Month: May 2021

“Like lepers”

From yesterday’s Guardian:

Contentious advice will be removed from the government website, a spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday evening. It had advised against all but essential travel to and from eight areas of England where the Covid variant identified in India has been spreading. Instead, people will be advised to “minimise travel”.

This gets to something that I observed last spring when I (like many people) decided to immerse myself in the literature of epidemics — The Last Man, La Peste, Journal of the Plague Year, Pale Horse Pale Rider: In an epidemic, people can’t help but think of contagion as a moral failing, and so, thinking of themselves as blameless, underestimate the possibility that they could unwittingly infect someone else. This makes it socially uncomfortable to insist that others practice necessary hygiene, because it sounds like you’re accusing them of secret turpitude. Strangers should wear masks, but “we’re friends”, or even — much too casually — “you’re in my bubble”.

Thus two Bolton residents, whose hotel reservations on the Isle of Wight had been cancelled purely from abhorrence of their municipal origins, complained to the press: “Bolton people are being treated like lepers”.

On a literal level we have here people who are feared to be at high risk of carrying an explosively contagious infection that produces an acute disease with no very good treatment, that is often rapidly fatal; complaining that they are being unjustly shunned as though they might be carrying a different, mildly contagious infection, that produces a chronic disease that can be completely cured with medication.

But, of course, what they really mean is, we’re being treated like morally culpable potential disease carriers. This is a status that has traditionally been conferred on carriers of leprosy, something we do not question, but that only highlights our moral — hence also virological — purity.

Auto-antonyms: Drawing a line

The BBC is being scourged for having been — 25 years ago — once insufficiently open and honest with its rightful liege lords (in this case, the then Princess of Wales). Apparently they tried to trick her into giving an interview, though the BBC says it has a handwritten note from her saying she didn’t mind, and she would have done the interview anyway.

In the course of discussing this Diana’s brother is quoted saying “he ‘draws a line’ between the [BBC] interview and her death two years later.” It’s an interesting phrase, of a rare sort that I call auto-antonyms. The same words might mean two diametrically opposite things. I think he means to say that the two events are causally connected — as though by a straight line. But he could also mean that even though one event followed the other, he considers them to be completely separate — to emphasise which he would draw a (dividing) line between them.

Does a shot of vitamin B protect against Covid?

Thirty years ago there were some who envisioned a new united Germany combining the best of east and west: A vibrant market economy with an expanded commitment to economic justice, a confident democratic federal government balanced by a greater variety of states, and a commitment to individual liberty reinforced by the recent experience of dictatorship. A bridge between the solid democracy in America and the rising democracy in Russia.

Instead, Covid has revealed the modern Federal Republic as the combined worst of both systems: A timid central government in thrall to private business interests, unable to take decisive action to protect public health because of a lack of confidence that their authority would be seen as sufficiently legitimate. A resurgent right wing inspired by American and Russian ethnonationalists to express their individual liberty by rejecting even elementary public health measures. And now, a public vaccination campaign dominated by the financial and status needs of private physicians, and prioritising those people with high levels of what the East Germans called Vitamin B — “B” for “Beziehungen“, connections, the way scarce resources were distributed under socialism.

When the vaccination program started it was concentrated in large vaccination centres (Impfzentren). These were highly efficient, providing rapid throughput and simple logistics, and the official priorities of the Permanent Vaccination Commission (Ständige Impfkomission, or STIKO) — covering people over 60 years old, those with serious medical conditions putting them at elevated risk of Covid complications (including pregnant women and their companions), police, teachers, and government officials — could be securely monitored.

There were two major problems with this system: First, the physicians in private practice, for whom vaccinations were traditionally a great money spinner, felt that they were losing money and influence; Second, there was no unobtrusive path to providing priority immunisation to people who were important, influential, or just rich, threatening to lead to the sort of blatant corruption that just embarrasses everyone. This led the government* to bring the GPs into the vaccination program, paying them upwards of €50 per vaccine. The GPs, unsurprisingly, rushed to vaccinate their friends and favourite patients — particularly those patients with private insurance, who they are generally keen to hold on to, as the private insurance covers all manner of treatments that the public insurance won’t pay for, and the payment levels are generally significantly higher.

How should one respond to this? The Ethics commission is very concerned… that people who haven’t been clever enough to work the system might be jealous of the superior people who have. Here is a comment from a recent podcast interview with commission chair Alena Buyx:

AB: We shouldn’t confuse the people who have gone the extra mile and somehow managed to get it organised, or had a stroke of luck, with those who have cheated.

Spiegel: … It could be that someone who isn’t so resourceful… for various reasons, it could be social background, it could be language, it could be some lack of access to information –and I can understand that they might feel he or she feels like you’re taking something away from them.

AB: These are things that one couldn’t have imagined earlier. We have vaccine envy and also vaccine guilty conscience. But all I can say is: Good People, every vaccination is a good vaccination… Those who have been lucky, or who have profited from this “flexibility” — if they haven’t cheated anyone — they should enjoy their good fortune.

From there to full social Darwinism is just a small step, and that step was taken by one Christoph S. in the comments section of the national newspaper Die Welt:

In my social circle — definitely well off — is just about everyone vaccinated, and always the whole family, including the university-age children. None of them in the vaccination centre, always in the GP practice or through doctors they know personally. In other words, since the GPs have been doing vaccinations the prioritisation has fallen away de facto, at least for the “higher” levels of the population. This is not pretty, but as long as they’re managing to vaccinate up to a million people a day in Germany, I find it acceptable. One shouldn’t make a fuss about the people who try to cut ahead at the vaccination centres; Germany has much bigger problems than someone getting vaccinated a few days early. And, by the way, this is how it’s always been, that those who make the most noise prevail, and presumably that’s why Homo sapiens has managed to survive.***

* Just to be clear, this is not the official justification. This is a purely speculative exercise on my part. It’s hard to think of any other justification, though. It’s not as though the GPs were otherwise unoccupied, with huge amounts of spare capacity for taking on vaccination duty.

Continue reading “Does a shot of vitamin B protect against Covid?”

Is it Father day or Sonday?

Pietro Perugino, San Pietro Polyptych, 1496–1500, Christ's Ascension.
Sorry, bye, gotta go…

I just discovered that German Fathers’ Day (today) is identical with the national religious holiday Christi Himmelfahrt, or Feast of the Ascension. Thus is the recognition of fathers identified with the single most famous example in Western culture of a man abandoning his family to finish his work. And he was going to join up with his own “true” father, who (as he had just remarked) had already abandoned him.