Monday 26 July 2021

Playing the Covid Blame Game

It's oft been the contention of this place that while the Tories have horribly mismanaged the pandemic, they have proven themselves past masters at handling the politics. They've determined the timetable, defined the framing, sucked the sting out of procurement corruption, and effectively depoliticised their missteps by throwing the responsibility for infection onto the atomised individual. Transmission is not a result of lapses in government policy but a matter of bad luck or personal irresponsibility. It might be wearing a bit thin now following the unforced errors of Boris Johnson and Dishy Rishi. Declaring last week they wouldn't be self-isolating after coming into contact with an infectious Sajid Javid, they quickly u-turned as soon as they realised it was electoral kryptonite for the punters. But it has damaged them. The latest YouGov has reported the evaporation of their polling lead from 13 points to four in the space of a fortnight, whereas Survation sees it whittled down from 11 to just two in the same period.

Still, Tory necropolitics carry on regardless of what happens to the polls. Which brings us to the seemingly immovable obstacle to the government's vaccination strategy: the young. On top of Johnson's vaccine-passport-for-nightclubs plan, The Times reported this morning how they're being considered for university students and perhaps also football matches. Apparently, with take up among the 18-24s stubbornly stuck under 60% Johnson's chewing up the new Downing Street furnishings. No lamp shade, sofa, or rug is safe. And as such case rates are highest among this age group.

Why the reticence? Why aren't younger people queuing around the block for their jabs? A glance at anti-vax mobilisations, like the one in London last weekend, doesn't show an over-preponderance of zoomers. It seems most are far too sensible to fall for this stupidity. That said, periodic polling about attitudes to the pandemic seem to suggest the youngest cohorts are the most vaccine reluctant, and sceptical of lockdowns and legally-mandated precautions. In Johnson's rare honest moments, he does acknowledge how the young have borne the brunt of this crisis, so how to make sense of the disproportionate rejection?

A government study into compliance from April this year throws in some clues. Part of it is experience. As the young are more likely to have had to work through the pandemic thanks to the gaping holes left in the furlough scheme, most have not contracted the disease. This can help inculcate a sense of laissez-faire, a feeling this is much ado about nothing. And then we have the government's own advice. This time last year the reckless and stupid Eat Out to Help Out scheme was about to launch, and Johnson went on the record saying people should return to their workplaces, while at the same time keeping restrictions on other activities. This was reinforced by both the subsequent lockdowns. The government acted as though workplaces were magically inoculated against Covid while the family home, each other's houses, the coffee shop, and wherever young people meet were super-spreader events in waiting. Mixed messaging only muddied matters.

Another key finding was the well-known risk the pandemic presented the old and the chronically ill, and therefore wasn't much of a problem for the young and physically fit. If this was the case, then why the restrictions on meeting up with friends, provided one was careful and didn't pass it onto elderly or infirm family members? This didn't appear to make much sense, and especially so as testing capacity expanded and risk could be managed somewhat. Looking at the data in a bit more depth, most young people found the rules easy to follow and abided by the mask mandate indoors, social distancing of strangers outside, and (mostly) kept to meeting restrictions. Hardly a generation of carefree libertines acting like useful friends of Covid.

If the young want to do the right thing, why the vaccine hesitancy? Ultimately, the fault lies with government. On the one hand there has been enough vaccine-related swill around social media to give people pause when it comes to the uncertainty over side-effects. We're not talking about disinformation or great reset junk but the failure of the Tories to come out hard on vaccine safety - something not at all helped by the debate around whether AstraZeneca is safe for the under 30s and the decision to switch to other vaccines. In the middle of a pandemic, to see the government panic and twiddle its thumbs before hastily changing the advice is not going to command confidence. And the second is inescapably linked to this. The young are less likely to get seriously ill, but rather than noting this in passing the government and their press helpers have positively amplified this message. If Covid is a case of the sniffles and a sore throat, many young people are going to conclude that taking a risk on a jab isn't worth it. Despite the dangers of long Covid, and worrying consequences even mild infections might have down the line - such as Parkinson's and other neurological disorders. We like to think we live in an irreverent age, but people do listen to government guidance when it's not dressed up in the language of politics point-scoring, and the Tories are to be damned for not talking about these very real risks.

A public health failure? Absolutely. But the politics? Not so. Despite being the bedrock and the salt of the earth, young people are getting lined up as the latest Covid scapegoats in the Tories' endless will to divide and rule. It happened last year. News bulletins and tabloid websites carried footage of illegal house parties, which were amplified by what is left of the local press. Raves in the wood, the number of arrests, it was a constant drip, drip avidly lapped up by target demographics. This, it was said, was the driver of infections through July to September. Nothing at all to do with the young people working in hospitality serving up dinners to the Covid careless at the chancellor's behest. A year on the situation is the same. Most infections are among the young, they're the ones now filling up the acute respiratory wards, and as shops and leisure reopen are, again, disproportionately exposed. But because of how the low vaccine take up is being spun and will be spun, the politics are being sucked out and this very serious problem will be put down to irresponsible and stupid choices, helpfully highlighted by tabloid tales of family anxiety and woe. "Our 20-something bar manager son refuses to take the vaccine!". You can count on celebrities sharing their pain as well., with the cumulative effect of an impression of carelessness and selfishness.

The Tories never let a crisis go to waste. The prospect of tens of thousands of young people contracting a debilitating illness, for some leading to life-long complications, and the chance of hundreds of more unnecessary deaths is no different.

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6 comments:

Graham said...

Whilst all you have written is true, I also believe that vaccine hesitancy reflects a worrying level of ignorance about basic scientific and medical facts as well as the priority given to people’s personal experience and anecdote over collective experience and data.

If people really understood that the reason that they haven’t had typhoid, measles, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, whooping cough, mumps, rubella, etc., etc. is because they were vaccinated as children, then there would be no rationale for not having the Covid-19 jab or the yearly flu vaccination.

The individualisation of experience means people can ignore the death toll, long Covid, and the number of people, including increasingly the young, still being admitted to hospital because “I don’t know anybody who has been ill” (to quote a recent TV news interviewee).

BCFG said...

Wasn’t it Stalin, in response to those who said Trotsky fought well during the October uprising, who said, everyone fights well when the opposition are divided, demoralised and have no rear guard!

The same applies to the Tories handling of the politics methinks.

They have a primarily middle class electorate, predisposed to their grotesque morality, a media that is lets be charitable and say, sympathetic to them and an opposition that tries to ape them when ut isn’t tearing itself apart.

“Why aren't younger people queuing around the block for their jabs?”

Because they are feral, decadent, obnoxious and hedonistic cunts in the main, who are the epitome of what neo liberalism means in practice, how centuries of red in tooth and claw capitalism debases human beings.

I am counting on China in the great war to come, they could start with Australia. I mean if Australia can obliterate the natives and stock the land with white folk, then i don’t see why China shouldn’t repeat the process. In a few hundred years it will just be history, and we will happily wtach their shit soaps.

Blissex said...

«they haven’t had typhoid, measles, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, whooping cough, mumps, rubella, etc., etc. is because they were vaccinated as children, then there would be no rationale for not having the Covid-19 jab or the yearly flu vaccination.»

It is not quite as simple as that, the other vaccines are proven safe by a long track record, the newer ones aren't. In anything new there is always some risk if it is applied on a large scale.

Because vaccines are not like most medicines: the latter are given only to the sick, so there is a clear case there for accepting risks and side effects, and they are few, vaccines are given to the healthy and everybody. So if there is some minority of the population that might have problems with them, trials are likely to miss them, but mass vaccination will affect all of them.

This said in the particular case of SARS-CoViD-2 vaccines the case for vaccination is strong because:

* There is a lot of experience with vaccines and CoronaVirus vaccines, trials however accelerated showed presumptive safety and efficacity, and mass vaccination so far has not filled the morgues or the hospitals.

* In any case nothing has a zero death rate (and that includes *not* taking the vaccine), and there are plenty of things that are done because of other people's right to safety. For example the jackbooted thugs of collectivism force people to attend driving school and to MOT test their vehicles to minimize accidents involving people other than drivers, not just themselves, and the same collectivists put you in jail if you show up in public without a crotch covering because it would offend other people. Unfortunately there is that “The individualisation of experience” that the Conservatives, New Labour, SNP, LibDems are all agreed on.

Blissex said...

«I am counting on China in the great war to come, they could start with Australia. I mean if Australia can obliterate the natives and stock the land with white folk, then i don’t see why China shouldn’t repeat the process. In a few hundred years it will just be history»

In one of the truly great scifi stories ever, "Norstrilia" by Cordwainer Smith, which I think is high literature, in distant future after world wars 3, 4, 5 Australia and much of the rest of the world are depopulated and the only government remaining is that of China, and they take over the empty australian (the australians have moved to another planet and still have pictures of the queen in public places in the year 16,000) continent to build a megacity there,

http://www.fourth-millennium.net/cordwainer-vr/aojou-nambien.html
http://www.fourth-millennium.net/cordwainer-vr/cs-index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norstrilia

«and we will happily watch their shit soaps.»

You can watch them now (with english subtitles), for example on Viki.com, and they are often of very good quality (but often the plot develops quite slowly), and also give some idea of life in China and their collective imagination. For example:

https://www.viki.com/tv/36373c-love-o2o
https://www.viki.com/tv/36761c-standing-in-the-time
https://www.viki.com/tv/29908c-fifteen-years-of-waiting-for-migratory-birds

Anonymous said...

When a government lies at the drop of a hat, can you really blame people for not trusting them over jabs?

Blissex said...

«A public health failure? Absolutely. But the politics? Not so. [...] The Tories never let a crisis go to waste.»

There is subtle problem about this; the ruling parties in Scotland (SNP) and Wales (New New Labour) and in Ireland (both north and south) have adopted the the same strategy as the Conservatives in England, which has been recently well defined as "fatalistic liberalism":

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/27/british-government-covid-strategy-virus-incompetence-ignorance-pandemic
“In a report released last December, the cross-party joint committee on national security strategy condemned the government for having “failed seriously to consider how it might scale up testing, isolation and contact-tracing capabilities during a serious disease outbreak” [...] this governing approach, which we call “fatalistic liberalism”, allows it to place the blame on the mix of public behaviour and natural causes. Risk appears to be the consequence of personal choice – people can decide whether to wear a mask or whether to get vaccinated – not the result of policy decisions made at the top”

Two of the main opposition parties at the UK level are the governing parties at the nation level and have adopted the same “fatalistic liberalism” as “The Tories”, and even the LibDems have been totally complicit (I don't know about the Greens).

Even the "unaligned" article mentioned above does not dare to mention the 10-100 times difference that "fatalistic liberalism" makes, and in it the *only* criticism is to the Johnson government, not to the SNP government in Scotland or the New New Labour one in Wales, even if the public health and the NHS are devolved:

https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/ https://phw.nhs.wales/
https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/118/1/16/1744498
Since devolution in 1998, the UK has had four increasingly distinct health systems, in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

«The prospect of tens of thousands of young people contracting a debilitating illness, for some leading to life-long complications, and the chance of hundreds of more unnecessary deaths is no different.»

That is on the heads of Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon (and less explicitly Ed Davey) too. In this respect the "fatalistic liberalism" strategy of Boris Johnson has been a big political success, making most of the "opposition" his accomplices.

There Is No Alternative” is both prescriptive and descriptive. :-(