"This is life now", the shining wires of covid denialism

Fiver in Watership Down

When I returned from a wonderful small-scale workshop in the Peak District, one of my fellow participants wrote in the WhatsApp chat that he had tested positive for Covid-19. He urged us to look out for symptoms and to test ourselves. I felt fine and did 2 RCT tests a day apart nonetheless. I am very grateful to him for his caution and for warning us.

A sign of the times, someone in the group chat commented, “This is life now.”

Someone else agreed “It’s inevitable now.”

The inevitability is something that we, apparently, must accept, even though Covid continues to have bad long-term health effects including elevated mortality rates (which are increasingly put into the baseline so they become invisible), decreases in life expectancy, and the onslaught on happiness and wellbeing that is long covid.

We must all live with this, because it will enable us to live a normal life, so the thought goes.

Indeed, in a recent Statnews article entitled “Amid another rise in cases, Covid’s new normal has set in” Helen Branswell writes

“While the angst is understandable, there’s something we need to grasp at this point in our coexistence with SARS-CoV-2: This is our life now.”

But is it acceptance, or is it denialism? I think it’s denialism, masking as acceptance. Phrases like, “it’s inevitable now,” “We all are going to get it [or indeed must get it] multiple times” are forms of denialism.

The shining wire

In the movie and book Watership Down, by Richard Adams, there is a group of rabbits looking for a new home. On their journey, they encounter a warren which looks, on the face of it, a picture of prosperity. The rabbits have shiny coats and look healthy. Not long after, the terrible reality is revealed: they get their ample food (carrots and lettuce) from humans who put traps everywhere.

The price for their prosperity is sudden, surreptitious death.

The rabbits from this warren have strong social mechanisms to stop anyone from talking about this. They sing lyrical poetry about accepting death. When the newcomers are trying to save their friend who is trapped, they become violent and try to stop them from doing so. Mustn’t disrupt the normal!

The story of that warren has struck me always as very creepy, worse than the totalitarian warren of Efrafa which is presented later in the story. As Hazel (the main character) realizes, the problem with the death trap warren is that they’ve become unable to even envisage another reality is possible. They’ve given up on their trickster epistemology; they no longer believe in the trickster el-Ahrairah who can always show that another way is possible. As Burkhart argues, trickster epistemologies are vital for us to challenge structures of authority.

The scarlet letter

Like the rabbits in the warren with the shining wires, we have social mechanisms that discourage talk about covid, or to even embody those annoying reminders of the pandemic (the CDC director already called masks the “scarlet letter” of the pandemic in 2022). From “you do you” we quickly shifted to “stop living like it’s 2020. Everyone has moved on now.”

The silence is uncomfortable, for instance, in a departmental meeting when someone mentioned their partner’s struggles with long covid, who went on a short vacation hoping to catch a break, only to get a horrible relapse from the effort upon their return. We all were silent and uncomfortable, because it can happen to any of us.

It can happen to anyone, so we pretend it can happen to no-one. The “vulnerable” have become this increasingly shrinking set of diffuse individuals, until the set has become empty. It’s not unusual to see someone pushing eighty, recovering from cancer and still on immunosuppressant medication attend a large, dense gathering without a mask or other mitigations (all the previous are real examples I’ve encountered).

None of us are vulnerable anymore (note how it first was elderly people, but they’ve also moved on), because there’s no way to adequately protect oneself in a society that has “moved on” from covid, other than to withdraw for what seems indefinitely from social life, and few people are willing and able to do this.

The denialism is also clear in the communications about boosters, which are something like this, “If you really want protection, okay go ahead, but why get yet another shot of mRNA vaccine? You’ve got that hybrid immunity, remember, it’s great! Are you really such a vulnerable wimp that you feel you need the shot where everyone else is fine?” This is not the language but the sentiment conveyed.

Imagine any kind of similar discourse about any other disease with similar death rates and long term effects. The discourse has shifted from protecting against disease to protecting against hospitalization. Apparently, the reason I took flu shots all these years wasn’t so I wouldn’t be indisposed and unable to function well as I believed. I got them to prevent me from being hospitalized! Silly me, I never realized this. I rather value not feeling sick as a dog, but apparently now any infection no matter how horrid and no matter the long term effects is fine as long as you don’t die or end up in hospital.

By framing vaccination as an individual choice that the healthy do not need to make (in an ableist society), is it a surprise so few Americans took up the booster last year? Self-fulfilling prophecy, it is no surprise that media articles after a vaccination round with low uptake will go on about how very few Americans are concerned about getting seriously ill with covid. After all, You are not vulnerable. You are normal, sensible, indeed, invincible. The few people left eeking out something of a covid-safe existence are portrayed as people with a mental health issue, who somehow cannot move on and live their life as before.

Hypernormalization

In the final decades of the USSR’s long drawn out existence, everyone knew it was falling apart and not working anymore. Yet, as anthropologist Alexei Yurchak pointed out, no-one talked about it and that reality was presented as if no other reality was possible. He introduced the term “hypernormalization” in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Everyone knew the system was shit, but no-one could envision a functional alternative. After a while, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. If no-one in a society can imagine an alternative way of being, then it becomes the only way.

This is exactly what’s going on with Covid. This is life now, but only because we have as societies decided that it is, like in that warren in Watership Down we’ve decided that the temporary economic gains outweigh structural changes, even such unobtrusive things like regular vaccinations and air purification. Then, governments massage people’s will and opinion, taking advantage of the fact that people dread sticking out/standing apart, and appealing to their natural sense of wanting to align their behavior with others. Soon, the new normal is the hypernormal.

But the costs accumulate. With the continued incidence of long covid and absence of effective treatment, we are moving toward a sicker and more disabled workforce, that no amount of “get back into the office, it’s great for your health and wellbeing” media pieces are going to be able to massage away. The fact that our governments aren’t even fully committed to decreasing these costs, only putting fractions of money in research on better treatments and vaccines, indicates that they are in the denialism stage, not in acceptance.

Acceptance looks very different. It requires we do not look the other way, and that we give the problem some genuine room in our lives, for instance, by being empathetic to those who have long covid or lost someone to covid.

Consider a similar situation, the climate change denialism many of our governments and we as individuals participate in, even those of us who verbally acknowledge that “climate change is real.” There is no argument for ignoring it, not even economic. The total cost of extreme weather events in the US in 2023 alone is a staggering 56.7 billion dollars. Whatever big oil companies make, it is unjustifiable that even the immediate costs (let alone the long term ones) of unmitigated climate change are so high. Similarly, the economic gains we make for denying covid’s existence and cloaking discussion of it in silence pale given the massive amount of human suffering, loss (of life expectancy, of health) and the continued death toll.

As I argued in this recent piece in Aeon, denialism is harmful because you cannot act when you deny the basic facts of your world upon which you’re supposed to act. Taking a leaf from Spinoza’s view on self-preservation and self-knowledge, the more you know, the better informed your decisions can be, and the better your course of action (all things being equal) becomes.

We made great advances in medicine, engineering, governmental policy, and other fields not by denying basic elements of our existence but acknowledging them, and researching them. This is ultimately going to be our ticket out. You might think, as some pieces already argued in 2021 that we can end a pandemic “socially” by simply pretending it’s over and moving on. But we’re only hamstringing ourselves, and denying ourselves opportunities to act and make things better.

I spoke to someone at work recently who had avoided Covid all this time, but had recently gone back to normal, and she caught it in a coffee shop (she told me). Weeks after infection, she is still very tired. I cautioned her to take it easy, hoping to reduce the risk of long covid (there is no official guidance on this, to my knowledge). Even if you move on, the shining wires lie, hidden from view, and they can ensnare anyone.