 176,985 guesses that came in by July 2021, only 52 per cent were correct, barely outpacing pure chance. So much for shortcuts.
As a left-leaning Mexican-American journalist whose immigrant parents voted for Trump on at least two occasions, Guzmán had extra motivation to get past lazy shortcuts: she loved her parents fiercely and didn’t want their political differences to stand between them. She insists we can all do the same. But how? As expressed in the book’s subtitle, “how to have fearlessly curious conversations in dangerously divided times,” Guzmán encourages people to lean into their natural curiosity – to replace assumptions with questions and knee-jerk proclamations with active listening.
COVID put our penchant for boxing on full display. Within days of the pandemic’s inception, people began building boxes around their enemies. In one box were the COVIDians, who quaked in fear, lined up for each shot and flooded Facebook with “I wear because I care” selfies. In the other were the COVIDiots, who insisted the virus was planned, reflexively mistrusted the vaccine and listened to Megyn Kelly.
When the Canadian truckers’ convoy began its long cruise to Ottawa in January 2022, a further box sprang up around those who supported them. The box quickly filled with epithets: anti-vax, anti-mandate, far right. Shocked to learn that I supported the convoy, my friends accused me of betraying my heritage. How could you? Your parents were Holocaust survivors. I didn’t take you for a fascist. They didn’t really listen when I explained that I saw the convoy as a protest against two years of massive government overreach. I had stepped into the wrong box, and they simply had to pull me out of it.
But I’ve stayed here in no-man’s land, neither a true believer nor an all-out dissenter. I don’t intend to get more shots, if only because the most recent data on their efficacy has left me underwhelmed, but when my husband trots down to our local Shopper’s Drug Mart to get the latest booster, I don’t worry that he’s poisoning himself.
All of which is to say: I’ll never pass the admission requirements for either box. I’ll be seen as a bit of a traitor to both sides. I’ll lose followers on X. But the weather is fine here, outside Boxlandia.
As far as I’m concerned, Guzmán’s book should be required reading for everyone. Long before studying algebra and capital cities, children should learn about boxes and how to stop jamming other people into them. Maybe there’s a marathon runner who does smoke. Imagine how interesting it would be to talk to her and find out what makes her tick.
When you get right down to it, we are all marathon runners who smoke. We all contain multitudes, and our thoughts and behaviours have tangled roots. As Guzmán puts it, “people are mysteries, not puzzles.”
Perhaps there’s a box for COVID unicorns? If you hear of one, do let me know.
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This post was previously published on HEALTHYDEBATE.CA and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
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