As the results of the mass vaccination campaign fail, we assist to an increase in the pressure against the “unvaccinated” as the scapegoats of the Covid crisis and also to and open -and almost fierce- defense of universal mandates for vaccination.
From the legal point of view, there is no doubt that vaccine’s mandates would ignore the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Rights (article 6 as international law), the Oviedo Convention (article 5), resolutions from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Vavricka v. Czech Republic (ECHR) could not hold in Covid’s vaccines due, among other very important things, to the non-sterilising immunity afforded by the vaccines).
Anyway, we are in the middle of a supposed voluntary campaign of vaccination aimed to achieve near universal results. It scares, as a method proper and distinctive of any and all dictatorships.
This important and central legal issue, however, points to an equally -or even more- important social an religious issue: scapegoats as a method of social and political cohesion in times of hardship and political emergencies.
René Girard studied this thoroughly and conclusively.
The issue of vaccination did not either scape his attention:
“And what to say about the modern procedures of vaccination and immunization? It is not just one and identical model operating in all cases and offering an intellectual framework to both the pseudo-invention and the true-invention? … the medical intervention consists of inoculation of a bit of the agent, exactly as in the rituals which injected a bit of violence in the social body to make it able of resisting violence. The quantity and accuracy of the analogies give vertigo. Revaccinations correspond to the reiteration of the sacrifices and appear, it is clear, in the same way as in the rituals of sacrificial protection, the risks of catastrophic inversion: a vaccine too much virulent, a pharmakon too strong, may extend the infection to be avoided in the first place. To illustrate the corresponding aspects of the sacrifice we could resort to the vaccine’s metaphor, and we can realize now that the metaphorical displacement is indistinguishable of the sacrificial substitution”
(Violence and the Sacred (Paris 1972), translated from the Spanish edition (Anagrama.1995))
René Girard considered social institutions as proper but difficult substitutes of scapegoating, without ignoring the recurrence of sacrificial ritualism in human history. The actual recurrence of the “apostles” of rituals of violence should alarm everybody as to the extent, depth and risks of the actual worldwide crisis.
