Cayla had always been left-leaning. Though not a preaching vegan or radical feminist, she made her distaste known when Trump was elected president. But when she moved to Florida before the pandemic, it was clear that her politics had begun to shift. When Covid-19 began spreading throughout the country and talks of vaccines and masks grew inescapable, the transition had been set in stone.
She began posting anti-mask propaganda on her social media page and it only grew as the months passed. The truth is that I can’t fully blame her. I don’t feel as though people have enough sympathy for those whose response to the greatest change of most of our lives was to harden up and resist. The transition from “What’s Covid?” to “Everybody lock their doors!” was sudden enough to raise eyebrows from even the most obedient.
The shift from never having seen a mask before in many of our lives to being unallowed in any store or class without them was such a colossal hit to the freedoms we’d all spent our lives with that, really, it makes sense that many people’s authoritarian alarm bells began to ring. As time has gone on and strains have emerged from strains with passing seasons, it’s been enough to make skeptics of believers. That’s what happened to Cayla and I’ve known more and more sensible people who have begun to fall into that camp.
As even those who said “We’ll go back to normal living once there’s a vaccine,” have continued to remain indoors even as they verge upon their third and fourth booster doses, it’s even felt to me at times as though there’s a sense of mass delusion at play here. But I’ve now gotten my fourth dose of the vaccine and it’s a coin that I see both sides to.
I can’t argue with all of the statistics that show just how many lives these vaccines are saving. I don’t believe that Pfizer and Moderna have moral enough track records, though, that these injections should be so above reproach. When I got my first Pfizer vaccine, I’m a little loathe to admit to my most left-leaning friends that the side effects were actually terrible. Fortunately, Moderna has been nearly problem-free for me.
But even if it’s the vast majority of studies that prove these vaccines are effective, I still see how so many of the attitudes around these inoculations have only widened the gaps between us. When political tensions had already left us as divided as ever before, we were uniquely receptive to so many of these conflicts and disagreements. The table had already been set for an awful storm by the time Corona had arrived.
The skepticism around vaccines dates back long before Covid, but it grew to new heights on the heels of this new decade as people began traveling deeper and deeper down digital rabbit holes of misinformation. The algorithms that sway our elections are in full-swing in these divisions over vaccines.
Just as our social media experiences can falsely convince people that vaccines are a danger to us all, they can convince the other side of the aisle that the people who buy into these narratives don’t deserve sympathy or understanding. Just because our vaccines aren’t a wide-scale attempt to chip and surveil the citizens of Planet Earth doesn’t mean there’s no sense in the notion that we’ve undergone colossal losses in freedom as a species in these past few years and that not all of them have been necessary.
The “outdoor indoor” dining tents and the selective unmask-when-eating policies that defined these years of our lives have reeked so badly of delusion that they make me sympathize with the vaccine deniers in even the pointiest of tin hats. The notion that so many on the left would discount so much of the cynicism that has emerged around these vaccines and restrictions over the last couple of years can seem pretty obtuse.
So when I speak to friends like Cayla, I try to be understanding. A lot’s changed in the last few years and most of us have developed our ways of coping.
When the pandemic first began to rage around the world in those early months of 2020, there were few among us who didn’t turn toward blame and hostility. But as years have passed and so many of our lives have struggled to return to what they were before the great pause, it’s important to be able to find unity in our shared losses. We never fully allowed ourselves to grieve before we turned to this anger that so many of us have only allowed to fester in the years since the pandemic first arrived.
How much longer the pandemic will linger remains unclear. Whether it will simply become endemic like the flu or continue to branch off into new and different strains with subsequent seasons is still heavily debated among virologists. But what’s clear is that it’s important to try to be understanding of each other when we’re talking about the world that we all lost together when Corona first arrived.