Kids become the 'doctor's cattle'

Childhood covid vaccination is a secular initiation ritual.

Covid vaccines have been added to the childhood immunisation schedule in America, and the European Medical Agency has approved covid vaccines for under-5s.

Of course, there are pharmaceutical interests behind these decisions (notably, inclusion in the childhood vaccination schedule will protect pharmaceutical companies from liabilities claims). And yet there is also a political logic behind these events, a new step in the state control over the bodies of citizens.

Covid-19 vaccination was never treated as a simple medical procedure, evaluated in terms of medical benefits and risks for the subject. Instead, it was seen as a sort of citizenship test, an initiation to the body of the nation, after which the vaccinated person could take on the full rights of citizenship. The vaccinated person was seen as ‘responsible’ and demonstrating social committment; the unvaccinated person was seen as ‘selfish’, ‘egotistical’, ‘irresponsible’ and even (in words of the French president) ‘not citizens’. The vaccinated person displayed their vaccination status with pride.

Hence the concern with vaccinating young people and children, when it was known that vaccines had little to offer to these groups personally and did not prevent transmission to others. The covid vaccine became a sort of secular baptism or initiation ritual, a means of declaring that the young person was fit to go to public school, museums, summer camp, or university.

The political element has always been there as an undercurrent to vaccination. In France, vaccination certificates are the most important documents required for a child to enter the schooling system. When I recently tried to change my son’s French school, I was told that the only document required would be his vaccination certificate.

Even in the nineteenth century, public vaccination had this political dimension. It was at once a potentially beneficial medical treatment, and also a form of state integration of citizenry, which was particularly targeted at what were seen to be the infectious and disorderly bodies of the poor.

Working-class resistance to compulsory vaccination in the nineteenth century claimed medical ‘home rule’ over the body, and resisted what they saw to be a form of state control. A dairyman who had been given an order to vaccinate his children, threw the order back in the face of the vaccinator, declaring that ‘the children were his own property and not the property of the state’. In 1884, a working class suffragist denounced vaccination as a kind of branding, declaring that the people had become the ‘doctor’s cattle’ and the vaccination mark ‘his brand’ (1).

With non-covid vaccinations, medical reasoning remained a decisive element, and the mainstream childhood vaccinations were largely safe and beneficial.

Yet with covid, the political narrative around vaccination has predominated and overcome medical considerations. One US doctor said that the tennis player Novak Djokovic was ‘selfish’ for not being vaccinated. The doctor said that vaccination an important ‘statement for your commitment to your community’, and that sportspeople should show ‘courage’, ‘discipline’, and ‘sacrifice’. The fact that vaccination is discussed (by a doctor!) in similar terms to military conscription shows that this is longer a medical procedure used rationally in the interests of the recipient.

This reverses the guiding principle of medical treatment. The traditional principle of ‘First, do no harm’, indicates that a person should have a good and positive reason to be subject to a medical treatment. When covid vaccination is seen as a form of civic integration, there is a default assumption that everyone must have it. The body that has not been injected is seen as outside the citizenry and outside the system. Even the American football player who was allergic to an ingredient in the vaccines failed to persuade authorities that he should not get the shot.

It is well known that pharmaceutical interests can stack committees and swindle studies to get approval, and they have long done this for various drugs. But nobody thought that they were a good citizen if they took a particular Alzheimer’s drug. The formidable social narrative that exists around the covid vaccine is an entirely different beast, and has driven unprecedented decisions.

The damage that will be done to a certain number of children as a result of this narrative shows the terrible danger of medical treatments being motivated by interests other than the health of the patient.

(1) Bodily Matters: The Anti-vaccination Movement In England, 1853-1907, Nadja Durbach, Duke University Press, p108