Posted on by porlando

Prolonged Pandemic Protests

In May 2020, I wrote one of my last pieces focused on COVID: Pandemic Protests. In it I listed a number of ways COVID changed or was likely to change protests around the world:

“In many instances, top-down social distancing orders and bottom-up unwillingness of people to gather in large groups had similar effects. The large protests that we saw so much of in 2019 dwindled not because protesters won their demands or because governments cracked down hard, but because people didn’t go out as much.

“Protesters’ strength came from gathering in numbers. What to do now?”

And for a while in many places around the world, large, crowded protests did decline, or were replaced by social-distance versions.

The most notable of those declines for me, since I had also written about it several times here, was the impact on the existing protest movement in Hong Kong. That movement formerly drew anti-government protests of over one million people to the streets (in a city of 7.5 million). When COVID emerged, the cynical view was that the timing of the pandemic hurt the protesters (or helped the government).

In a way, the US experienced an opposite effect. Less than a week after I wrote Pandemic Protests, George Floyd was murdered in the US. At that point, many parts of the US were already a couple months into the early-COVID lockdown. The point I made back then was that a combination of the tensions of the lockdown period and impending US presidential election helped make the protests that followed into something bigger than they would have been otherwise.

A New Wave

Now we are in the middle of a new wave of protests: those related to vaccine mandates. These protesters are not primarily “anti-vax” (which was only ever a small percentage of the population) and make a point of saying so.

So why are people protesting vaccine mandates?

Internationally, there have been protests against vaccine mandates and continued lockdowns. Among the most notable were those in Australia (probably getting too much attention for their size) and Italy (probably getting too little attention for their size).

There have also been several large groups to do this recently in the US, including:

The above groups also protest by walking off the job (or waiting out deadlines),  gathering for protests, and advocating instead for frequent testing and exemptions for those who have natural immunity to COVID.

It’s not surprising that there are protests to vaccine mandates. The US has a long history of protesting. Just in the last half-century in the US we have had the BLM/George Floyd protests of 2020, the anti-Trump series of protests from 2016 – 2019, the anti-war Bush and Obama protests of 2003 – 2011, WTO/trade-related protests of 1999, anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s, and Civil Rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s, among many others.

But in comparison to today, those earlier protests didn’t trigger automatic firings or a mandated corporate response. People who participated in those protests were not automatically identifiable (well, apart from state surveillance of leaders). That is, participation in those earlier protests didn’t force an action that an employer could verify or that a government could require.

With today’s anti-vaccine mandate protests it’s different. Those who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID provide proof of their beliefs: they lack the right vaccination record.

I consider the numbers of people protesting vaccine mandates to be a failure of communication as well as a failure of trust. Both failures were a long time in the making.

New Tactics

In the modern era, something about protests feels anachronistic. We replaced the horse and buggy with automobiles, but we still use protest tactics that worked centuries ago. It’s as though we continued to use stirrups in cars.

Protests do provide information. But why do we still need them today? Should there be a better way?

After all, protests can be gamed. Media organizations sympathetic to one side will show them in a different light as a result. Participants can be tricked into taking a specific view. Showing up in large groups forces attention.

But in a time of pandemic, would another form of protest also be valid?

The purpose of a protest is to show numbers and the potential for chaos. That sways political leaders, helps gain followers by showing the popularity of the belief, and helps the protesters gain concessions.

If those are the purposes, how else could we provide that value?

I think of the way labor unions negotiate for better terms (at least in the positive sense). They first put a list of demands out for negotiation but then if they fail to achieve something acceptable, organize a strike.

Could protest movements organize in similar ways, but rather than gather or strike, demand a certain number of hours of airtime to discuss their demands more broadly?

Trust and Speed

As I wrote in Crumpled Butterfly:

“We usually think of speed as good. Getting somewhere faster or finishing something sooner are typically positives. Completing an action or a project shouldn’t prioritize slowness. In fact, slowness is often paired with unsuccessful and over-budget projects. But are there breaking points where increased speed makes a system worse and harms the project itself?”

There are a few causes of vaccine mandate protests.

    • It was just too fast. We went from vaccine disbelief and mistrust during last year’s election to COVID vaccine mandates. Vaccine mandates from history did not move as fast. In light of mRNA technology that could speed up development of future vaccines, that’s something to consider for the future as well.
    • Taking a public health approach vs an individual impact approach. Refusing to value tests for natural immunity and to allow isolated individuals to be exempt from vaccination makes people question motives.
    • Lack of trust. There is a mistrust of pharmaceutical companies, in particular Pfizer in the US. This mistrust extends to the new vaccines available for 5 – 11 year olds where the small health benefits may be outweighed by myocarditis risks in that age group, in particular for males.
    • Reaction against a heavy-handed or unpopular government. A purpose of a liberal democracy is to manage all of the above and bring as many people toward a common goal as possible. The response to vaccine mandates under a Trump administration may have been similar to a Biden administration. There just would have been a different mix of people pushing back.

If the goal truly is better health outcomes, the above concerns won’t be dismissed out of hand, even if they are believed to be exaggerated. Rather, government and health officials should address them honestly and patiently, realizing that public resistance can often be a feature, not a bug.

Trust is lacking for some on the vaccine because they lacked (for decades) much trust in government or healthcare. Lacking trust (whether justified or not), those same institutions can’t quickly regain it now.

Today is the first day I’ll show proof of vaccination to enter my workspace. My employer has already told me where I can get my booster shot. In an onsite pharmacy if I want Pfizer. (Or, I could find somewhere else in town to go if I want Moderna.)