Are Anti-Vaxxers and Anti-Maskers the Human Species’ Secret Vectors of Population Control?

I ask that question with only the mildest snicker. I know that most of us don’t want to be vectors of disease infecting those around us, winnowing the human population down to a survivable size.

But numbers are getting clear that some 30% of us really don’t give a hoot if they make someone else sick or not. They think not getting vaccinated or not wearing a mask is like refusing to wear a motorcycle helmet, or like resisting the seat belt law — possibly suicidal but their choice, freely chosen in the spirit of “give me liberty or give me death,” and of no harm to them or anyone else, if their luck doesn’t go awry. They are the kind of people who magically believe they make their own luck.

But not wearing a mask or not getting a jab is not just about free spirits showing off their bravado in a big magic show, it’s about the rest of us too, about their so called freedom turning them into vectors of disease and us into their victims. If COVID-19 is replaced by a much deadlier virus, or morphs into one itself, their “freedom” could well wipe us all out, and far faster than drought, famine, flooding, rising seas, hurricanes and the other catastrophe’s of climate change could.

A pandemic turns personal illness into a potential social calamity. And that’s why it’s not quite just a quirky joke to ask if freedom-loving disease vectors might not be life’s unexpected way of thinning down the human herd so its general knuckle-headedness doesn’t result in a massive worldwide die-off and the extinction of countless other species.

Many thoughtful people believe that the probability of curtailing climate change can only be boosted in two ways: by reducing the human footprint on the planet through the calamity of a partial extinction, or by having enough of humanity suddenly gifted with a collective moment of insight and commitment to dramatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases the species releases into the atmosphere.

The case for the latter view was strengthened two weeks ago with Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom’s landslide victory that turned back a Republican recall effort over his aggressive approach to slowing the spread of COVID-19 in his state. It’s one of the more optimistic moments in American politics since the election of 2017. It shows that many of us, at least in California (and New Mexico with its 70% vaccination rate), don’t want to die from this virus through the politics of stupidity. California voters roundly rejected the politicization of the pandemic and the denial of science, the distrust of experts, and the rise of magical thinking that goes along with it.

This all has something to do with self-help, looking out for number one, rugged individualism and just ornery cussedness, qualities that writer and researcher Jess McHugh describes in her eye-opening new book “Americanon: An Unexpected U.S. History in Thirteen Best Selling Books.” Analyzing self-improvement books from “The Old Farmer’s Almanac,” “Ben Franklin’s Autobiography” and “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” to “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,” McHugh reveals an American belief system grounded in the hard times of the Great Depression, a belief in self-sufficiency and the power of positive thinking to replace the cold hard indifference of society at large. The best selling “how to” books she analyzes were mostly written in the humble voice of good friends and neighbors, not of authorities and experts that the authors knew Americans tended to distrust. And the books all offer ways to cope with a society that seems ever lonelier, ever more callous and expensive, a world of high hopes out of the reach of most people. And the coping mechanism these books all come up with basically is the magic of self-reliance and dependence on no one but yourself, even to the point of dreaming up magic remedies for illnesses, even for pandemics, remedies like taking horse deworming drugs instead of submitting to the “government control” of vaccinations.

Of course, choosing magic over expertise, even medical expertise, isn’t confined just to American culture. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are plaguing societies all over the world, especially in Europeanized countries. It’s a global phenomenon that endangers everyone on the planet. And population size seems to have something to do with it. In the realm of probability, the rule isn’t just the more the merrier but also the more the deadlier. Let’s say that the 30% of unvaccinated New Mexicans and Americans in general mirrors the global reality. Thirty percent of 7 billion people is roughly 2.1 billion people (the world population around 1929) who are potential vectors of disease.

If climate change is caused in part by overpopulation and is responsible in part for the increased number and severity of pandemics, the less people there are the more chances the living will have to experience a humane and productive natural lifetime.

But what’s the solution to over population? The terrible and simple answers are like a neon skull and cross bones blinking away in the future — genocide and population control through reproductive restrictions, both dystopian solutions.

Population control has all too often been associated with eugenics, which can be broadly defined as manipulating reproduction to produce desired kinds of characteristics, and desired kinds of people. The undesirables, whoever they might be, would be genetically manipulated out of existence. It’s a laboratory form of ethnic cleansing.

In a wide ranging and insightful piece in the New York Review of Books this month called “Conceiving the Future,” journalist Anna Louie Sussman reviews three books on population and climate change: “Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World,” by Daniel Sherrell, “On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change,” by Jade S. Sasser, and “Count Down: How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Imperiling the Future of the Human Race,” by Shanna H. Swan with Stacy Colino. All of them are serious, responsible works of investigative journalism.

In her review, Sussman writes of “an activist network” of women called “Conceivable Future” that faces the danger of climate change straight on by asking the question “What kind of world would my child be born into?” By some estimates, more that 12.5 million Americans “some calling themselves BirthStrikers or GINKS (Green Inclination, No Kids), have foregone parenthood at least in part because of concern about a future child’s existence on a burned out planet and the ‘carbon footprint of procreation,’” Sussman writes.

If population control, eugenics, genocide, and the disease vectors of so called freedom-loving anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are the alternative, the restraint of voluntary childlessness is humane in comparison. But still, when pessimists talk about too many people they imply there must be fewer people, and not just fewer infants, but fewer people period. And who chooses who goes and who doesn’t? As appealing as it is to say that the solution to climate change is less people, the implications are horrendous.

But what is the humane alternative? Intensified global diplomacy, focused technical ingenuity, and compassionate, voluntary self-restraint? I don’t want to say that’s a kind of magic thinking of its own. Nor am I willing to admit quite yet that my faith in human goodness and our compulsion to solve problems might be too. But what else do we have that the conscience of the world, and of each of us, can live with?

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it