IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

In the United States, "freedom" became the catchphrase of those who argue against authoritative experts and institutions pushing for restrictions, masking requirements, social distancing, and vaccine mandates. Anti-vax parents argue for the family's freedom to do as they see fit in raising their children. Masks, whether for children or adults, are often equated with "muzzles" trying to limit the freedom of others to express themselves. The consequence of such views of freedom came at the cost of the health and lives of others, particularly in states where the government blocked public health mandates and restrictions. However, those who reject vaccines do not see themselves as against good health, indeed they often see their position as the healthiest one and are skeptical of the authority of well-documented science. Masks were not just rejected because they are perceived as a limitation of freedom alone but because of the false idea that one cannot breathe with them on properly. I think one fruitful area to pursue a feminist bioethics of the pandemic would be to consider how health can remain a general, central concern of the populace but that the authority of science remains a divisive issue. This has long been the case for the mom-driven anti-vax movement. Much of the American anti-vax movement pre-COVID-19 pandemic circulated around mothers who were deeply concerned with the health of their children and worried about the impact of "unnatural" vaccines on them. How has it come to pass that individuals are invested in health but not in the healthcare sciences?

Edmund Husserl (1970) argued that the crisis of modern sciences is that science is abstracted from everyday human meaning and value even if its purpose, such as the creation of vaccines, is to better human existence. Modern science developed a highly specialized mathematization and quantification of the world. The error is not in this method but in the assumption that these objective practices reveal true meaning, value, and reality. For phenomenologists, the objectivity of science is not a "solution" to subjectivity but a product of it. Without a clear connection to subjective meaning, science's objectivity has no necessary grasp on the individual's sense of self. Anti-vaccination groups [End Page 164] privilege subjectively meaningful connections and information over objective scientific data. One example is that only the death or severe illness of a close friend or relative from COVID-19 has been shown to shake the confidence of strongly held anti-vaccination views.

Hannah Arendt (2006) wrote of another crisis—that of a collapse of authority due to the nature of mass society. Acceptance of public health recommendations is not necessarily grounded in a better knowledge of the sciences but in an acceptance of the value of authoritative experts to guide one's actions. Anti-vaccination groups spend time promoting and conducting a kind of social media driven "research" into cures and treatments that have never been objectively proven to be effective and show an indifference, if not an outright hostility, to the authority of scientific experts. While it is true that better scientific literacy might help destabilize the idea that such practices are actual research, it is not the case that scientific literacy drives those who follow health science guidelines. Rather, it is the acceptance of expert authority to guide one's actions.

The less investment in the authority of experts, the more the individual sees health as a matter of personal freedom over which one has individual control. While anti-vaccination groups are an extreme form of this idea of an individual's capacity, independent from the authority of experts, to know without any expertise and to control what is healthy, they represent a radical position to an increasingly common view of health as a personal or familial production. Such views contribute to the blaming of the ill and the fascination with fringe theories of health. They also gloss over the increasingly glaring discrepancies between the wealthy and healthy and ill and poor since everyone is "free" to make themselves healthier.

I argue that vaccine resistance might lie in part in the idea...