Why vaccination shills and ‘anti-vaxxers’ are two sides of the same coin [a parable]

Behold, the two faces of Medical Janus!

Once upon a time, there was a massive accumulation of sewage that threatened to overflow and compromise the sanitation of a great city. Unlike previous generations who learned to put in the gruntwork and clean up the accumulation of sewage daily, a new generation decided to build a dam containing the sewage, dubbing it the Vindication Assured Xtra (VAX) Dam.

But it turned out that the dam also damaged societal health: the metals and other infused questionable materials comprising its structure were contaminating the public waters, sparking an uptick of allergic reactions and damaged physical immunity (or shall we say side effects) for particularly sensitive individuals.

And so, dissension arose in the great city. 49.75% of the population defended the Vindication Assured Xtra as the lesser of two evils holding back the sewage accumulation and were known as pro-VAX, arguing that it would be impossible to manage the sewage problem without the dam. Another 49.75% claimed that the onslaught of sewage wouldn’t be as bad as the already-present water contamination and that it would be fine to just remove the dam because the sewage problem was superficial and would dissipate without serious adverse effects. This group that supported dismantling of the Vindication Assured Xtra Dam were known as anti-VAX. Meanwhile, 0.5% of the population suggested cleaning up the sewage entirely to render it safe to dismantle the dam.

The 0.5% were of course treated as fringe schizophrenic loons for demanding that the society put into the gruntwork of cleaning up the mountain of sewage that had accumulated for the past decades. Why, that would necessitate too much work and drain the lionized golden budget of the great city—how dare anyone suggest the >99% citizens are to blame as if the common people were all collectively wrong in their longstanding decision not to clean up the sewage! Rank heresy!

And so, after very much squabbling, the great city agreed to partition in half with a dividing wall, one side for the pro-VAXers who kept the dam and the the other for the anti-VAXers who dismantled it. It came to pass, that amidst ever-continuing sewage overflow, eventually the dam on the pro-VAX side of the wall could not prevent all the sewage from seeping their half of the city anyways, and that they were plagued with not only continued side effects from the dam’s components infecting the waters, but also the Vindication Assured Xtra Dam itself. The pro-VAX half of the city continued to believe that the dam was only all the extra necessary preventing a total flood, thereby accepting the compromise of increasing contamination from not only the dam but also the sewage that poured in increasingly.

Meanwhile, the anti-VAX side of the great city chose to completely dismantle the dam, unleashing all the sewage into their communities they could never since fully purge out as the water supply became diluted sewage.

The remaining 0.5%, already beginning to leave the great city and move into the wilderness, saw that the mounting contamination problem in both halves of the great city were increasing in their own respective trajectories out of the common refusal to purge out the sewage in the first place, eventually saw the end culmination: a sudden flood of not only sewage, but a combination of sewage, garbage, and excrement would come upon the entire great city, drowning its entirety under 20 feet of sewage, garbage, and excrement, burying alive all the inhabitants. By the time that day arrived, all of that 0.5% remnant had fled, able to convince only another 0.5% of the total population to flee while the remaining 99% refused to listen to the longstanding exhortation to clean up the sewage in the first place, shutting their eyes and ears.

And it came to pass on that day, that an unprecedented colossal flood of sewage, garbage, and excrement hit, not only drowning the anti-VAX side of the great city but destroyed the remaining dam walls on the pro-VAX side, annihilating all 99% of inhabitants who were in the city and burying them alive. The only survivors were the 1% whose yearning to live apart from sewage outweighed their desire for an expediently comfortable couch-potato life in the great city whose tragic end was irreversibly sealed.

For many are called, but few chosen. —Matthew 22:14