The Vaccine Moment, part one

This essay by Paul Kingsnorth approaches the problem of Covid19 shutdowns and mandates from such a disarming angle that it might just turn out to be something that both sides of the Covid wars will be able to read — and to read for understanding, not ammunition. Miracles do happen.
We haven’t asked the author for permission to reprint this, so we only provide an opening snippet, plus a link to his The Abbey of Misrule, where you can read the whole thing. Do.

— The Editors.

… I have not been vaccinated against covid, and I don’t plan to be. This does not make me ‘anti-vax’ - a category that is designed to feed into the ongoing culture war narrative which separates the good from the bad people, and leads both sides in that war to demonise the other. I am not against vaccination, and I certainly wouldn’t imagine I had a right to tell others what to do with their bodies. I don’t believe that the available covid vaccines are ineffective - though they do not do what they were sold to us as doing - and I can see plenty of reasons for people, especially vulnerable people, to take them if they choose.

I expect that readers of this essay could argue with me about my decision if they felt like it, and I expect I could argue back. This is what much of the world has been doing since these vaccines arrived on the scene. We could all throw peer-reviewed studies that we don’t really understand at each other, and they would all miss the mark because the vaccine is not the point. The point is what it symbolises - and what it is being used to build.

I am a writer. I know how to construct stories. I know what makes them succeed or fail, and I have a nose for when a story does not hang together. The covid Narrative is just such a story. It doesn’t fit together, even on its own terms. Something is wrong. The surface tale does not reflect what lies beneath. And what lies beneath is what interests me now.

(Read the full essay here)