Novak Djokovic: Everyone is a loser in a vaccine culture war
It’s been weeks, I know, but I’m still trying to figure out whether wearing a mask really is like trying to keep a fart in your trousers. The anti-everything activist Piers Corbyn was filmed singing that it was back in November, but are his trousers really completely ineffective at this sort of thing? Mine aren’t. What are they feeding him?
People often see parallels in debates around Covid and debates around climate change, and it’s of course worth remembering that before he was known as either an anti-vaccination activist or even as Jeremy’s loony brother, Corbyn was best known as the favourite meteorologist of the then climate-sceptic Boris Johnson.
The parallel, though, doesn’t quite work. Disbelieving climate change only means you have to depart from the scientific consensus about what the future will hold. Disbelieving Covid means you need a different reason for all these sick and dead people lying around, which must be far harder work.
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A belief in the terrible dangers of Covid vaccines, meanwhile, must be harder still. Mid-last year, you might remember, the US pop star Nicki Minaj claiming that her cousin’s friend in Trinidad had been vaccinated shortly before he was due to be married, whereupon his testicles became so swollen that his fiancee called the wedding off. I’m not sure how big they allegedly grew - would they still have fitted, for example, inside Piers Corbyn’s trousers? - but looking back I think we can now all agree that the Great Global Testicle Crisis definitely failed to materialise. You might say it was “junk science”, if not for fear of being badly misunderstood.
Novak Djokovic’s vaccine hesitancy, I expect, concerned balls of another sort. Still, you can understand why his arrival in Australia caused public fury. It’s the Cummings rage. It’s Barnard Castle, one rule for them. Australia’s lockdown restrictions have been savage, particularly at borders, with many citizens stranded overseas, unable to return even for funerals. And, whether you supported that sacrifice or resented it, you’re still going to be united in loathing for some tennis celeb who dodges it. If Djokovic does play next week, you wonder what reception he’ll get. Thank God for that famous Australian reluctance to say what you think.
His release yesterday didn’t actually seem to have much to do with vaccines. Nor did it even seem to be a verdict as to whether or not his remarkably convenient infection in December should have earned him a visa in the first place. Rather, it seems to have been based on the guys at the border screwing up the procedure of cancelling it.
Either way, it behoves a columnist to be honest. So, I shall admit that my first thought, on seeing the news that he’d won his court case, was one of bitter disbelief. My second thought, on hearing that the Australian immigration minister might kick him out anyway, was “good”. And my third, fourth and fifth thoughts, respectively, were “what the hell am I doing having thoughts like this?” and “so I’m the sort of person who wants politicians to overrule courts, now?” and “God, what have I become?”
Culture wars, like all wars, are easier to fight from a distance. I know a small handful of outright antivaxers, and I don’t regard them as particularly threatening, except for when they are up close and breathing on me. Most are fragile, defensive and prone to melodrama; the sort of people you worry for, while rolling your eyes. You put a bunch of them together, though, as we did in this newspaper yesterday in a report about extreme antivax speech on social media, and that compassion becomes a challenge. Suddenly, you think of them as a block, a tribe, an enemy. And I’m not sure it’s helpful.
Last week, as you might have seen, the health secretary Sajid Javid had an exchange in a London hospital with Steve James, an unvaccinated consultant anaesthetist. He had worked on Covid wards for the past two years, he said, and had contracted the virus, and reckoned himself unlikely to get too sick if he got it again, so he simply didn’t see the point in getting the jab. He made the same points, eloquently, in later interviews, and yet I must admit I remained none the wiser about why he had such a huge objection to just bloody getting it anyway.
Look I definitely believe in taking action, I got vaccinated because of others and for my mums health, but how we are handling Novak’s situation is bad, really bad. Like these memes, headlines, this is one of our great champions but at the end of the day, he is human. Do better.
— Nicholas Kyrgios (@NickKyrgios) January 7, 2022
Dr James’s views seem to make him a very small minority in the field of medicine, particularly at his level. Since he spoke, my timelines on social media have been smothered with many, many more medics who are pro-jab. There are not many tennis players, likewise, who seem to agree with Djokovic. I keep reading that Covid is the new culture war, but is it really? The world has rarely seen such unity. Even in America, over 80 per cent of adults have had at least one jab. Donald Trump himself has proudly had three. Yes, Emmanuel Macron wants to “emmerder les non-vaccines”, but given how much hospital resources they consume, why should he not? The same is true of smokers, and with roughly 82 per cent tax in this country on a packet of fags, we already emmerder them like anything.
My point is not that we should ease up on the vaccine drive, because of course we should not. My point, rather, is to remember that this is about health, not politics. Think of the damage done by climate change becoming a proxy political battle and ask yourself, do we really want to do that again? There are always those who want small fights to get bigger, as seen by the way that Nigel Farage is in Serbia this week because apparently he’s in favour of eastern Europeans crossing borders now. So what? Why give them what they want? If you try, I will, too. Let’s keep those farts in our trousers. I’m sure we can.
The Times
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