Dismissed vaccine questions drove people into the Mirror World’s claims.

Evidence

Similarly, questions about the safety of brand-new vaccines for people who are pregnant or considering getting pregnant could have been treated far more respectfully than they were. Rather than commentators summarily shutting down questions as frivolous or nutty, there should have been ample room in public debates and reliable media for concerns about how the vaccines would impact reproductive health. These should have called on medical experts in fertility and pregnancy to explain the vaccine research methods, along with the special vulnerabilities to Covid during pregnancy, when immune systems are particularly weak. Because it’s perfectly reasonable to worry about a vaccine for a novel virus when you are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant—I worried about eating soft cheese when I was pregnant. Moreover, plenty of people, pregnant and not, have good reasons not to trust both Big Pharma and Big Government, let alone the two acting in coordination. In an era when whole cities like Flint, Michigan, have had their water poisoned; when gas companies tell you that fracking is safe, never mind the earthquakes and flammable tap water; when Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly against attempts to ban its herbicide Roundup despite it having been credibly linked with cancer; and when Big Pharma peddled the drugs that set off the opioid crisis, it is entirely rational to be skeptical toward monopolistic power. Johnson & Johnson, one of the major vaccine makers, not only is caught up in the opioid lawsuits but also has been ordered to pay out billions in legal settlements in recent years over alleged harm caused by several of its prescription medications and even its ubiquitous talcum powder (found to have contained asbestos). Against this backdrop, and given the lack of debate and allowable questioning of the vaccines in many progressive spaces, it’s no surprise that so many went off to “do their own research”—finding my doppelganger, and many more like her, waiting with their wild claims about vaccine shedding and mass infertility. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 386

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The echo here with the reader’s own work on moral panics over modesty — how dismissing women’s bodily concerns channels them elsewhere — could be an essay connecting Klein’s vaccine-pregnancy point to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece about which concerns get heard in public debate.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice’ and ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ interest in how institutions dismiss or police the concerns of the less powerful, redirecting legitimate anxiety into elsewhere.