“I am a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, and I deal with people’s anxieties—and their paranoia too. Many people think ‘the anxious’ are necessarily weak (one medical colleague calls the vaccine hesitant ‘wimps’). But this is, if not entirely wrong, a superficial way of understanding anxiety.” So writes Norman Doidge in a long 4-part essay in Tablet that has been widely recommended as the best to date on the subject of vaccine “hesitancy.”
In the essay (actually a short book with substantial chapters), the psychiatrist and author of the bestselling The Brain That Changes Itself provides a history of the rocky road of vaccine development in order to help readers (perhaps even his arrogant colleague) understand the legitimate concerns of the unvaccinated. “One needn’t agree with the decision or actions of the vaccine hesitant in order to learn something from them and about them,” he justifies.
From his psychoanalytic perspective, Doidge explains the nature of what he calls the “behavioral immune system,” from which arises a “state of panic, fear, loathing, and disgust of the other” when in the vicinity of potential agents of infection. He argues that both those who are pro-vaccine (especially those who are pro-mandate) and those who have chosen not to take the vaccines are experiencing forms of anxiety; they are merely anxious about different matters. Doidge seeks to make the case for transparent consultation and persuasion rather than coercion. This is certainly better than what we’ve got now, but the implication that all, or even most, should be persuaded to be vaccinated is never satisfactorily proven—in fact, quite the opposite.
The expository middle sections of Doidge’s detailed essay are informative, even fascinating, while seeming to contradict his declared purpose and conclusion. Far from merely explaining why people experience so-called hesitancy, he abundantly justifies outright rejection of the vaccines, which he shows to be highly “leaky” (unable to prevent infection or transmission) and inadequately tested.
In the second section, Doidge gives a short history of traditional vaccines, stressing both their manifold achievements and their undeniably dark underside, including the unethical treatment of some research subjects, lack of informed consent, and vaccine mortalities. He also provides an overview of the illicit dealing, corrupt regulatory environment, and proven misconduct of the same pharmaceutical companies responsible for the present crop of vaccines, as well as many deeply alarming cases of collusion between these companies, academic researchers, and the government officials responsible for drug approval.
In the third section, he provides an outline of the often-duplicitous or at best fatally misguided “Master Narrative” about the Covid vaccines, explaining the rationale for their unusually quick rollout and admitting that as a result, they were tested for a very short period. He laments the lack of transparency of vaccine trial data, which has prevented independent verification and analysis of pharmaceutical claims. He also shows, once again, the corrupt relationship between government officials and Big Pharma: in the case of Moderna, government agencies “stand to benefit” from Moderna sales and “individual government employees may get royalties from them,” while vaccine mandates “would be based on studies that were authored in some instances by […] employees of the companies themselves, which were testing their own products.” This section in particular deserves to be widely read.
A substantial section on false vaccine claims focuses on Israel: Doidge shows how it went from leading the triumphant vaccine charge to becoming the Covid capital of the world, with record numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the fully vaccinated. A very poor country such as Ethiopia, in contrast, with an extremely low rate of vaccination, has survived Covid quite well for reasons that deserve to be far more fully recognized and studied.
One comes to the end of these sections wondering afresh why anyone should be expected to trust what vaccine manufacturers, officials, and members of the medical establishment have to say about anything, least of all about vaccines that have demonstrably not been fully tested over the long term and whose short-term adverse reactions, including death, are far from insignificant.
Doidge never does answer this question, and in fact he occasionally relies on statements and studies by these very officials to make his case that although the vaccine hesitant are not entirely wrong in their view, it is right to attempt to persuade them out of their “anxiety.” For example, he accepts a very high number (700,000) for those who have died from Covid in the United States without questioning how many of these died from Covid as opposed to merely with Covid (and with multiple co-morbidities).
Perhaps most seriously, Doidge’s psychoanalytic framework, with its focus on elucidating alleged anxieties, seems unnecessarily patronizing and ultimately inadequate to the explosive information he reveals. Having worked with patients who experience anxiety, he appears to assume that people who choose not to be vaccinated are suffering from a psychological malady that can and should be healed through a “talking cure.” But isn’t hesitation entirely rational in these circumstances? Is Doidge merely pretending to diagnose an anxiety that he knows to be well-justified?
At the beginning of the fourth chapter, Doidge seems to be making the case that it is actually the fanatically pro-vaccine, rather than the hesitant, who are trapped in a “primal, archaic, cognitively rigid brain circuit,” “almost addicted to being scared […] demanding that all the previous protections go on indefinitely.” Reading this section, I thought I must have misread the opening chapter about “reaching” the skeptics.
But no, that is still, strangely enough, Doidge’s stated goal. Near the essay’s conclusion, he refers with approval to an American physician and YouTube personality named Zubin Damania (!), a vaccine enthusiast who makes videos attempting to persuade the unvaccinated by working through their expressed concerns and making them “feel listened to.” Doidge seems to imply that his essay is a literary version of Damania’s videos.
But given the devastating record so far of Covid-vaccine false promises, disappointments, obfuscation, lack of transparency, collusion, and outcome unknowns, why should anyone seek to persuade another person at all? Doidge has conclusively not explained why, given the lies and unethical actions of health authorities past and present, anyone should be willing to risk themselves to combat a virus that poses such a small threat to healthy people. I can only conclude that Doidge himself is in the grip of a type of cognitive dissonance, claiming to be pro-Covid-vaccines while writing 25,000 + words justifying their rejection.
Related: Gavin Newsom Had Adverse Reaction to COVID Booster & Flu Shots, Report
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