Antivaxxers make me uncomfortable because I agree with them to such a large extent. To make it clear: I maintain that vaccines work and are reasonably safe, much safer than risking infection, plus rejecting vaccines when you can take them puts other people into risk for spurious reasons. I got my 3 shots as fast as I could, plus the flu shot, and I'll take any more boosters that show up, and I think everybody without a health condition should take all vaccines for both personal safety and ethical reasons.
Yet a lot of my arguments to do my own hormones, or DIY medicine in general, are very similar to antivaxxer’s arguments to reject the COVID vaccine. I’m glad that Abigail from Philosophytube is foregrounding the uncomfortable parallels between their arguments, and our trans-feminist-mutual aid perspectives on body autonomy and informed consent:
=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va0RCgbywGc
The video is a fascinating UK study (like, not a youtube essay, an actual sociological study) on what one might call moderate antivaxxers: people who are not full nazis/qanon or denying covid exists etc., but still refuse the vaccines, and why. Here are some common antivaxxer beliefs that also happen to be my beliefs:
So how come I’m not an antivaxxer? Why do I think those things should apply to transgender care, or mental care, or daily ailments, but I still think you should go to qualified doctors for COVID treatment (and infections, cancer, HIV, surgeries etc.)? It's easy to say ‘trust science’, but I was an actual scientist long enough to see how the sausage is made. Plus one can’t properly verify studies outside of one’s specialisation, nobody can specialise on everything, and even e.g. a PhD in dermatology is little more prepared than an average person to evaluate an epidemiology study, let alone five hundred epidemiology studies.
In the context of one’s own life and personal decisions, how does one reach a level of trust about advice given by institutions one doesn’t trust?
Here’s my thought process on why I’m not an antivaxxer:
Our interests are partly aligned in this. If governments really cared about human lives, they’d have done full, 100% quarantine for a couple months, by providing full basic income, cancelling rent and personal debt of every kind, suspending work and school, and coordinating with poor countries; this would have eradicated the virus. Governments prioritise profit over lives. But if everybody gets the plague they lose the workforce and consumer base. Governments want people docile but alive, while not interrupting profits; I too want people alive.
A lot of what passes for science is the trappings of science as empty ritual—the performance of peer review and nicely typeset articles with citations, meaningless statistics (‘statistical significance’, p-values etc.) and unreplicated correlations. Medicine, along with humanities, is rife with this. Then you add the crooked interests of capitalist financing, and that’s how you end up with everything both causing and curing cancer.
That doesn’t mean all medical science is bollocks. Studies replicated widely by institutions with different sets of incentives, demonstrating causality and strong effects, are by and large reliable—sometimes big mistakes go on for a long time, cf. much of nutrition, cf. the ‘droplets’ fiasco with COVID and the decades this basic mistake was ‘scientific consensus’ about the flu—but it’s a good bet to go with widely-held consensus unless you have better evidence, which for stuff like hidroxicloroquine etc. is just not there.
I have enough nurses and doctors as friends to get a feel for medicine folk, and yes I too have dealt with callous arrogant dudes who get a fit if you say any opinion, and I’m aware of what a clinic is like to marginalised folx—but even for the most arrogant cynical doctor, it’s impossible for me to believe med people are all in the pockets of pharma selling meaningless vaccines, or swindled by capitalists. Med people to a very large porcentage do actually want to care for their communities and heal harm. Medical professionals feel about diseases the way antifas feel about nazis.
I do think a large swatch of afflictions we bother doctors with would be better treated with horizontal community support, more rest and sleep, frugal home remedies, and vibing. Did I mention community support. Especially that one.
But if I get shot by a cop at a protest I don’t want a traditional flower tea of the Balkans or a girlfriend on my lap whispering sweet things, I want a frigging tourniquet and a surgeon. It’t silly to think that DIY medicine can substitute highly trained professionals and advanced technology for everything. Some herbs do actually help control HIV (there’t good science on this, look it up), but nowhere near as reliably as modern PrEP, and getting a high enough regular daily dose of tropical African plants would be a lot less accessible than cheap, durable, stockable pills.
Likewise you can’t DIY an ICU. Going on record with this, don’t DIY and ICU. After the revolution brings us the glorious solarpunk utopia, we’re going to mutual-aid even better ICUs in freely associated commitees and they’ll be like, zero-carbon wind-powered with pastelcore flower patterns and crap. In the meantime we have the ICUs capitalism gave us, and if we didn’t I would have died long ago, and if I hadn’t, my daughter would’ve been dead at birth.
Does Pfizer benefit from government pushes to pressure everybody to vaccine? Absolutely. But if the vaccine is not beneficial, why did they hoard boosters as the disease ravaged the Global South? If Bill Gates’ goal is to modify the DNA of the human race, why did he personally stopped Moderna from making the vaccine patent-free for poor countries?
I’m very comfortable injecting myself untestedly high doses of estrogen or overdosing on sketchy herbal hormones. I do believe, out of my own research, that the risk-benefit ratio of DIY HRT is pretty good, but more importantly—if hormones were contagious, I’d be a lot more careful with this.
I think this was my primary motivation; I come from a country plagued by epidemics, I got several preventable diseases as a child that I watched shrink away under vaccination campaigns. You have no idea how glad I was when I got my children shots for mumps and measles and chickenpox and was like, phew, y’all won’t have to go through this. I got friends with immunodeficiencies, and I care about elderly people, and ppl from countries where the vaccine is hard to access, and indigenous folk.
Even if I was a lot more sceptical of pandemic data than I am, the possibility of spreading a deadly virus and mutations is in itself enough that it would tilt my decision in favour of the least likely to cause harm to the community.
A lot of the feelings of harm and injustice that nazis prey upon are actually real and legitimate:
Nazis smell these points of failure of neoliberalism and leverage them for recruiting, by redirecting the blame to Jews and marginalised communities, and presenting themselves as the solution—this government is bad but we’re going to treat you right, we’re the good daddies.
For months now, nazis have come out in force to recruit antivaxxers. They’re calculated about this, explicitly laying out in their plans how all the nazi stuff is carefully hidden, while they organise demos nominally about healthcare freedom and autonomy. Then they chase people of colour out of the demos, and pipeline the rest into anti-semitic conspiracies.
As a result, nazis become the face of anti-government resistance. In much of the world right now, if one fully loses all faith in the system and decides to do something about it, the first thing that pops to mind as a way to have your own guns and autonomous off-grid communities is nazi militias. This isn’t a rhetorical issue either. After the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, nazis were the ones handling rifles and weapons training to common people eager to resist the next assaults by themselves. The result is the Azov battailon becoming the symbol of anti-Russian citizen self-defense, with local anarchists having to catch up:
The events of the Maidan were like a situation in which the special forces break into your house and you need to take decisive actions, but your arsenal consists only of punk lyrics, veganism, 100-year-old books, and at best, the experience of participating in street anti-fascism and local social conflicts.
[…] Anarchists are now trying to create horizontal grassroots ties in society, based on common interests, so that communities can address their own needs, including self-defense. This differs significantly from ordinary Ukrainian political practice, in which it is often proposed to unite around organizations, representatives, or the police.
=> (War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine)
The Ottawa antivaxx protests were powerful, paralysed the country, rendered the government helpless, and had a carnival atmosphere of personal bond-making, community and autonomy for the participants. The white participants, because the protests were also incredibly racist and outright nazi. The media talked of them as this destructive, barbaric force who refuses to play by the rules of civilisation, a non-peaceful, illegitimate protest, a danger to the established order. That should have been us. We should be the ones people think of when they want to break off with the system; the first thing that comes to mind as an outlet for your justified rage should be team "solidarity with the poor and marginalised", not team "borders and white supremacy".
The government overreach that was set in place to stifle the Ottawa nazis will undoubtedly be used against us too, old story, but that’s not the bigger problem. Governments are going to persecute us more and more, with nazis or without; look at the news, they have identified us as a threat, and correctly. The bigger problem is which alternatives are visible to the public mind. The lesson of antivaxxers is to actually listen to people, highlight the legitimate human yearning for freedom and justice and meaning, and answer it with a positive material analysis of the causes of our predicament—with positive, ethical views of what a free society could be like. Also it would help a lot if we got better at guns than the nazis.
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