Green Pass at Macron? Unvaccinated scapegoat for errors and delays of public power
Emmanuel Macron's decision, proclaimed on television to the French people, to extend the Green Pass to the possibility of accessing restaurants, clubs, bars and long-distance travel, thus being able to board a train or plane or not, has aroused widespread echo and understandable debate. The choice, said the French president, after announcing the actual vaccination obligation for health personnel, is to limit only the unvaccinated, instead of the entire population.
There was also, of course, international reactions, with Angela Merkel for example who, while reiterating the essentiality of vaccines in the fight against Covid , recalled how they will remain non- mandatory.
To tell the truth, Macron himself formally, even if partially given the reverse on sanitary ware, remained consistent with his previous tweet , dating back to December 2020, in which he pompously wrote that France, the homeland of the Enlightenment, reason and science, would not have imposed mandatory vaccination; this is because the Green Pass is something different from a pure vaccination obligation, given that it translates into a basically voluntary choice which results in the consequences of greater or lesser usability of services (not among the essential ones, of course).
Tend to be voluntary, let's make it clear; because it appears quite clear how the push, by no means kind, consisting in eliminating and not allowing a whole series of activities to the unvaccinated, a sort of partial social clean slate, represents not very metaphorically an indirect coercion (and therefore, at the end of the fair, an incentive to compulsoriness), very different from the nudge theorized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their famous book “Nudge – the gentle push” .
We are not on the crest of libertarian paternalism, this delightful and equivocal oxymoron that has been circulating for some years, but rather in a sort of call to arms, seasoned with media emphasis: not surprisingly, the media were quick to specify that a few hours after Macronian decision that hundreds of thousands of citizens are booked to have the vaccine inoculated.
In Italy the debate has become hot, as usual. The presidents of the regions were divided, often even when of similar political orientation: Toti, governor of Liguria, said he was in favor even if the following day he partially retracted his favor; Fontana, president of Lombardy, declared the measure unnecessary given that the vaccination campaign is going well.
While Salvini published in a tweet his being decidedly contrary and Meloni went even further, fearing dystopian scenarios like "1984" , the press reported the statements of the super-consultant hopeful Walter Ricciardi, absolutely favorable, and those of the general commissioner Figliuolo, equally in favor of this stringent declination of the Green Pass .
On the position of Meloni then there was a surreal media short circuit. After decades of complaining from the crude, uncivilized and fascist left on the right that it should have become civil and liberal, now that Meloni says something even libertarian-like, claiming the sacredness of individual freedom and self-determination, here she is metaphorically reprimanded, with the virologist Burioni who even accuses her of going against her story, adding in a sibylline but not so much post scriptum that the first compulsory vaccination took place, no less, than in 1939.
One year, 1939, which one imagines, at least on the part of certain surreal liberals in favor of state coercion, should be very dear to Meloni, who in a nutshell, according to them, now that the hard fist of the state is needed, should show itself hierarchically statist, authoritarian and in favor of coercion. Now apparently the right is fine even if it is rough and authoritarian, and tightens even fascist. Good to know for the future …
I will then pass over some tweets of the well-known virologist who, certainly reputable when he talks about his subject of election and study, becomes much less so when he discusses the legal system and constitutional law, even supporting the overcoming of the rule of law in emergency conditions. .
Even between ordinary citizens, often users of various social networks , an authentic war in a typically Italic style, that is football-like, has been waged in furious hand-to -hand combat between no-vax , lockdown fanatics, hypochondriacs, pro-restriction liberals of all kinds. , irreducible libertarians, undecided.
The casual naturalness with which a part of our political and intellectual class has adhered to Jacobinism returning in a Macronian vein, without asking even the slightest question of full adherence of that model to our constitutional order and without any more serious reflection than writing some digital chirping of jubilation, says a lot about the present state of things.
Now that more and more often the courts recognize all the forcing of a year and a half of managing the pandemic, and now that in a courtroom it emerges, put in black and white by the State Advocacy to defend the choices adopted by the government in 2020, that sad truth for some time under the eyes of all, and that is that in the total number of deaths from Covid , patients who died not due to Covid but from other pathologies, simply found positive for the virus, were entered and counted, it would be necessary, before fear the umpteenth problematic measures on the subject of freedom, a serious, organic, weighted political and juridical examination.
All (or almost), on the other hand, are very ready to copy the transalpine president sic et simpliciter , passing over the warning of the vice president of the Privacy Guarantor, professor Ginevra Cerrina Feroni, who before being vice president of that Authority is an ordinary professor of constitutional law and as such it therefore has some (intended euphemism) title to express motivated critical issues and perplexities that instead the exalted arengo of social media had completely forgotten.
The answers, the reactions of a part of the population, often also of many liberals and people of proven intellectual acumen who I imagine to be tried by a year and a half of pounding pandemic narration, are completely visceral, emotional, gut, even if they are recalled the collective well-being, reason, science, health.
Very often, scrolling through the Twitter timeline for example, I came across the expression 'I am vaccinated, I will not accept other restrictions because of those who are not vaccinated'.
Here, in my opinion, we go straight to the point of the confusion that is taking place, and I will explain why.
The basic assumption of this assertion, humanly understandable but based on unverified and at times apodictic elements, is that there is such a strong, substantial, numerically high resistance, that it can question and in crisis the entire vaccination campaign: a sort in front of no-vax so pervasive, incisive and widespread that it has convinced hundreds of thousands of people to take a step back in front of the serum and go into hiding.
To tell the truth, considering that the vaccination campaign began with considerable ups and downs, also due to logistical and structural delays, to date we have reached about 45 percent of the population over 12 years fully vaccinated: the hubs continue to receive copious lines of people eager to get vaccinated, and often the delays and shortages were dictated by logistical shortcomings, by stocks that did not arrive, by bureaucratic hitches, and so on.
And even when there have been doubts, cancellations of reservations, steps backwards, to tell the truth it seems to be able to say that the same occurred in conjunction with the communication disaster that involved the vaccines themselves.
Have you already forgotten? Not me. Having undermined the credibility of vaccines, their efficacy, their safety, the meticulous and morbid description, and often hasty, of the adverse reactions, the thrombosis, the panic from hospitalization after the injection, were not the children of an unbridled media campaign of no-vax patrols, 'strong' of some digital channel and of the presence on social media but of the mainstream press, of politics, of the expressive and verbal incontinence of certain virologists, and of the public authorities themselves.
Those same authorities who today cry out against vaccination, refusal, 'betrayal', no less, but who a few months ago did nothing but cast shadows, clouding the full validity and safety of vaccines. The unedifying scenario that aired on AstraZeneca dates back a short time, and should still be alive in the collective memory.
Personally I received the second dose of AstraZeneca a week before it was suspended for the under 60s, in the midst of the fuss and the thousand changes of ideas about what was the safest age for inoculation: nobody, and I repeat nobody, in that climate , with newspapers throwing up health dramas, suffering, hospitalizations, unfortunate events yet to be clarified but suggested as being related to vaccination, he could really be sure that he wanted to be vaccinated, with a light heart.
I almost have the feeling that the ideas that are crowding and overlooking this crackdown rather than resolving a sort of generalized victory of the no-vaxes serve more than anything else to straighten and make us forget certain distortions created by public authorities, with the voluntary or involuntary complicity of a part of the world of the mass media: after all, if you now ask for an extension of the Green Pass (which already exists for some activities), due to the real or presumed delay on the vaccination schedule, what should be done then who has disseminated doubts and often authentic hoaxes, while remaining on that side of the fence for which, ontologically, the "hoaxes" do not seem to exist? The field of the good, the virtuous, those who never make mistakes even while they are making a gross mistake.
There is another point to underline; those who say they are exhausted by closures, by limitations, by restrictions, by now, perhaps exhausted by a year and a half of totalizing and polarizing media and political narration, have shifted the focus of their reprimands from public power to the unvaccinated. Not wanting to be subjected to further restrictions is absolutely right: it is more questionable to identify, in a certain and crystalline way, without any doubts, the category of the unvaccinated as the primary source of further restrictions.
How many are unvaccinated? How many will it be in a few months? Are we really sure, as we said before, that there is all this reluctant population in a diachronic perspective? And might it not be that some delays in vaccines depend on the public machine, in all its various forms?
Now that the variants are raging, which vaccine are we talking about? Will we have to do point Green Passes depending on whether the inoculated vaccine is safer than some variant? Is an AstraZeneca vaccine equivalent in all respects to a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine? According to the distinctions that experts and virologists seem to paint on single vaccines, in relation to the variants, there is almost no doubt about it.
And imagining a Green Pass limiting many freedoms in this Balkanized framework appears highly questionable, without having to access libertarian radicalism on the full and total self-determination of choice.
On the other hand, there is also to add, why should a vaccinated person be afraid of an unvaccinated, given that the vaccinated is no longer at risk of being hospitalized (or worse)? Answer; for the frail not yet vaccinated. But, and this is the point, if there are fragile unvaccinated, in plain evidence, the responsibility will be that they have not yet been able to fully guarantee vaccination even for certain categories, certainly not of those who voluntarily choose not to be vaccinated.
It is therefore clear that fear has moved from the biological, health aspect, of preserving one's life and that of loved ones to that of the further and prolonged loss of freedom, which, however, is neither decided nor established by the non vaccinated but by the public power that there is to think uses the unvaccinated as a scapegoat for their shortcomings.
In my opinion, this is an even more relevant point: we are really sure that the vaccine is the real discrimination, when it comes to the return to full freedom, for an increasingly hungry public power that for a year now, in its self-referential bulimia expansive, has it done nothing but dictate detailed rules, limitations, concessions, sanctions?
Let's talk very clearly: even today, even with 45 percent of the Italian population vaccinated, anti- Covid public policy continues to be set in terms of infections. The statistical indicators on contagions permeate not only the debate but the choices made from time to time by public power, so much so that we are seriously returning to talk about color regions, as it was until a few months ago, with a backward somersault that it does not seem engendered by popular aversion to vaccines. Given that, everyone knows, even the vaccinated continue to be infected and infected.
Following infections, instead of hospitalizations, intensive care and deaths, or of the elements underlying the stress of the health system, means pursuing the deadly policy of 'Covid zero' , contrary to what some countries are doing, including the very civilized England which with the infections he decided, continuing to vaccinate, to live with them.
The point is therefore linear, clear, sunny: the choice to follow the statistics on infections will lead us to end up in prison, in full lockdown , or to wear a mask outdoors, even when the vaccinated population is 80 percent or more. Also bearing in mind that a part of the population will not be able to be vaccinated for physiological reasons and health safety.
So it seems clear to me: before the hypothetical adoption of the Green Pass in 'French' terms also in Italy, all those politicians, those public managers, those consultants, super or normal, those newspaper directors and journalists 'guilty' of having polluted the credibility of vaccines, of having distorted the public debate by establishing correlations and adverse reactions between vaccine inoculation and various deaths, generating a climate of objective terror and undermining, if indeed it was undermined as the pasdaran of the Green Pass seem to suggest today in Macronian terms , the vaccination campaign.
In fact, for a year and a half now, the continuous, constant erosion of freedom, in the absence of any assumption of responsibility by those who governed, decided, limited, restricted, poses a very serious question of the accountability of power itself.
Because if we keep hearing that freedom means first of all the assumption of responsibility, the first to learn from the principle of accountability should be politicians, public managers, virologists, journalists and opinion leaders who for a year and a half do nothing but implement measures very often disavowed by concrete experience or launch into often alarming predictions without foundation: there is certainly no freedom to infect, because it would mean being irresponsible, but neither should there be the freedom to adopt policies seriously erroneous, often liberticidal and not necessarily supported by objective data or elements.
Just as there shouldn't be the latent or explicit politicization of the pandemic time (the vulgate of the pandemic as an opportunity).
It is therefore not possible to accept a declination of the term one-way responsibility, unilaterally, as that is weighing only on the shoulders of citizens, while for politicians, virologists and opinion leaders it becomes a mere ornamental tinsel: 'I take all responsibility', says the politician or doctor who has made a mistake in every single prediction, and clearly both remain steadfast in the saddle, without any practical or material effect on the announcement of the assumption of responsibility.
Let's start again from here, even before thinking about further limitations on freedom.
The post Green Pass at Macron? Unvaccinated scapegoat for errors and delays of public power appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/green-pass-alla-macron-non-vaccinati-capro-espiatorio-di-errori-e-ritardi-del-potere-pubblico/ on Thu, 15 Jul 2021 03:57:00 +0000.