Jonathan Kay: Our COVID culture wars are just getting started

Hope of a vaccine gives the “Screw COVID” crowd another excuse to keep on screwing, while policy nerds like me have more reason to take long view and sit tight.

By Jonathan Kay 

It’s been playing out everywhere — from Diwali parties in Brampton, Ont., to megachurches in Los Angeles. Even as a majority of the population plays by the rules brought down by governments to combat COVID-19, small subcultural clusters of superspreaders flout lockdown policies. In some cases, as in Hasidic communities, these groups are defined by their unusually observant religious lifestyles. But in other cases, it’s the opposite. On Saturday, police broke up a “Rumble in the Bronx” warehouse event where men staged unlicensed fistfights while more than 200 spectators stood “shoulder to shoulder … drinking, smoking hookah and” — gee, what a shock — “not wearing masks.” Police in Toronto just busted up a birthday party with more than 100 guests at a self-storage facility. Ontario premier Doug Ford expressed the views of many when he said, "Like, come on ... I just give my head a shake when I hear these things. One hundred people in a storage unit, really? Nothing ceases to amaze me now with the behaviour of some people."

The common physical denominator is that these are all events where people engage in singing, chanting, cheering, or other forms of agitated face-to-face breathing, which, as we have known since April, is how COVID-19 spreads. But what’s at least as important is the common cultural denominator: COVID-19 rule-breaking has been most consistently and predictably observed within subcultures whose shared social capital is built up around deeply immersive physical interactions that cannot be replicated electronically (a pattern that can play out at the micro level of the extended family, as there is no real digital substitute for a thanksgiving or Christmas dinner). 

The entire culture war over the public-health response to COVID-19 has been shaped by this fact: The people who are most strenuous (and, at times, hectoring) in their lockdown pronouncements tend to be well-educated, economically secure knowledge workers who were already habituated in the use of electronic media for professional and social interactions; and who have little stake in subcultures that are dependent on physically mediated forms of communal interaction. 

As the COVID-19 caseload surges, this cultural conflict has stretched some societies past the limits of their pre-existing level of social cohesion. Canada has not quite gotten to that point yet. But the United States clearly has, as vividly illustrated by a recent mass-attendance motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. Everyone knew that the event would become a deadly pandemic superspreader event, but local politicians simply didn’t feel they had the moral authority to assert the primacy of public-health science over ideologically inflected conservative folk mysticism. As The New York Times reported, some attendees even “called the rally a declaration of freedom, and went home with T-shirts declaring, ‘Screw COVID. I Went to Sturgis.’”

The United States is a special case, because the pandemic overlapped with an acute political and racial crisis. But I don’t think there is any society on earth that could indefinitely maintain its cohesion under these circumstances, especially since the above-described social fault lines run along the pre-existing economic grooves that separate privileged knowledge workers who spend their days on email, Twitter and Slack, from blue-collar service-economy workers treading water as temps or gig-economy “contractors.” It’s getting colder, and the nights are getting longer. We no longer have park picnics, backyard barbecues and disc golf to keep us happy and sane. Humans are social creatures, and eventually everyone gets to the point where “Screw COVID” feels like an irrepressible impulse, no matter how many lectures they get from government and media. 

There’s a great line from Neuromancer, in which William Gibson described Night City as “a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.” The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns often have felt like that. And I will admit to experiencing some inhuman curiosity about how this would all end if things were to persist for years. But that isn’t going to happen, thanks to the veritable deus ex machina that will likely be supplied, in vaccine form, by the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. The test results we have seen so far are preliminary. But even so, it seems probable that we will witness the start of a mass distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine — indeed, multiple vaccines — to health workers before 2020 is over. Unfortunately, that means we will also be cast into yet another culture war, this time over the question of how to distribute the vaccine most efficiently and equitably. But compared to the alternative, it’s a good problem to have. 

On November 9, Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech announced that, in a placebo-controlled study of 43,538 individuals, their vaccine candidate was associated with 90 per cent protection among participants who hadn’t exhibited signs of prior COVID-19 infection. As former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier explained in my publication, Quillette (and in a subsequent Quillette podcast episode), this is not only great news in and of itself; it also foreshadows good news from some of the many other companies seeking a vaccine — since all are focusing on the same spike protein as Pfizer researchers have targeted. We now know that this is a viable strategy, even if the details remain in flux. 

Sure enough, this week, Moderna announced that its own COVID-19 vaccine candidate also has achieved 90-per-cent-plus vaccine efficacy. Both companies rely on the same novel mRNA technology. But unlike its Pfizer counterpart, Moderna’s candidate vaccine is “expected to remain stable at standard refrigerator temperatures of 2° to 8°C for 30 days,” with “shipping and long-term storage conditions at standard freezer temperatures of -20°C for 6 months,” such that it may be “distributed using widely available vaccine delivery and storage infrastructure.” That is much bigger news than the efficacy numbers (94.5 per cent for Moderna versus 90 per cent for Pfizer), because it suggests the possibility that we all may be able to eventually get such a vaccine at a drug store or neighbourhood clinic, as opposed to just hospitals or single-purpose government locations with specialized facilities. It also would seem to get around the logistical bottleneck imposed by a Pfizer vaccine that reportedly required refrigeration at -57C.

These results have not yet been peer-reviewed; and approval from the FDA and other national agencies hasn’t yet been granted (though it should come by the end of the month). Although neither Pfizer nor Moderna reports significant side effects associated with their candidate vaccines, it is certainly possible that their research participants may exhibit worrying after-effects. (On the other hand, we may get news of even better vaccine candidates: Dr. Flier notes that Johnson & Johnson is pursuing a one-dose vaccine that apparently might not require any cold storage whatsoever.) But barring such developments, this week’s news from these two tech giants represents a real public-health game-changer, especially since both companies have emphasized their capacity to deliver tens of millions of doses before the end of 2020. Pfizer alone says it may be able to deliver “up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.” 

While this good news is being widely reported, I’ve been surprised by how little the tenor of public discussion has changed in recent days — much of which echoes the same arguments about lockdowns we’ve endured since March. Responding to the Moderna news, Globe & Mail writer Adam Radwanski sensibly asked, “With these encouraging signals about vaccines, at what point does public-health messaging take a slightly more optimistic tone, with more emphasis on light at the end of the tunnel if we’re just willing and able to do our part through winter?” 

It’s a good question. But I fear that, in the short term, at least, the prospect of a vaccine will simply exacerbate our pre-existing culture-war rut in regard to pandemic policy. The “Screw COVID” crowd now has yet another excuse to keep on screwing, while policy nerds like me and Adam have one more reason to justify taking the long view and sitting tight. For the next few months, at least, our society’s confused emotional state is going to resemble that of castaways who suddenly catch sight of land. On one hand, you now have a lot more to lose by getting careless and slipping overboard. On the other hand, hey, it’s party time. 

The emergence of the vaccine will also complicate all of the narratives we love to recite about the evils of Big Pharma and the incompetence of government officials. The story of the German-Turkish husband-and-wife team that pioneered the vaccine research developed by Pfizer — Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci — is an inspiring tale of medical brilliance, professional excellence, and, yes, multiculturalism. Moreover, for all Donald Trump’s ignorant pronouncements about COVID-19, there is no question that his government’s Operation Warp Speed funding program helped accelerate the process of vaccine development — even if the rollout of the vaccine in the United States likely will be a chaotic affair. (For what it’s worth, my prediction for Canada is that the process will be more orderly because of our established top-down provincial public-health hierarchies; but also that the zero-sum nature of vaccine allocation will cause us to fall back into traditional regionalist bickering.)

It will be easy to dismiss the arguments of fringe anti-vaxxers, who claim that vaccines cause autism or lead to government mind control. But we will also have to deal with libertarians who argue, not unreasonably, that adult citizens shouldn’t be compelled to submit to medical treatments, even if they are safe. Meanwhile, progressives will argue, persuasively, that the most vulnerable groups — including long-term-care workers and residents — get preferred access to any vaccine (and, in some cases, whether skin colour should be used as a proxy for vulnerability). But because of the compressed time frame, policy likely will simply be made on the fly by provincial health officials on a common-sense basis. 

All of which to say: Culture warriors of all stripes will be able to continue wiling away the dark winter days of late 2020 and early 2021 with arguments, new and old, about the public response to the pandemic — even as the vast bulk of us quietly shuffle forward in the slush outside Shoppers Drug Mart and Pharmaprix to receive tiny drops of a magic elixir that, for untold thousands of us, will mean the difference between life and death. 

Perhaps, as we do so, we might contemplate how amazing it is that we got to this point, less than a year after this disease had even been discovered. I would also ask that we spare a thought for Dr. Sahin, Dr. Türeci, and the countless other dedicated health professionals who have been busy toiling away in obscurity, quietly saving the planet while the rest of us noisily groused about all the things everyone else was doing wrong. 

Jonathan Kay is an editor at Quillette, host of the Quillette podcast, and an op-ed writer at the National Post. 

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