Boris Johnson, ever the populist, wants to keep a British public onside that is keen to get back to the pub, while the Tory party more generally needs the economy recovering and its corporate donors placated if its claims to being the party of private enterprise and economic growth continue to sound plausible.<\/p>\n
‘Vaccine apartheid’<\/h3>\n
The ethics of immunity passports is also being hotly debated \u2013 if only in slightly more serious terms \u2013 in the pages of my old newspaper, the liberal Guardian.<\/p>\n
Nick Cohen, a columnist whom in normal circumstances I would scrupulously avoid citing, writes of imminent \u201cvaccine apartheid\u201d and notes \u2013 in vaguely approving terms<\/a> \u2013 that \u201cIt is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated\u201d. What will be needed, he argues, is yet more crackdowns on free speech, on “fake news”, to bolster the public\u2019s trust in government and increase vaccine take-up.<\/p>\n Cohen\u2019s only reticence is that black and Asian populations, because they are least likely to trust the British state and get vaccinated, will be the main victims of any popular backlash against the unvaccinated. That, he fears, will test the consciences of identity-focused liberals like himself.<\/p>\n Another Guardian opinion writer presumptuously cites the philosopher John Stuart Mill in arguing<\/a> that stripping the unvaccinated of basic rights \u2013 vaccine apartheid again \u2013 can be made more palatable if it is presented positively as \u201cincentivisation\u201d rather than negatively as punishment. Helpfully, we are told: \u201cThe aim might be the same, but the moral reasoning behind it is crucially different.\u201d What a relief!<\/p>\n Again, only the danger that black and Asian communities may end up as the collateral damage of these coercive or exclusionary measures pricks the writer\u2019s conscience.<\/p>\n All this circumspection is being fleshed out below the line by Guardian readers, who are offering their own potted versions of \u201ccommon sense\u201d. Popular punishments include sacking the unvaccinated from their jobs to protect others and denying them medical treatment in an over-stretched NHS (apparently even if they have spent a lifetime paying their taxes).<\/p>\n The future, at least the one envisioned by these liberals, echoes Dr Seuss\u2019 story of the disdain faced by the Plain-Belly Sneetches at the hands of the snooty Star-Belly Sneetches:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let us pause for a brief intermission. This is not a post for or against vaccination. I will leave that to others, not least because the polarised nature of that discussion entirely distracts and detracts from what I think are deeper matters relating to trust in the Covid vaccines that reflect wider problems of trust in our state institutions and the values they uphold.<\/p>\n I want, as I have done before, to use this space to switch our attention, even if briefly, from the debate everyone is having to a debate almost no one is having.<\/p>\n In fact, I want to deconstruct the debate entirely and reframe it. If you are heavily invested in the arguments of the pro- and anti-vaccination camps \u2013 or the more often overlooked concerns of the vaccine hesitant \u2013 this article may not be what you were hoping for.<\/p>\n Instead, this is a call to draw ourselves back from the drama of the pandemic to consider the bigger picture of a virus that \u2013 if we would listen \u2013 offers us a warning of where we might be going wrong.<\/p>\n The problem with the debate about whether we should be able to bully people into getting a Covid vaccine is that it isn\u2019t really a debate at all. It\u2019s a faux debate, because a real debate needs two sides. What we are getting, as so often with these corporate media-framed moral \u201cdilemmas\u201d, is one side of the debate masquerading as both sides.<\/p>\n The ethics of immunity passports, or vaccine apartheid, depends on a wider debate about what our societies mean \u2013 and what they obscure \u2013 when they discuss issues of trust, the public good and social solidarity. A real discussion of these matters, not the phoney one presented by politicians and Guardian writers, should be at the heart of how we address concerns about privacy, personal choice, social pressure and mob tyranny.<\/p>\n When columnists, politicians and liberal newspaper readers argue that we should all abide by the communal good in taking the vaccine, they are suddenly imposing an ethical yardstick they rarely use in weighing other issues. The sudden concern for the entire public’s welfare sounds hollow and self-serving when it is uttered by those who normally express only the most perfunctory interest in the common good and social solidarity.<\/p>\n The reality is that we live in societies that for at least four decades have been run exclusively in the interests of a tiny corporate elite. This corporate class \u2013 which own and run all our major media outlets and provide a revolving door for our captured politicians \u2013 are not just concerned with making money. Corporations are commercial enterprises driven by a psychopathic obsession with maximising profits and externalising costs \u2013 that is, passing off the toxic legacy of their business models on to those out of sight: the domestic poor, the foreign poor, and future generations.<\/p>\n My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis \u2013 to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https:\/\/t.co\/S4Aby314FX<\/a><\/p>\n — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nA future of Sneetches<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/sneetches-e1614873872382.jpg\")
When the Star-Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts<\/em>
\nOr picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts,<\/em>
\nThey never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches.<\/em>
\nThey left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches.<\/em>
\nThey kept them away. Never let them come near.<\/em>
\nAnd that\u2019s how they treated them year after year.<\/em><\/p>\nThe pandemic drama<\/h3>\n
A faux debate<\/h3>\n
Past the clown mask<\/h3>\n
\n