Socialist professor Richard Wolff sparked a small blow-up on Twitter last week, clearly triggering some folks by expressing solidarity with anti-vaccine mandate protests:
Backlash ensued, especially from a small tide of left-wing blue checks. Ryan Grim and Eoin Higgins of The Intercept contended that Wolff misread the entire situation — they argued that virtually none of the current labor unrest has to do with vaccines at all.
This itself isn’t something I want to debate: firstly, because Prof. Wolff didn’t seem to imply that most or all labor unrest was due to vax mandates; secondly, because it would be next to impossible to quantify these proportions anyway; thirdly, because the entire question doesn’t really get to the core of whether or not the left should support vaccine mandates — or any protests thereof.
This last point is the important one for me. After hearing Noam Chomsky, Matt Bruenig, and others weigh in to the contrary, I’m here to make a left and fully-vaccinated case against vaccine mandates.
Undoubtedly, there’s some contingent of working people opposed to vaccine mandates from employers. In the U.S., these workers are visible in quite a few places: hundreds if not thousands of unvaxxed healthcare and other frontline workers have been suspended in New York State. Many were replaced with retirees, students, and out-of-state workers, and at least 1,400 of these workers have been fired outright in the state.
Also in New York, Black Lives Matter leadership has protested vax mandates and even argued that the mandates themselves constitute a form of racism, given systemic disparities in vaccine adoption. The eventual fate of many airline workers remains uncertain. Unions with tens of thousands on their rolls have gotten involved.
Wolff invites us to think about these ruptures in the workplace and community as an organizing opportunity. He writes that the “labor militancy component” of the anti-mandate movement “deserves interest and support.” But for many leftists, solidarity is precluded by an earnest belief that opposition to vaccine mandates is tantamount — quite literally — to murder. It’s worth exploring why this is the case.
On Mandatory Jabs
When Joe Biden announced plans for a suite of vaccine mandates (on federal workers, healthcare workers, and federal contractors) and vax-or-test mandates (on large employers), he leaned on a late-pandemic truism.
The mandates, he insinuated, would curb the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But to justify his authoritarianism — mandates that he himself had denounced months prior — Biden had to frame the pandemic as an issue of workplace safety, something that called for more than just concerned individuals getting vaccinated themselves. The “pandemic of the unvaccinated” had to become something imperiling the vaccinated as well: “The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.”
The logic is nonsensical: if vaccinated people can get infected, they can obviously contribute to COVID’s perpetuation. But Biden’s story works as a kind of moral drama. The vaccinated can see themselves as moral actors who have already done everything right. The pandemic they deplore, and the ongoing restrictions it necessitates, become the product of the only true agents in the moral scenario, the unvaccinated. It’s a worldview in which vaccine mandates make absolute sense.
The only problem is that it rests on a false dichotomy. Some unvaccinated folks already have antibodies that protect themselves and others. And more importantly, the exact manner in which the unvaccinated imperil anyone at a workplace — other than themselves — is something the vaccinated can also do with ease. The data show this.
On Delta
Some readers might be surprised to learn the following passage came from commentary published in one of the biggest scientific journals in the world, The Lancet Infectious Diseases:
Although preventing severe disease and deaths remains the primary public health goal in the acute phase of the pandemic, and is still being achieved by available COVID-19 vaccines despite the emergence of the delta variant, addressing SARS-CoV-2 transmission is a crucial additional consideration. … This study confirms that COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and also accelerates viral clearance in the context of the delta variant. However, this study unfortunately also highlights that the vaccine effect on reducing transmission is minimal in the context of delta variant circulation. (The Lancet Infectious Diseases; emphasis mine)
Why did the author come to this conclusion? She referenced among other things a “carefully designed” longitudinal study in the United Kingdom, which reported a number of findings that showed the limitations of vaccines in slowing the spread of the coronavirus Delta variant. This study, by Singanayagam et al. in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, showed that the secondary attack rate — a good measure of person-to-person spread of disease — for COVID-19 in U.K. populations was quite similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated examples.
The chance of infection for a vaccinated person in close contact with a Delta-positive subject was measured at 25 percent, and for unvaccinated contacts the measure was 38 percent; 13 percent higher. Thus, the vaccine provided some protection in this study, but not all that much. Notably, vaccinated individuals were found to spread COVID just as easily, if not more easily in general than the unvaccinated subjects. The overall rate of transmission from vaccinated subjects was 25 percent, and the measure of the same from unvaccinated subjects was 23 percent. Further, study of viral load in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated Delta-positive patients showed that peak loads were just as high in vaccinated subjects, though those subjects cleared the virus marginally faster.
The scientific commentary alerts us to “waning of protection” from the vaccine over time. The typical time since vaccination for Delta-infected patients ranged from 74 days to 120 days — not much time, but longer than that for COVID-negative vaccinated subjects exposed to Delta. The corresponding author on the original study warned,
Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant, and from spreading it onwards, in household settings. This is likely to be the case for other indoor settings where people spend extended periods of time in close proximity as will occur increasingly as we head into winter. (Imperial College London)
This author stresses that “The ongoing transmission we are seeing between vaccinated people makes it essential for unvaccinated people to get vaccinated to protect themselves from acquiring infection and severe COVID-19,” (my emphasis).
Thus, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” appears to be a curious form of myth, for the U.K. at least. Delta’s wicked adaptations can work through even the best of the current vaccines (I should know). But does the U.S. national context show the same thing?
The Boston Globe and researchers’ findings suggest yes. Just a few days ago, The Globe put out an article titled “Vermont, the most vaccinated state in the nation, has been weathering a spike in COVID cases. But why?”
Shockingly (for me), the consulted experts blamed the spike on early enthusiasm for the vaccine in Vermont and low amounts of natural immunity:
Because so many Vermonters stepped forward early to get their shots, many may have waning immunity now, making them more susceptible to breakthrough infections. And because the state did such a good job of keeping COVID case numbers down through much of the pandemic, fewer Vermonters developed natural immunity from actually fighting the virus.
Naturally, this news and this reasoning were not broadly reprinted in Biden-friendly media (which is most of it).
Indeed, the case numbers in Vermont — with a 7-day rate of 219.7 cases per 100,000 people — exceed those of Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Kansas, Indiana, Nevada, Florida, Ohio, and Missouri, according to the CDC Community Transmission Tracker1.
The gap in vaccination rates between Vermont and the rest of these states is striking in the national context.
The total range in state vaccination from most to least vaccinated, when I checked at the end of October, is some 30 percent. This means that some of the states with significantly lower caseloads than Vermont are about as distant from it in terms of percent vaccinated as the entire national range.
The fourth least vaccinated state, Mississippi, has a 7-day rate of just 108.2 COVID cases per 100,000 people. Its vaccination rate stands at just 45.7 percent, compared to 71.3 percent for Vermont. Vermont is 25.6 percent more vaccinated than Mississippi but has about 100 percent more COVID cases per capita per day, on average.
Vermont has a 23.6 percent higher vaccination rate than Louisiana, but the former state suffers from about 360 percent(!) more COVID cases per person per day. Louisiana’s test positivity rate is also lower than Vermont’s — below 3 percent — making it hard to blame this fact on testing alone.
Other states with lower caseloads than Vermont, many of them much lower, include Texas (17.9% lower vax rate), Arkansas (23.2% lower), Kentucky (20.5% lower), Tennessee (23.6% lower), Illinois (10.8% lower), North Carolina (18.6% lower), South Carolina (21.2% lower), Oklahoma (21.2% lower), and more.
The state of Maine has higher caseloads than even Vermont, but its vaccination rate is just 0.7 percent lower. With 11 percent more cases per capita per day, Maine outpaces Louisiana by about 400 percent in current caseloads with a 22.9 percent higher vaccination rate. Maine also outpaces Iowa (15.1% lower vaccination rate) and Alabama (25.8% lower), in addition to the states named above.
On the other end of the spectrum, we should look at Alaska. Alaska is a conservative state and has the highest caseloads in the country, roughly 3.4 times the median for that measure (AK = 623.5 cases per 100k; median = 183.4 per 100k). But contrary to what we might expect, the state’s vaccination rate (52.7%) is just 0.9 percent below the median rate for U.S. states (53.6%). It’s off the median by less than 1/30th of the spread in vaccine rates nationwide. Compare these figures to Wisconsin: the latter’s vaccination rate is 4.8 percent above the median, but its cases per day are also about 1.4 times the median for caseloads. New Mexico’s vaccination rate stands at 8.6 percent above the median, but its caseloads are 1.77 times the median (NM = 325 cases per 100k).
Finally, we should note that Florida now has the lowest caseloads in the country (56.1 per 100k), but its vaccination rate is just 7.1 percent higher than Alaska’s, whose cases top the charts. The difference in vaccination rates between the two states takes up less than a fourth of the national spread, but Alaska’s caseloads are now 11 times higher than in Florida. Vermont and Maine, on the other hand, have about four times the caseloads of Florida with 10 percent higher vaccination rates.
I made these micro-comparisons pulling the most recent data from trackers at the Mayo Clinic and the CDC2. The findings match up well with broad-scale comparisons at the county level performed two months ago by SV Subramanian and Akhil Kumar.
Writing in the European Journal of Epidemiology, Subramanian and Kumar found that “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.” This paper analyzed the period just before Sept. 3, 2021, and the picture they formed then looks mostly the same as now:
Across the US counties … the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2). Notably there is also substantial county variation in new COVID-19 cases within categories of percentage population fully vaccinated. There also appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated.
Helpfully, they include a tracker that shows a similar picture today, which further verifies what I managed to put together. I was unable to find U.S. counties that met the lowest vaccination percentages shown below (10% or lower) in other county-level trackers, so we can safely dismiss the very lowest sections of the graph as a mix of White House data anomalies, low-population outliers, and locations outside of the 50 U.S. states. I encourage the reader to check The New York Times’ county map to verify this claim, if in doubt.
Given such a limited correlation between vaccination percentages and COVID spread, it seems foolish to accept vaccination as the only, or even primary, means of enhancing workplace safety during the COVID pandemic. And yet mandatory vaccinations are the only federal-level edict of its kind issued so far. One gets the sense that workplace safety isn’t really the point of Biden’s mandates.
On Politics
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), once a redoubt of free-speech absolutism and civil libertarianism, has recently argued on behalf of coronavirus vaccine mandates. Their reasoning offers a great window into the political psychology of the mandates Biden implemented. “Far from compromising civil liberties,” ACLU argues,
vaccine mandates actually further them. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated, and communities of color hit hard by the disease.
Who wouldn’t want to protect these vulnerable groups? What’s key is that many of the groups named here are not only vulnerable, they are vulnerable specifically because they are either a) unvaccinated or b) groups for whom the vaccines are only minimally effective (the immunocompromised). Even communities of color — which often have low vaccination rates — slot in here.
To my mind, in fact, only one group typically associated with low vaccination rates is omitted from this list: the Republicans. Republicans and other conservatives are unvaccinated, but they are not vulnerable — presumably because unlike the other groups, including POC, they have chosen ideologically not to get vaxxed. The casual insinuation that POC could only be unvaxxed because of “systemic racism” and not in accordance with their free will — along with the corollary that all unvaxxed Republicans are unvaxxed as a result of zero oppression — is of a piece with the ambient racism found in most liberal institutions today.
But I digress. The most important part of this language is that it paints a scene in which staying unjabbed is dangerous and in which the danger can be assigned most readily to morally bankrupt Republican voters. For ACLU legal director David Cole, such people should forgo their rights to “bodily integrity,” “personal autonomy,” and “religious freedom.”
“They’re not absolute rights,” he told The Atlantic last month. “You don’t have the right to inflict harm on third parties, and that’s what you’re doing when you refuse to take a safe and effective vaccine …”
More than anything else, this narrative is extraordinarily convenient for Joe Biden and the Democrats, who currently control the executive branch and its bureaucracies, along with the national legislature. How convenient it is that as the Delta variant continues to ravage the nation — due in part to Big Pharma’s hoarding of vaccine IP from viral hotspots such as India — the U.S. nonetheless knows exactly whom to blame for the harms of the virus, and it includes no one in the Biden administration, no one in Congress, and no one in the coterie of the country’s ruling corporations! Science itself can come away with a clean conscience; although it may have inflicted us with the virus, it has also given us the way out — but even science is no match for the GOP! We’re meant to believe it’s the anti-science crowd that bedevils us, not the lack of humane healthcare policy and institutional accountability.
In reality, institutional actors are more than happy to ignore the actual science of interpersonal pandemic safety, which now seems to lean much more toward permanent work from home, testing requirements for in-person work, and antibody measurements than mandatory vaccines — and in any case is always changing — so long as the ignorance augments the power of the institutions and their means of defending and acquiring it. The fact that Delta spreads quite effectively among the vaccinated explodes ACLU’s moral argument, but it does not remove the political reasons for advancing it.
On Solidarity
All of this is barely to mention the complicating factors of natural immunity, boosters, vaccine side effects, virus reservoirs in underserved parts of the world, and additional viral mutations. Is a recent COVID survivor, now with higher antibody counts than someone who got fully vaccinated by March or April, really less moral than the early vaxxer? Will a person be immoral if they get a breakthrough case and refuse a mandated third shot? What about a fourth or a fifth? Is a quarantining, unvaxxed COVID patient more or less scrupulous than the vaccinated mayor who danced maskless in a crowded club — violating her own city’s mask mandate — because she was “feeling the spirit” and had no need for the “fun police to come in and try and micromanage” her? What if she were in the presence of a traditionally marginalized or disabled person?
While it’s easy to view vaccination as a one-and-done path to virtue, there are good reasons to believe leftists should reject this view. For one thing, the science on Delta is far from clear — it’s not even remotely certain that getting vaccinated is even the best step an individual can take to stop COVID. And of course, viewing things in terms of individual actions siphons blame away from structures. It reinforces a quasi-Thatcherian view in which “there is no such thing as society,” only a contingent grouping of individuals. Should we not blame companies for the needless imposition of in-person office work? Should we not blame the corrupted government for bailing out business and the one percent while not, for example, paying folks to take vaccines, setting up mobile vaccination stations, and the like? Should we not blame politicians, like Biden and Trump, for disparaging universal healthcare? And with all of these instances of structural irresponsibility, with the slow learning processes of science and the steady march of viral evolution, it becomes unclear how much blame certain individuals should even bear. The moral picture of the pandemic becomes unsavably murky.
No one, for instance, should want to blame someone for getting vaccinated too early, even though early vaccination may make someone more dangerous to vulnerable populations than many COVID survivors. In opposing mandates, we can apply the same reasoning that liberals applied throughout the pandemic to certain groups who started out undervaccinated.
In late 2020 through early-to-mid 2021, during times when vaccination rates lagged much more between racial groups, it became perfectly acceptable to argue that “unethical medical incidents such as the Tuskegee experiments in 1932–1972” were a prime driver of slow vaccination among U.S. minorities. NPR and The Wall Street Journal, for instance, argued that black folks’ vaccine hesitancy was “lingering” and “historical,” even though multiple studies showed little link between knowledge of Tuskegee and willingness to undergo scientific procedures. Studies have found that somewhere around half of black people know about the Tuskegee experiment at all, and yet one survey showed only 14 percent of black respondents trusted the safety of the coronavirus vaccines in November 2020. Seemingly anyone who challenged the Tuskegee narrative, which made little sense, felt compelled to blame the broader phenomenon of “racism” for racial vaccine disparities, even though multiple celebrities who identify as black openly encouraged distrust for the vaccines due to the jabs’ relationship to Donald Trump.
Clearly, the reasons for vaccine hesitancy and resistance have been manifold in minority communities. It’s time we recognize that the same holds true in other communities, which can suffer too from class-based disparities, institutional neglect, and limited access to healthcare. There are groups still unvaccinated because of past COVID status and sincere religious belief. There are groups legitimately afraid of vaccination due to reported side effects and the sheer newness of it all. There are groups and individuals who mistrust corporations and corrupt administrations. There are even folks attuned to recent science who have grown sick of listening to talking heads and just want to regain some modicum of personal control. And there are even folks beyond these who trust vaccination but resist mandates as an excess of biopolitical control.
Many of these people come from the most marginalized and forgotten reaches of the country. Still more have, undoubtedly, felt politically voiceless and homeless for some time — whether only recently or for much longer. Perhaps for some, the recent mandates have awakened a political consciousness for the very first time.
The question now is this: which political actors will offer a voice, a home, a community, a sense of agency to these Americans who now seem willing to question authority and to mobilize? My wish is for these actors to be the left.
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Data pulled on 11/02/2021.
Data from CDC and Mayo Clinic pulled on 11/02/2021.
Thanks for this. Leftists who oppose mandates must speak up. Echoes much of what I said in 'Danger to Society: Against Vaccine Passports" http://www.thepolemicist.net/2021/09/danger-to-society-against-vaccine.html