POLITICS|COVID-19
In Defense of Anti-Vaxxers
Pandemics, algorithms and divisions
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…
