[imagesource: Fabrice Coffrinzaff / Getty Images]

One might argue that anti-vaccine protesters, like the pair above wearing masks with syringes in the shape of a cross, are othering themselves.

By taking a stand against COVID-19 health passes and vaccinations, many people in European countries have ended up locking themselves out of society.

The anti-vax argument is splitting already terribly divisive nations, families, and friends while simultaneously endangering the lives of the vaccinated majority who just want to move on from the pandemic.

The pandemic has nearly entered its third year, with the Omicron variant sparking a new wave of cases across the world as the authorities are trying to bring the virus under control.

This is what Europe looks like at the moment, reported CNN:

Vaccine passports have been in place for months to gain entry to hospitality venues in much of the European Union. But as Delta and Omicron infections have surged and inoculation rollouts have stalled, some governments have gone further.

Austria imposed Europe’s first lockdown for the unvaccinated and is scheduled to introduce mandatory shots from February 1.

Germany has banned unvaccinated people from most areas of public life, and the country’s Health Minister, Karl Lauterbach, warned in December that: “without mandatory vaccination I do not see us managing further waves in the long term.”

And France’s President Emmanuel Macron last week told Le Parisien newspaper that he “really wants to piss off” the unvaccinated. “We’re going to keep doing it until the end,” he said. “This is the strategy.”

In an effort to encourage everyone to get vaccinated, those who refuse are effectively being locked out of society.

Image: Dennis Waser

Student and part-time supermarket cashier Nicolas Rimoldi (above) from Switzerland has decided against getting the vaccine, which has barred him from completing his degree or working in a grocery store.

Without a vaccine certificate, he also can’t eat in restaurants, attend concerts, or go to the gym.

Having never attended a protest before the pandemic, he now leads Mass-Voll, one of Europe’s largest youth-orientated anti-vax passport groups:

“People without a certificate like me, we’re not a part of society anymore,” he said. “We’re excluded. We’re like less valuable humans.”

…”We live in a two-class society now,” Rimoldi told CNN. “It’s horrible. It’s a nightmare.”

Not that he’s letting any of that stop him from living life:

“On Monday I was with 50 people eating in a restaurant — the police wouldn’t be happy if they saw us,” Rimoldi told CNN, boasting of illegal dinners and social events with unvaccinated friends that he likened to Prohibition-era speakeasies — but which public health experts describe as reckless and dangerous.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in November that the lives of 470 000 people in Europe aged 60 and over have been saved by vaccines since the rollout began.

Rimoldi is focused more on the “principle” of being forced to take the vaccination and the fact that the “government lied to us” than on the science of the vaccine.

Likewise, many other campaigners are up in arms mainly because they’re so disillusioned by the government:

Even before the pandemic, vaccine hesitancy in Europe was strongly correlated to a populist distrust of mainstream parties and governments.

One study published in the European Journal of Public Health in 2019 found “a highly significant positive association between the percentage of people in a country who voted for populist parties and the percentage who believe that vaccines are not important and not effective.”

But Suzanne Suggs, professor of communication at the University of Lugano’s public health institute, make a good point:

“[Some] people have a very twisted idea of what freedom is,” she said. “They’re arguing it’s their individual right to harm others.”

Likewise, French President Macron is on a similar track:

Those who refuse to get inoculated may accuse vaccine passport-wielding politicians of turning them into second-class citizens, but the French President, like many of his European counterparts, is unrepentant.

Macron insists those who do not protect themselves and those around them from Covid-19 by getting vaccinated are “irresponsible” and thus deserving of such a fate.

“When my freedom threatens that of others, I become irresponsible,” he said. “An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen.”

It takes a certain kind of person, though, to put principles aside for the greater good of everyone around them.

[source:cnn]