Is Vaccine and Mask Resistance Immoral?
Many on the right have vigorously denounced the push to blame the unvaccinated for the new spike in COVID cases and deaths across the South. “Getting vaccinated,” a common repartee goes, “is a personal choice that should be made in consultation with your doctor.” Others continue to point out that full FDA approval has yet to be given for any of the COVID vaccines, though, given the enormous evidence at their disposal that the vaccine is safe, it’s hard to imagine full approval—which will likely come tomorrow for the Pfizer shot—will change anyone’s mind.
Then there are the misunderstandings, willful or otherwise, about the shots or COVID. The shot doesn’t work because vaccinated people are still getting COVID, some say. Or the vaccines were made using the tissue of aborted fetuses. Masks don’t work, and they actually make COVID worse. Or that vaccinated people are as likely to spread COVID as unvaccinated people. Or even that the vaccine in the mark of the beast. (But really, what isn’t though?)
That professing Christians have taken the lead in making these claims is downright scandalous. After all, most of them, as they’re typically articulated, are abjectly foolish, and the people of God should not be fools. (Note: Being labelled a fool for Christ’s sake because one lives as if the resurrection happened is not the same as being a fool. Augustine, for example, castigated Christians who claimed that the Genesis accounts were written as history because it would make the biblical writers look unintelligent.)
But are vaccine and mask resistance immoral? That, it seems to me, is a slightly different and harder question.
While making a major error in reckoning or failing to understand the risks, rewards, and duties regarding masks or the vaccine may be blameworthy, that blameworthiness seems like it could be different from sinfulness or immorality. People make mistakes that hurt others or themselves-- sometimes really costly or boneheaded ones--that aren’t immoral. I won’t provide an argument for it here, but a good example might be those who honestly believe taking the vaccine means participating in some way in abortion while believing that abortion is tantamount to murder. I think there are very good arguments that should dissuade people from this position. But being wrongly persuaded here is surely not immoral.
But other examples are less clear. Take the belief that masks don’t work and the accompanying fierce refusal to wear one. The person who holds this belief might really believe themselves to be in the right and the extensive research on the benefits of masks to be wrong. But even if they were right, they would lose little even by their own reckoning by wearing a mask. They might get pimples or be uncomfortable or “have their freedom infringed upon,” some say, but in other circumstances these arguments are so weak that they would hardly warrant a response. If the rest of society believes that you are endangering lives by not wearing a mask and you can easily wear one while going about your life (yes, you can), then refusing to wear one shows contempt toward others. It hardly needs to be demonstrated that those of a libertarian and Trumpian bent on the right have contempt for their political opponents. And Christians and many others will argue that contempt is immoral (or, to use the proper theological term, sinful) no matter its object.
A somewhat different version of this example applies to Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott’s positions on masks and vaccines. These governors and others have barred schools and other state-funded institutions from implementing mask and vaccine mandates, saying that people need to have the freedom to make their own decisions. The problem, of course, is that neither mask-wearing nor the vaccine completely prevent COVID. Therefore, our actions are necessary to protect other people; they might be vaccinated and masked, but we could still give them COVID. In rare cases, those breakthrough cases have even been fatal. So if I refuse to mask and get vaccinated because it inconveniences me or for some other such reason, I show contempt toward my fellow citizens. For these Republican governors, the right to do whatever I want regardless of the consequences for others has trumped the good of the citizens of their state as a whole. This is nothing but state-sanctioned immorality.
How did we get here? The story has far too many twists and turns to even begin here. I believe (see my book Bonhoeffer’s America) that it began with the Lollards, a heretical Christian movement in Medieval England that believed that they didn’t need the Church to encounter God through the Bible. The modern Cartesian view of the individual doubtless played a role too.
But liberal-capitalism and its attendant anti-republican view of society should be central in our attempt to understand what has led the American right to play these deadly political games. In Philip Gorski’s book American Covenant, he writes that republicanism holds that citizens have duties as well as rights and that the good of the body politic should be balanced against the good of the individual. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and the great Medieval theorists believed this. It was still visible in the writings of John Adams and, really, all the American Founders, even Jefferson. But today liberalism is our creed, and that means that, from a republican view anyway, we’re quite out of balance. There is no common or public good; we follow Hobbes in this.
My point in bringing up our liberal creed in the context of this post on vaccines is merely this: liberal-capitalism, that great religion of the monadic individual, is at least partially responsible for the contempt for others characteristic of the anti-vaccine/anti-mask discourse. The immorality of this contempt has become clear to many liberals and never-Trumpers in recent months.
But it has always been there. To address the root problem, the creed that has become the American ideology will need to be brought into question.