Covidians vs Covid Deniers

The tragedy of the SARS-CoV-2 response has been heightened by the political rift it has deepened

“They who have presumed to dogmatize on nature, as on some well investigated subject, either from self-conceit or arrogance, and in the professorial style, have inflicted the greatest injury on philosophy and learning.” - Francis Bacon, 1620

What are we to do about the Covidians and the Covid Deniers...? While I prefer to avoid descriptors people haven’t chosen for themselves, there’s really no choice in this instance - neither faction named itself, so the only labels available are those bitter accusations their adversaries coined for them. Thus, during the widespread panic about a respiratory infection associated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, people who resisted were demonised as ‘Covid Deniers’. They would not comply with the proposed interventions, declaring that there was not actually a crisis, or that this virus was not responsible for the crisis, or that there were no such things as viruses whatsoever. There is actually very little consensus among these disparate folk except a shared contempt for their mirror image, the Covidians.

The enormous range of scientific and ethical positions among the Covid Deniers came about in large part because the Covidians were so uniform in their claims about everything - the risks of fatality, the merits of testing for specific infectious agents, the benefits of community masking, the necessity of the lockdown-until-vaccine strategy, the extent of vaccine efficacy and safety, and so forth. There is staggering uniformity within this faction, which the Covid Deniers dubbed ‘Covidians’ (or sometimes ‘Branch Covidians’, to heighten the allusions to cult mentality). Thus their chaotic reflection, the Covid Deniers, gathered together anyone breaking with this artificially enforced illusion of consensus in any way - small wonder it incorporates such diverse positions!

Both sides blame their counterparts for politicising public health. Covidians claim the Covid Deniers politicised public health by refusing to adhere to the mitigation methods proposed by the establishment. Conversely, Covid Deniers accuse Covidians of politicising these issues by exaggerating the risks, proposing wildly untested mitigations, breaking with established norms in public health (such as not intentionally provoking panic), and pressuring technology companies to censor contrasting viewpoints as ‘misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation’. Both accusations are broadly correct, although in fact neither faction is ultimately responsible for this politicisation, since both are victims of whatever the US Department of Defence was up to when it quietly seized control of the global public health apparatus in 2020. Unless we somehow get full disclosure, it’s all just conspiracy theories versus wilful ignorance.

What unites the Covidians, however, is not the deference to state authority that the Covid Deniers allege, nor their own implausible claims of superior scientific practice. Neither side can honestly claim that, since we sank this ship together. Rather, Covidians are united in an ethical commitment to taking whatever steps are deemed necessary to ‘defeat’ literal and metaphorical disease - whether cancer, COVID-19, climate change, or whatever else comes along next week. I will not criticise them for holding these principles - I’m relieved when I can find any principles these days! However, the moral high ground that Covidians presume they occupy falters on the erroneous assumption that their demanded warfare obligates universal conscription.

With a few notable exceptions, no-one on either side upheld good scientific practice, and arguing about the facts and interpretations remains pointless until these processes can be robustly restored. The root problems are ethical. It is inherently authoritarian to presume participation in anti-disease projects must be mandatory rather than voluntary: this imperious conceit is precisely where the Covidians went awry (although this ill-advised path was cleared long before 2020…). But on the other side, the Covid Deniers leapt so far beyond the norms of justice that some demand the public execution of anyone involved in the disastrous failed response to SARS-CoV-2, without any attempt to uncover what was nefarious criminality and what was merely incompetent hubris. In this, the Covid Deniers have disastrously failed in their ethics too.

The thing is, we still have to live together. Never mind recovering public health and scientific process from the smouldering ruin we have made together, citizen democracy will be impossible with so vast a gulf of hatred and distrust between neighbours. It is precisely as Francis Bacon warned more than four centuries ago: those who dogmatically preach their interpretations of nature have inflicted the greatest injury. Today, however, it is not just philosophy and learning that has been brutalised by this clash of arrogance, but the very soul of civilisation itself.