The “war on the unvaccinated” will (perhaps) win today’s battle, but it will leave wounds that we will pay dearly
On the subject of the "de facto vaccination obligation", the government is now proceeding like a steam roller, with a crescendo of restrictive measures increasingly harassing against those who do not join the campaign.
That Green Pass which was initially conceived essentially as a simplification tool – for example aimed at allowing to accelerate the return to normality of international travel by eliminating the need for tampons – has been transformed, in the hands of the current executive, into the tool to implement "regressive" policies towards the unvaccinated that increasingly resemble a condition of "civil death".
Yet in the face of an issue that touches such delicate chords, an attitude of greater understanding of the legitimacy and right of citizenship of minority positions should be obligatory on the part of those who govern.
Until now, when the country has found itself in the presence of extremely strong ideological and value divisions, politics has hardly ever chosen a strategy based solely on conflict. In practice, it has almost always opted for arrangements and solutions which, while respecting the government of the majority, would guarantee respect for minorities through appropriate compromises. The fundamental question is that democratic coexistence cannot only be based on the brutal imposition of the majority criterion; it is also necessary to take care of the maintenance of some shared bases in which everyone is allowed to recognize themselves.
Faced with the great conflicts of the past, it was decided not to humiliate the Communists, albeit a minority in large ways "dangerous", and it was preferred to give them a way, albeit from the opposition, to see a right of citizenship recognized in the political debate. At the time of the great secular transformations of the country, with divorce and abortion, it was however chosen not to humiliate Catholics and to find with them a ground of sharing – the very formulation of the law on abortion was inspired by wise compromises cultural and lexical.
And a similar attitude of political moderation inspired many other choices that touched on particularly sensitive issues, from the environment to the issues of family, sexual orientation and linguistic identities.
In many ways, however, the significance of the ideological, cultural and value clash taking place over vaccines and its potentially long-term impact on community coexistence is underestimated.
What is too often forgotten at this stage is that the vaccine has already been supported for some time in many forms, ranging from gratuitousness – financed by all, even from the taxes paid by no-vax citizens – to pressing and widespread information campaigns across all mainstream media.
And in fact the results are extraordinary, with 74 percent of Italians already vaccinated with at least one dose and the reasonable prospect of going up to at least 80 in the short term. This is a trend that has only marginally been increased by recent obligations and which is largely due to the spontaneous choices made by Italians in recent months.
Then counting those who are “naturally” immunized having contracted the infection, the percentage of people with antibodies is probably even higher.
It should also be noted that the numbers of vaccinations in Italy are in line with those of other Western European countries and, consequently, among the highest in the world. Most European countries believe this data is sufficient for a complete reopening without health passes – demonstrating that everything can be said except that the Green Pass represents an inevitable and somewhat "automatic" choice in the current scenario.
Italian politics, on the other hand, has chosen to implement a strategy of exclusive conflict with vaccine-skeptics. The objective of the Green Pass , even more to guarantee a wider safety of indoor premises, now appears to be that of "punishing" the unvaccinated citizen.
What's more, it is to hit him with a "public punishment", a "psychic cost". In fact, as long as we talk about restaurants or cinemas, the punishment is “hidden”, because those who don't go there can't be seen; but when, for example, unvaccinated workers can no longer access the company canteens and are forced to eat a sandwich in the courtyard – away from the colleagues with whom they worked together until a few minutes before and with whom they worked together in the many months in which no one was vaccinated – then the punishment becomes, in fact, "pillory".
And the government continues to relaunch, from time to time tightening its policies towards the unvaccinated just at the moment when many countries with vaccination levels comparable to ours choose instead to move towards the end of the emergency. Thus, from October 15, even the expulsion of those who do not have the Green Pass from the workplace – a measure of enormous size that risks putting many people intimately convinced in their "objection to vaccination" in the face of chosen problems. of conscience.
The Italian government has, in no uncertain terms, decided to humiliate that minority of citizens who for whatever reason have chosen not to be vaccinated – personal health conditions, personal assessment of the relationship between risks and benefits, distrust in the effectiveness of vaccines or, in many cases, distrust of the overall pandemic management process. He decided, in no uncertain terms, to make a part of citizens of the "enemies of the people", of the "pariahs", of the "deplorables" , of the "anthropologically inferior" beings to be pointed out to the public mockery. He has chosen to teach the majority to fear them, to despise them and to consider them the sure cause of anything going wrong in the future.
Against the "vaccine-skeptics" a real process of dehumanization is being put in place, in many ways, which leads to the increasingly frequent newspaper articles "pleased" when one of them dies of Covid .
Yet these "vaccine-skeptics" are Italian citizens, part of our economic and social fabric, our friends and our colleagues. These are people who have attended the study paths provided by the Italian State, precisely those who were designed to create "conscious citizens" – and who today use their awareness and the cultural means they have developed to reach conclusions different from those to which we arrived vaccinated, that is the majority of the population.
One of the great mistakes that is being made is that of thinking that the well-being of a country is measured only in health terms. It was already heavily committed at the time of the lockdown , when it was considered that health goals should be pursued as an absolute value to cost what they cost from the point of view of the economy.
And now we are committing it perhaps in even more serious terms by believing that health objectives must be pursued as an absolute value at whatever cost from the point of view of national cohesion – that in the name of one fewer deaths or one ICU in the less one can pass over the opinions, sensitivities and fears of a part of the population with a tractor.
We are probably not fully aware of the type of laceration we are inducing. The consequences could be very heavy to the point that it could, perhaps for the first time, totally expel a good 10-15 percent of the population from the possibility of recognizing themselves, regardless of their own ideas, in a shared idea of community. "Social humiliation" and "violation of the body" risk being, for many people, serious injuries that they will carry with them and that will forever undermine their trust in public debate and institutions.
In these days we read about the fear of violent outcomes of no-vax dissent, but the feeling is that we are evaluating only the most visible and short-term consequences of the current state of tension. The risk is much greater and it is that the government's decision to manage the no-vax issue only by repeatedly throwing fuel on the fire will have heavy long-term consequences in terms of escalation of political tones and general incapacitation of the country.
Today we desperately need the ability to recover that little bit of empathy that is necessary to accept and recognize the other , even when he makes choices that we consider "wrong" according to the information we have and the way we process them.
It is necessary to recognize that there are different assessments of danger among people – there are those who fear Covid more than the vaccine and there are those who fear the vaccine more than Covid . Coexistence between these "hierarchies of fear" can only take place through respect for personal freedom of self-determination. My body, my choice.
If the freedom and dignity of some groups of people are trampled underfoot, we can perhaps win the battle of "today", but we will pay the whole bill in the Italy of tomorrow.
The post The “war on the unvaccinated” will (perhaps) win today's battle, but it will leave wounds that we will pay dearly 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/la-guerra-ai-non-vaccinati-fara-vincere-forse-la-battaglia-delloggi-ma-lascera-ferite-che-pagheremo-care/ on Tue, 28 Sep 2021 03:51:00 +0000.