On 10 March this year, the Kenyan newspaper, The Nation, reported “an African leader”was in a Nairobi hospital being treated for Covid-19 infection. Speculation arose that the leader in question was John Magufuli, the President of Tanzania who had last been seen in public on 27 February.
A week later, it was officially announced that Magufuli had died of heart failure. The Tanzanian Vice President, Samia Suluhu, made the announcement, saying Magufuli had suffered from heart problems for a decade. Those problems were later described as “chronic atrial fibrillation”, a condition known to cause an irregular and often accelerated heart rate. In an overwhelming number of cases, it is easily treated by a pharmacological response.
In May 2020, Magufuli had declared Tanzania free of Covid-19 after two weeks of national prayer. In an odd way he was right because the Tanzanian government had stopped publishing its Covid-19 infections and deaths despite lectures from the US State Department and the World Health Organisation. No Covid-19 data, no Covid-19.
Magufuli instructed the Tanzanian Army to conduct Covid-19 tests on goats, sheep, even pieces of fruit and claimed they had been found to be positive for Covid-19.
He sacked the head of the country’s national laboratory. It became a crime to distribute any information about Covid-19 that was not approved by his government. Magufuli denounced those who chose to wear masks.
And now Magufuli is dead. We’ll never know the exact cause of death but Magufuli was the world’s most politically prominent avowed anti-vaxxer, a national leader spruiking his own version of anti-vax misinformation.
In a speech three months before his death, Magufuli said, “Vaccinations are dangerous. If white people were able to come up with vaccinations, a vaccination for AIDS would have been found.” Instead, he urged traditional remedies including herbal treatments, witchcraft and soothsaying for an infectious disease he and his government maintained did not exist within Tanzanian borders.
The late Tanzanian President is decaying proof that sometimes life comes at you fast and can go away just as quickly.
It’s important to make the distinction between anti-vaxxers and the vaccine hesitant. The vaccine hesitant are those unsure, uncertain, perhaps sceptical of accelerated clinical trials. It’s OK to be hesitant. It’s OK to source as much information as one can but if you find yourself prowling the darker corners of the web where it is claimed the federal government along with governments around the world, are in the megadeath business-by-vaccine in order to turn the mountains of corpses into a form of bio-slurry to be used as crop fertiliser, you probably should take it down a notch.
An anti-vaxxer, however, is a person who spreads misinformation that seeks to deter people from receiving the vaccination. It has ceased to be about their own personal choices. They insist on telling others what they should do by force of propaganda and sometimes, by shouting at them.
I was reminded of this yesterday after a reader forwarded me a link to a video of a motley group of maskless anti-vaxxers who were filming at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, known colloquially as Jeff’s Shed after former Premier Jeff Kennett, during the lockdown late last week.
There they were mocking people standing in line to receive the vaccine and going so far as to shriek at them that they’d all be dead within three years.
One member of the group watched people emerge from Jeff’s Shed and pronounced them all “walking dead” and wished they could be identified in some way so she and those of her ilk could avoid their company. Vaccine passports perhaps?
This ramshackle collection of idiots also celebrated as they saw a woman scuttle away from the long queue. Perhaps she had forgotten her car keys or her phone. But the anti-vaxxers pronounced her “converted.”
Frightening people about to receive a needle is just one of their nasty methods.
The good news is, the anti-vaxxers’ days are numbered. Once the roll out of vaccines occurs around the world and in this country, as slow as it has been, there will come a time where the world must return to a kind of pre-Covid-19 normal.
Let’s attempt to peer into the future, perhaps as far away as early next year where hopefully, large numbers of the population are vaccinated. International departures and arrivals will recommence, quarantine requirements for vaccinated people entering the country will be lifted. Certain parts of the world will be safer than others, driven by high rates of vaccination – the US and the UK for example. There may well be red zones where quarantine remains a requirement.
Covid-19 and its variants will still exist. For a period at least after international borders are reopened, Covid-19 infections will rise. Those vaccinated may suffer infection but even with variants, the protection the vaccinated have will ensure they will not be hospitalised or suffer serious illness.
Where does that leave anti-vaxxers, many of whom it must be said are on the wrong side of their middle years and are more vulnerable to serious illness and death, post-infection chronic conditions, including loss of cognitive function, renal disorders and heart and respiratory conditions?
If I can be allowed to stretch my stint at the crystal ball just a moment or two longer, I’m going to predict that a good few will pop on their baseball caps and sunglasses and head off to medical clinics to have a trained medical professional inject them with a Covid-19 vaccination. Sleeves will be rolled down and firmly buttoned before they return to their keyboards, preach their nonsense on the ever diminishing social media platforms that permit their garbage, dripping in hypocrisy, the ultimate pandemic lie.
I am confident of that particular prognostication because your common or street anti-vaxxer loves the notoriety, the attention, the sense of identity they have carefully nurtured through the pandemic, the friends they made along the way as Q poster, Ron Watkins wrote when he walked away from the QAnon conspiracy.
For all that deceit, they will be the smart ones among their movement. Those who continue to stick to their guns are going to go out feet first, the Magufuli way.
More Coverage
Principles of freedom crushed by intolerance
Of course, ostracising the voices with which one disagrees is nothing new. Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was fully familiar with its antecedents in classical Greece, foresaw the danger of a new form of ostracism emerging in a world increasingly shaped by public opinion.
Release of hostages is a win, but nothing is resolved
The Western determination to press for peace at all costs has not delivered a lasting or sustainable political solution towards building two states coexisting side by side.