Orwell, the Covid and the Vampires

It is fashionable to invoke Orwell’s 1984 to describe current events. Let’s try the exercise by adding a touch of vampirism. In the dictatorship of Big Brother, doublethink reigns supreme. Love is hate, war is peace and ignorance is strength. Let’s update the list:

Submission is freedom

As soon as someone expresses his or her desire not to be vaccinated and criticizes the health passport, he or she is met with sincere incomprehension: « Isn’t the best way to regain our freedom to be in favor of vaccination? Vaccination and the health passport are the key to reopen restaurants, cafés and regain freedom, how can you be against it? The argument is not scientific, otherwise a constructive and didactic debate could take place. After all, perhaps the specificity of the current pandemic is that the natural immunity of those who are not at risk, combined with the vaccination of risk groups, is no longer sufficient. But that is not the point, the objection is purely logical: how is it possible not to admit that in order to be free one must submit to the injunctions of the Ministry of Health? Say that these injunctions are liberticidal and you will be told that the vaccine is not mandatory. Retort that it is by the pressure of injunctions, and you will be invited not to mix everything. The hostage is absolutely free not to pay his ransom… That is the logic.

Discrimination is equity

In law, applying the same rules to people in different situations is as discriminatory as applying different rules to people in the same situation. But that was before. Dare to say that a young person without comorbidities is not objectively in the same situation as an elderly person when faced with the disease, and you will provoke disapproval. Add to this the fact that, faced with the need to study, work, discover the world, interact, start a couple or a family, this young person is not, objectively, in the same situation as a retiree whose restrictions on freedom will have no impact on his present and future income, nor on his ability to find work, build his personality, or start a family, and you will provoke a healthy indignation Ironically, point out that since we are all in the same boat, the vaccinated should return the favor of intergenerational solidarity and accept to remain confined in the bilge with the unvaccinated youth, and the indignation will turn into noble anger. Humanism, solidarity and morality are not negotiable. Argue that, even if all those vaccinated died 10 years after the injection, a 60 year old would be robbed of ten years of life expectancy, while a 20 year old would be robbed of fifty. Add that fifty is not ten, and you will be accused of a sophistic reasoning, euphemism of the crime of the thought. In Novmorale, 2+2 is not necessarily equal to 4. The German Medical Association recommends that access to nurseries and kindergartens be made conditional on (completely free) vaccination⁽¹⁾. If you think that imposing (freely) a new vaccine technology on subjects who will bear the possible risks without benefiting in any way from it is to make them objects of experimentation, you are the one who will be called a Nazi.

Excessiveness is nuance

Suggest that confinement only affects those for whom it is a necessary inconvenience to avoid a much greater one, and you will be told, « How dare you say let the old and the sick die!« 
If you are really masochistic, suggest that in order to reach a sufficient coverage while sparing young people and children, we make the vaccine compulsory for people over 50 years old, arguing that from this age onwards we get an advantage that compensates for the theoretical risk of the long-term effects, by definition, unknown, of the vaccine innovations… guaranteed split between those who want to vaccinate everyone, and the antivaxers. If you are a provaccinationist, you will have no problem imposing (sorry, proposing) it to young people and children, nor putting on the same footing the vaccination passport to travel in the tropics and the health pass to go to the local restaurant. If you are anti-vax, it will not be a problem to say that against the vaccine poison, hyper tense diabetics of 85 years and young people without comorbidities, same fight! Nor to compare the health pass to the yellow star.
Those who fall between the two, who seek objective criteria, compromise and proportionality, are dangerous extremists.

Vampirism is the love of youth

If you love young people and children, you must force them, through confinement, to live like little old people. They are not at risk of a disease that the vaccine protects you from? They must therefore be contained, masked and vaccinated. New vaccine technologies hold so much hope for extending the lives of young quinquas and their elders.
If you sincerely love them, you must relay with macabre greed the slightest information about a young person in intensive care, or better yet, dead. Let’s protect our youth, let’s keep them in fear of the variant! But no, the argument is not abstruse at best: not all viruses, even the most benign, mutate permanently, and winning the race for variants in a globalized village of eight billion people is not a pipe dream! But no, the argument is not at its worst perverse: it does not amount to wishing for a variant killer of young people to emerge, in order to be able to justify a posteriori all the useless suffering we put them through!

Yvan Falys