Notes From a Pandemic: August 13th, 2021

by Miles Raymer

Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future.

When I got vaccinated back in the spring, I thought I was done with the COVID-19 pandemic, at least personally. Well, as it turns out, the pandemic wasn’t done with me!

The vaccines, we were told, were our ticket out of the months of isolation, anxiety, and boredom brought about by lockdowns and COVID safety restrictions. It was my understanding not only that the vaccines would provide nearly-perfect protection against hospitalization and death, but that they would also cancel out (or at least drastically reduce) my chances of carrying the virus and spreading it to others. Even though we’ve been dealing with an information landscape of partial truths and constant revisions from the very beginning, I treated these guidelines like the redemptive, irrefutable laws of post-pandemic life.

Why did I do this? Exhaustion! Hope! Motivated reasoning!

The good news is that I got a lot of what I wanted. My life has changed significantly since getting vaccinated, and almost all of that change has been positive. I move around my community more freely and with less caution. I regularly hang out with and enjoy normal physical contact with people who are also vaccinated. At the end of July, my wife and I took a lovely road trip up to Oregon and Washington to visit with friends and family, and COVID concerns didn’t hamper us. I don’t worry that if I or one of my vaccinated loved ones gets the virus we might get seriously ill and die. Compared to where I was a year ago, this is fabulous!

But the full story is a lot uglier, and frankly more tragic than anything that’s come before. I’m going to focus on Humboldt County, my own community, but much of what I will say applies to California and the USA more generally. As a society––a group of humans who share a common living space and depend on one another for continued survival and flourishing––we snatched failure from the jaws of victory. We are awash in vaccines, but only about 50% of our local population is fully vaccinated. And with the new Delta variant leading the way, our COVID numbers are now worse than they’ve been at any point in the pandemic (see image below from the County’s COVID statistics page).

HumCo COVID Stats

Although the problem seems to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the unvaccinated population, local health officials have made it clear that vaccinated people can transmit Delta to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Personally, I know of at least two fully vaccinated people who have tested positive, one of whom was quite sick for the better part of a week. And in just the last few days I’ve heard lots of stories from fellow community members about vaccinated people testing positive and unintentionally spreading the virus. On Saturday, August 7th, the County implemented a new masking order for everyone––vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

I can’t overemphasize how frustrated and unsure I’ve become about what constitutes “COVID safety” in this moment. However, there are two tentative conclusions I’ve come to. The first is that, even with the Delta variant, the vaccines do appear to provide incredibly strong protection against hospitalization and death, at least for now. That’s encouraging. But it also seems clear that it’s considerably easier than I previously thought for vaccinated people to carry and spread the virus, and this is where things get really difficult from an ethical standpoint. If I can be vaccinated but still infect people, then I can still be part of the problem. I can actively make the pandemic worse.

What does this mean for my personal conduct? Well, I’m still figuring that out. I’m not going back into full lockdown mode, but I’m scaling back my social and travel plans in a major way. I’m no longer going to knowingly share space with unvaccinated people. If I do any traveling, I will get tested before returning to normal activities.

Resisting Vaccine Tribalism

At the moment, most pro-vax people are wallowing in bitter resentment toward people who have refused to get vaccinated for personal or political reasons. In my view, anyone who doesn’t have a compelling medical reason to avoid vaccination should have been vaccinated before the Delta wave hit. And I agree that the vast majority of the blame for Delta being as bad as it is should fall on those who are “skeptical” or “hesitant” about vaccination. The degree to which people have allowed their myopic self-concern to compromise our collective well-being is sickening, both literally and figuratively. And the longer this predicament persists, the longer COVID will have to mutate into increasingly dangerous new variants.

This is a dire and disheartening state of affairs. But is endless complaining, mocking, and criticizing our fellow citizens for their “selfishness” and “ignorance” going to solve this problem? I don’t think so. In fact, I think almost all of the well-meaning handwringing coming from the pro-vax camp is only making the situation worse. There are lots of reasons for this, but one has to do with a concept called “counterwill,” which I recently discovered while reading Gabor Maté‘s book on ADD, Scattered Minds. Here’s how Maté describes this psychological phenomenon:

Counterwill is an automatic resistance put up by a human being with an incompletely developed sense of self, a reflexive and unthinking opposition to the will of the other. It is a natural but immature resistance arising from the fear of being controlled. Counterwill arises in anyone who has not yet developed a mature and conscious will of her own. Although it can remain active throughout life, normally it makes its most dramatic appearance during the toddler phase and again in adolescence. In many people, and in the vast majority of children with ADD, it becomes entrenched as an ever-present force and may remain powerfully active well into adulthood. It immensely complicates personal relationships, school performance and job or career success…Counterwill has many manifestations…Like a psychological immune system, counterwill functions to keep out anything that does not originate within the child herself…Counterwill is also expressed through passivity…This passivity, what people may call laziness, can signal a strong internal resistance. (186-7)

Counterwill, a term originally created by Gordon Neufeld, has something useful to teach us about vaccine resistance. Whether through overt refusal or quiet reluctance, millions of Americans are flipping the bird to the entire sociopolitical structure that is trying to save their lives and the lives of others they care about. Interpreting this behavior as a mass act of counterwill––a knee-jerk and largely-unconscious psychological defense mechanism––prevents us from demonizing or falsely classifying it as bald malevolence. Every time we attack unvaccinated people for making the pandemic worse and try to shame them into getting vaccinated, we activate their counterwill and make it less likely that they’ll get that shot. And it doesn’t matter if we’re right or not. Lives are at stake, so it’s results that matter.

I’m aware of the many other influential factors here: mis- and disinformation, social media, political polarization, anti-vax culture that predates COVID, low-probability health complications from the vaccines, the presence or absence of vaccine mandates and/or incentives, possible booster shots that will improve vaccine effectiveness, and reasonable criticism of fumbling institutions such as the FDA/CDC––to name just a few. Applying the psychological framework of counterwill to this crisis won’t solve it outright, but I think it will genuinely help. This is especially true at the level of personal relationships, where acceptance or rejection of someone based on their current vaccine comfort level may be the difference between them getting vaccinated sooner rather than later, or at all. We should all examine our behavior and modes of communication, asking how we can redirect and defuse counterwill rather than making it stronger. Maté gives a list of ways we can do this, and the most important is to cultivate positive attachments with those around us––to double down on our inherent interconnectedness and shared needs for security and social connection.

Pro-vax vs. anti-vax has become the newest frontier of cultural warfare in a country already riven by toxic and internecine tribalism. But unlike most previous clashes in the culture wars, people are dying everyday because we can’t resolve this. It’s up to each of us to decide where we stand, and in making that choice I’m recalling the words of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff:

As a result of our long evolution for tribal competition, the human mind readily does dichotomous, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity. (The Coddling of the American Mind70)

In the context of COVID, this imperative isn’t just a matter of creating “welcoming, inclusive communities,” but also of preserving our foundational safety and integrity.

In that same book, Haidt and Lukianoff cite a quote from Pauli Murray: “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them” (260). I don’t know if this attitude is the only way to end this pandemic, but it’s my way of trying. I refuse to adopt a callous and hostile disregard for the unvaccinated, and will do what I can to protect them until this disaster is over.

Until next time, be well, and good luck.

Global: 205,661,815 confirmed cases, 4,338,593 deaths

United States: 36,307,177 confirmed cases, 619,094 deaths

California: 4,097,958 confirmed cases, 64,529 deaths

Humboldt County: 5,929 confirmed cases, 58 deaths