The main holiday in the United States, Thanksgiving, this Thursday (25th) will concentrate the largest number of Americans in transit since the beginning of the quarantine in March 2020. Airlines alone expect a movement of 20 million passengers passengers. Vaccinated and unvaccinated families will flock to eat turkey and celebrate the supposed meal of the pilgrims who colonized the country in the 17th century.
Confidence sign that the pandemic has been defeated? No. Infection rates rose again in the country — 30% in two weeks. Although Covid’s demographics are uneven, determined by regions where vaccine deniers prevail, the curve is upward.
The explosion of cases in Europe, intensified by the delta variant, and the refusal of Americans, swimming in vaccine doses, to immunize themselves signal yet another pandemic winter. It is impossible to dissociate the political context, cultural wars over masks and social distancing from the sabotage of combating Covid-19.
New York should be the poster city in the fall (Northern hemisphere) of returning to normal. But only 68% of the eligible population was vaccinated with two doses. At the moment, Covid, like influenza, seems to insist on imposing itself as seasonal, like the flu. The number of infections in the city, where booster vaccination is recommended for the entire adult population, is on the rise.
Critics of federal health authorities are beginning to say that the “third booster dose” should have been mandatory months ago. Will the reopening of events, live shows and the admission of travelers from countries like Brazil, which were on the list of restrictions, fuel a wave of infections in NY? The answer must be yes; the local infection rate here is now the highest since April, when the vaccinated population was much smaller.
Resistance to the vaccine and measures of social distancing, such as the wearing of masks, spread and became the banner of employee unions in activities such as health and education in New York.
It is hard to imagine fighting 20th century epidemics such as smallpox and polio under the current climate of militancy that confuses individual freedom with the right to infect vulnerable people.
The new wave of the pandemic in the Northern Hemisphere coincides with the realization that democracy, in the USA and in dozens of countries, is in retreat. Obscurantism and distrust of science are not products of the 21st century. The Vaccine Revolt in Rio de Janeiro, in 1904, was not only motivated by immunization against smallpox, but against urban reforms.
The difference, in 2021, in the anti-vaccination activism we are witnessing in Europe and the US is that resistance to measures that save lives and can restore the economy of countries ravaged by the pandemic is fueled by a frightening nihilism, a disregard for death.
The idea that any mandatory measure (such as requiring a vaccine to enter public places) constitutes an affront to individual freedom is a Trojan horse for Western democracies. Want greater oppression than living at the mercy of citizens who believe they have the power to risk their lives?
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