How Covid became a morality tale

As Age opinion-extruders go, Julie Szego is hardly the worst - that would be unabashed Andrews apologist Jon Faine.

On occasion Szego can even say something remotely sensible, which somehow slips through the production process, before defaulting to the usual tortured nonsense of left tribalist groupthink and partisan barracking. 

However, last year as Melbourne winced under yet another interminable hideous lockdown, she produced a sentence so unmoored from any recognisable glimmer of sanity or even common humanity that I had to re-read it a few times to clear away the disbelief.

"But – admit it – for a big chunk of us the fact we’re on track to be the longest locked-down city in the world is a source of perverse pride," she wrote.

No source of pride could be more perverse than lockdowns.

We will probably never know the full mental health toll lockdowns took in Victoria, especially on the young and even more specifically young women who took their own lives in unprecedented numbers.

It is also estimated that 3500 cancer diagnoses were missed.

Lockdowns also led to surges in domestic violence, unhealthy eating, lack of exercise, alcohol consumption and have left Victoria with the nation’s greatest raging drug habit.

Furthermore the particularly heavy handed approach taken by the Victorian government resulted in deaths of refugees and children in vulnerable situations.

Also because of the loss of education and squashing of opportunities, “Generation Lockdown” faces more limited life chances and choices.

This is before you even consider the suffering lockdowns caused to those cut off from friends or family.

AFL great Luke Darcy memorably confronted the premier, perhaps the only time this has happened in the whole Covid period, with one such story about his father.

Not to mention the loss of livelihoods and businesses built up over many years or just the voiding of what should have been precious and irreplaceable experiences of play, socialising and celebrating across all ages, but again especially for the young.

The final insult to add to all these oceans of injury is the finding that lockdowns didn’t  even work to save lives and while that paper is still being debated one quick way to verify it is by looking at Victoria's comparatively dismal record.

So, if lockdowns did not save lives and instead inflicted immeasurable harm what did they provide?

Szego provides the answer when she rhapsodises about feeling “almost saintly” for “smothering the virus”, how the vaccinated victims were “blameless” and how she has found her “second wind in this martyrdom caper”.

Covid responses have, in her mind, moved from being a question of safety and risk calculation, science and rationality in other words, to a measure of how good and devout a person or community is.

This puts them squarely in the realm of morality or religion.

Catching a cold or flu-like virus was previously regarded as a commonplace and largely unavoidable risk of happenstance but now it seems to amount to a "moral failing", which makes it a bit medieval.

This has led to ABC has running separate articles on how to deal with the guilt of catching or transmitting Covid.

These advocate meditating on soothing platitudes of self-forgiveness but perhaps would be better advised to borrow something more concrete and time-tested in the business of guilt expiation, such as a few Hail Marys.

Speaking of which, while vaccines now appear all too fallible in stopping Covid they instead have the infallible papal endorsement of being a “moral obligation”.

Pope Francis did not, despite what some satirical websites have posted, say only the vaccinated will enter the more fun heaven but it remains the case in many places that those seeking spiritual salvation will not be able to find it in Catholic churches unless they are vaccinated.

So, it really is a casting out of the unclean or impure, even though the organisation’s founder explicitly went out of his way to minister to lepers and other outcasts.

While the zealous naked eye can't easily determine who the unvaxxed unclean are there is another more obvious signal of at least some adherence to the catechism of Covidism.

Despite there being little evidence to back them, masks seem especially important to the doctorly priests enforcing the new faith, even when there is no one in infection-range near them.

Another doctor when faced with a triage situation where an unvaxxed Covid patient had, on the face of it, a greater chance of life than one in the late stages of terminal cancer asked a question of her “ethically conflicted” colleague that seemed a little Godlike in its presumption of punishing wickedness.

I think, but am none too sure, she ascertained the wicked unvaxxed patient was not in immediate danger as she chose to give the ICU bed to her “blameless” cancer patient, more it seems to comfort the family than because of any chance of recovery.

The fate of the “unvaccinated” patient does not interest her, except in as far as he worthlessly takes up an ICU bed that could, or really should, go to another patient.

There is even the suggestion at the end of the article that his "extended stay in intensive care" could be considered "consolation", as in he is getting his just desserts.

That the unvaxxed are lesser human beings has become pretty well an article of  the Covidist faith.  

It means the WA Premier can threaten to make their life "very difficult", which in a particular bit of prohibition pettiness amounts to denying them alcohol.

I would be interested as to what medical advice this measure is based on.

It seems any cruelty inflicted on the sinners, such as denying them the right to see their dying father, can be justified.

In an early but very strong entry for most appalling column of the year, The West Australian’s Kate Emery takes us through the mental contortions of deciding what to do when she discovers her house guest will be “unvaxxinated”. 

She acknowledges that vaccines are of little use against the dominant Covid strain of Omicron, although she then talks about how they improve survivability odds of men aged 60-99, a group she is not in unless the photo that goes with her column is very misleading.

To give her some credit she does realise that unvaccinated does not automatically mean “diseased” and as a vaccinated “healthy” 30-year-old she has little to fear from catching Covid.

So she lumps in the risk to her children, which is also negligible, and the risk of passing Covid onto more vulnerable people as a way to assure us her “unease” is not entirely selfish, even if that’s a tough sell three print columns into a piece that has obsessively talked about herself.

The “anti-vaxxer” by the way is given no voice, I suppose she forfeited that right because of her sinfulness.

Eventually Emery answers her own question about whether she has an “obligation to make the lives of anti-vaxxers harder”.

Not very surprisingly, she believes she does.

If this person (if, indeed, you can call them a person at this point!) “cares so little for the vulnerable people in the community” and fails to “overcome their hesitancy for the good of others, they deserve to wear the consequences of that”.

Indignantly she lists the punishments already being doled out by the state government to her guest, which apparently makes adding one more entirely justifiable.

She demands her guest wear a mask in the house for her family’s “safety” (although it seems they are mask-free) but I'd say more importantly to impose one more “inconvenience” on her recalcitrant guest.

It seems the real active ingredient in Covid vaccination is often great walloping doses of self-righteousness.

However, you might call that a narcotic intoxicant than a medicine. 

Perhaps that’s what some need in order to feel consoled over the unrelenting major and minor cruelties, degradations and indignities that have been inflicted in the name of Covid.

However, for another group the excuse of “doing it for others” seems a convenient excuse and sanction to ostracise, humiliate and punish others and to even celebrate it.

That’s a moral condition science will always struggle to find a cure for.

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