Redeeming the Vax-Scene

In the spirit of Christmas, it's time for both sides of the Jibby Jab debate to come together.

If you happen to be in possession of Stephen’s soul, can you please return it, because we miss him.

Since the very start of its rollout, near-on 12 months ago now, I have taken it upon myself to be almost unrelentingly critical about the Jibby Jab.

Why? Well, I could take the self-righteous moral high ground of “well someone had to do it guys” — someone had to push back against the astonishing level of coordinated propaganda that ensured any dissenting voice would be granted almost immediate ostracisation from accepted social discourse.

While I believe the necessity of such dissent has now been proven, it really wasn’t about that at the time. It was far more simple: it seemed — from my own personal understanding of science and medicine — like a frankly terrible idea to mass inject healthy people with an experimental mRNA concoction that obliges our cells to create an active component of what we are told is a highly toxic microbe. I assumed, after a short while, the majority of people would come to this same conclusion.

I still firmly believe this, and I believe the available evidence (see here, here and here) firmly supports this. While there has indeed been a significant shift in sentiment towards the Jibby Jab since its triumphant social initiation — particularly as the once-fringe conspiracy prediction of mandatory, multi-annual booster jabs cements itself into reality — it’s fair to say that mine has been a more prolonged and taxing contrary position to hold than what I was anticipating. No regrets though, I’m here for it.

However: taking such an unrelentingly critical and pessimistic eye to a complex social issue inevitably means annihilating some of its nuance. In this case, this has meant overlooking the depth of the human dimension to what this collective medical endeavour represents.

So, given it is Christmas after all (there is a Love Actually quote to insert in there somewhere), let’s find common ground: fly the white dove, smoke the proverbial (or non-proverbial) peace pipe — and let’s all agree on the positive aspects of this Jibby Jab journey: the inherent virtues that it has awoken inside of us. 

It is time to Redeem the Vax Scene.

Courage

I wonder often just how many people have taken the time to fully comprehend what this Jibby Jab is endeavouring to do inside our bodies. Here we are, injecting ourselves with potions of genetic material, concocted by unashamedly profit-driven pharmaceutical companies with incredibly sketchy ethical histories, which is teaching our bodies to create a probably-toxic spike protein in order to initiate a Goldilocks-type of immune response — not too heavy, not too light — that leaves our bodies better prepared for the inevitable ‘Rona intrusion.

There are so many biological assumptions at play here, only one of which has to be misplaced for things to go wrong: that the injected genetic material will be limited to the immediate vicinity of the injection site, and not pass into the bloodstream and spread around the body to undesired organs; that, once this process has been initiated inside our cells, we will stop making spike proteins before they are flooded to unhealthy levels; that the proteins will indeed stay only within the cell as planned, and not float out and about causing mischief and mayhem in the surrounding blood and tissue; and that the immune response to these spike proteins will be consistent for everyone — across all ages, gender and particularly races — and not result in exaggerated and harmful auto-immune attacks.

While it might be tempting for some to plead ignorance — especially given the extent to which the science behind these jabs has been dumbed down to the now ubiquitous “Safe and Effective” — I think most people had some inherent understanding of what they were signing up for. This is Ride or Die Science like we have never seen before, and most people barely battered an eyelid. 

So what can we take from this? Perhaps it is that we are, without even realising it, inherent risk-takers — with underlying reserves of courage that most of us may not have even known were lying dormant there. 

Faith

This leads to another fundamental human quality that has been exposed through this roll-out: faith. This is an interesting one; faith in what?

Most obviously, it is the faith that we have collectively placed in this experimental medicine and the people who have produced it. This includes faith in our scientific and medical establishment to have gotten this experiment right: to not have overestimated its own abilities and wisdom in attempting to pull off this daring immune system hack; to be honest and upfront to us if at some point they realised things might not be going entirely to plan.

On the other hand, it would be mistaken to think that a large proportion of those who signed up for the Jab did not have an inherent mistrust in the intellectual class that makes up our scientific institutions, not to mention a healthy dose of skepticism about the moral purity of our Big Phama-captured medical system. Their past misdeeds are not little known — far from it in fact, and many people I know who willingly signed up for this experiment were well aware of them. 

In this case, faith still applies: now, however, the relentless optimism projected onto the Jibby Jab highlights a pervasive faith in our own bodies and their ability to tolerate and positively transmute this intrusion. And this is where I am in total agreement with the Vax Scene, and where I differ from those who otherwise share my Jab skepticism: I give our bodies far more credit to be able to withstand the negative impacts of these injections than the doomsayers predicting mass illness and death within the next 3 to 5 years.  

Thus, when we talk about faith, it is better understood as a general concept — a spiritual belief that is held far more widely than our largely secularised society might suggest — rather than something directed to any worldly entity: faith literally that we will come out of the other side of this alive and better off.

Self-Sacrifice

The most outstanding virtue that I have witnessed the Jibby Jab unleash has been our inherent urge towards self-sacrifice — of submission to a cause greater than ourselves. 

I mean, there is no other way to put this: the world may never have seen (and may never will again see) such an outpouring of collective sacrifice then a social agreement to take an experimental injection produced and promoted by known psychopaths in order to protect each other. Leave the science out of it: it was an astonishing act of solidarity. And I say this as someone who willingly did not take part in it and observed it from the sidelines; I have never seen anything like it. 

This is a phenomenon that I described previously as Toxic Selflessness, which also relates to the psychological and sociological concept of Mass Formation. Essentially, we have been ushered into a world increasingly stripped of morality and meaning, where the tangible actions we can take to substantially contribute the Greater Good seem increasingly complicated, problematic and restricted.

It is within this void that the Jibby Jab came along: a perfect cause for which to collectively express our self-sacrificial urges. And we — sorry, you — did just that. You passed the test with flying colours, and may that never be forgotten, regardless of what the social outcomes of this collective sacrifice turn out to be.

Justice

As a final point to consider as we collectively move forward in our new Jibby Jabbed reality, there is an interesting alternate manifestation of this desire to contribute to a collective endeavour: the desire to encourage — often very vigorously and persuasively — others to come along for the journey as well. 

This is a tricky one. It undoubtable arises from good intentions, if a person genuinely believes it is in everyone’s best interests to be jabbed. However, it becomes more complex and problematic when this encouragement is applied to certain social groups: namely, in this example, to people of ethnic minority groups.

This is has been the hardest one for me to watch unfold, here in Australia: how do we redeem, find the good in, what we are currently subjecting our original people to? I have been highly critical of what I see as an aggressive and overbearing push to get jab rates in indigenous communities comparable to those in the overall population. I don’t want to go through my arguments and the evidence that support them again, as I have written about them here and spoken about them here. So instead, I want to focus on the virtues that lie at the heart of this push. 

To me, it stems from the notion of justice: that marginalised and oppressed communities must receive the same opportunity for protection against this virus that the fortunate and privileged of us have. It is a noble intention, albeit one that appears to be hijacked by other factors: an underlying sense of guilt as to what we have collectively subjected indigenous people to previously — that this is our opportunity to right the wrongs of the past — but also an element of paternalism: the now undeniable belief that many of us have shown that we know what is best for them, and that this overrules their right to choose for themselves.

Another way to look at how we have arrived at this point, and how we can move forward from it, is to do with the notions of equity and equality. We all want indigenous people to have access to the same social, economic, and now medical opportunities that we do. But at the same time, we have to remember that they will never reach levels equal to ours: this is our culture — a very fixed and defined culture — that we are doing our best to welcome them into. 

And the key word here is welcoming: not coercing or forcing. It shouldn’t be lost on us that they have their own culture to retain, one that is, in many ways, fundamentally different to ours — and, perhaps because of this incompatibility, it is a culture that is in great peril.

Medicine is a central part of indigenous Australian culture: perhaps the main reason why they were able to survive to be what many say is the oldest continuous culture on Earth, in one of the most challenging and hazardous landscapes on Earth. You don’t do that without knowing how to use your surroundings to stay alive. Yet their conception of medicine is inescapably removed from the one that our Western society has normalised: I would argue that it might be the most fundamentally incongruent element between indigenous and colonial cultures. 

Equality is ensuring every individual has access to the Jibby Jab if they want it. Equity, I would suggest, is going further to ensuring every individual is fully informed about the Jibby Jab, and its alternatives, so that they can fairly decide if they want it. But surely what we ultimately want is justice: the ability for everyone to exercise their own free will — to have full self-determination for their own health — which is ultimately the only way we can achieve equal health outcomes.

Let’s not overthink this. Have we ensured every Indigenous person has had the opportunity to get jabbed, and has been exposed to both sides of the debate around the jab? Then that is all that needs to be done; from there it is their choice. And whether we like or understand or agree with that choice, whichever side of the debate we might be on, is irrelevant.

Perhaps then — for all the virtues that the Vax Scene had undoubtably demonstrated in this Jibby Jab journey — it is humility that has been most glaringly absent, and is the virtue that is most needed now for us to find a unified path forward.