Anti-vaxxers are the new "unclean"
The righteous shall inoculate the earth, writes George Pitcher. But they're treating those who refuse like lepers
Ingrid Tarrant, whose job is described as “TV personality”, attracted a predictable social-media mauling for going on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this week to say that she was refusing to be vaccinated against covid, but still wanted to be able to hug people.
It was clearly a thin day for news. But it was the language she used that was interesting: “I am clean, I take precautions,” she said.
The idea of being clean is a complicated claim at the heart of the issue of inoculation. If we are unvaccinated, we’re unclean. And the Independent’s Sean O’Grady is in no doubt about what “we do about anti-vaxxers”:
No jab, no job; no jab, no access to NHS healthcare; no jab, no state education for your kids. No jab, no access to pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, stadiums. No jab, no entry to the UK, and much else.
O’Grady generously accepts that anti-vaxxers are “human beings”, but his attitude contains much of what it has traditionally meant to be “unclean”. It is to be an outcast, anathema, a despised enemy.
To be unclean has its roots in the Abramic faiths. In the oldest, Judaism, it is framed in the ancient Mosaic food laws of the exiled Israelites, but extended to menstruation, sexuality and childbirth, skin diseases, the touching of dead bodies and much else besides. Any contamination required (and in many cases still requires) ritual cleansing, full immersion in holy water in a priestly bath, a mikvah.
It was these laws that Jesus of Nazareth scandalously overturned by openly mixing with the unclean, lepers and foreigners, hanging out with sinners and touching corpses to raise them from the dead: “Nothing outside a person can defile them.” (Mark 7: 15).
But you wouldn’t know that from the Church he founded. Baptism is a form of ritual cleansing from sin. And the Prayer Book still contains a liturgy for the Churching of Women, a “thanksgiving” after childbirth that has its provenance in Judaic cleansing of the body and rededication. Islam considers it unclean, among other things, to emit bodily fluids or touch members of the opposite sex, actions that require purification.
Mental ill-health in the ancient world was to be possessed by “unclean spirits” which needed to be exorcised. That perhaps has its modern resonance in recovering drug addicts and alcoholics speaking of having been “clean” for the period during which they have successfully kicked the habit.
Segregated underclass
And now the leper’s bell is to be hung around the neck of the unvaccinated. They are to be confined to their own colonies, denied the badge of honour of the righteous in the form of vaccine certification and scorned by polite society. They are a segregated underclass, who in some sense “deserve” their fate.
That derives from the concept that disease and illness is God’s punishment on the wicked – so covid and the unvaccinated deserve each other. The plague was visited on the unrighteous until the Enlightenment, a penalty paid for being unclean, both metaphorically and literally, but principally spiritually.
We see some of that in the chosen-people language that accompanies development of the vaccines. The British are “world-beating” for producing the Astra-Zeneca vaccine in Oxford, rather than world-supporting or even world-leading. China was in some undefined way wicked for delivering covid in the first place; India deserves its scourge for being so crowded and poor.
And the reckless deserve what they get: Witness the response to Boris Johnson succumbing to the virus after shaking hands with everyone he met at a hospital. Cities like Bolton and Blackburn? Ghettoes. Seal them up and let them die. Nobody to my knowledge has actually said that, admittedly, but talk of a return of the dreaded tiers is a form of what might be termed placism.
As is the idea that plucky little Britain is a safe haven. A green country is a healthy nation; amber ones are dodgy, red ones beyond the pale. We get what we deserve.
And the unvaccinated get what they deserve. A plaintive defence is that an uninoculated body is a danger only to itself – the vaccine makes not a blind bit of difference to whether we are transmissable or not. But that cuts no ice with the righteous, who wear their conceit like a nosegay.
It matters not because these people are insufferably pompous in their superiority, but because there is a kind of medicinal apartheid developing, between the health-entitled and the rest. It means that we overlook that none of us is safe until we’re all safe, instead isolating ourselves from those who refuse – or, more crucially, those countries that cannot afford – to be vaccinated.
And it matters as an issue of faith. Because a Christian nation must acknowledge the one who came not to liberate an elite, but to stand in the corner of the marginalised and the dispossessed, to show alarmingly that no one can be saved until we’re all saved.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.