I’ve been thinking about immoveable vaccine suspicion I’ve recently confronted in a couple of people I regard as intelligent and public spirited. It was in my mind while listening to Kim Hill on Saturday discuss with Danyl McLauchlan his thoughtful piece called “In a captured state” in the Spinoff.

His article included a startling table. It showed NZ to be at the extremes of the left/right political divide based on income and education. Essentially,  higher income people in NZ are more likely to be blue (right in politics) than in 21 other countries and the tertiary educated were more red. I had no idea we would rate as extreme in that kind of polarisation. Danyl had several theses, but he had a profound insight into the snobbery that serves as a class marker for being in the educated camp.

 I thought ruefully of the accusation by one of my vaccine hesitant friends, that my reaction to her explanation was arrogant (snobbish).

I’ve wrongly thought New Zealand to be relatively protected from the toxic partisanship which contaminates public life in the US, Canada, the UK and even Australia. Try as they might, opponents could not get ordinary NZers to hate John Key, or Jacinda Ardern. I was forgetting about the woeful state of NZ academia – the 450 prophets of Baal.

The other anti-vaxxer just told me why he turns to conspiracy theories. He thinks what is happening in NZ cannot be honest or well meaning mistake. That would be too stupid. So he believes it must be planned, with a purpose. He sees patterns to explain it. His conspiracy explanation makes him impervious to what I might offer as counter-evidence.

 The internet offers torrents of accumulated anecdote, folklore and superstition mixed with suspicion of politics and politicians, gained from several decades of TV depictions of cynical, venal and self-serving politicians.  So while I can protest that conspiracy is too hard to pull off, he hits me with something that will in hindsight look calculated and centrally organised.  

He has been an academic. He points to our recently pervasive  academic and education establishment dogma that all knowledge is relative and that everyone’s truth must be respected. Even when it is patently false or can be falsified. Why should his vaccine hesitation be vilified he asks?

 He was told he must treat some hocus pocus as science. He must not offend Islam. He says there are attempts to cancel, sack and silence the 7 Auckland professors who protested against a demand to call matauranga Maori science.   The 7 refused to pretend that accumulated anecdote, folk history, folklore, folk wisdom, religious metaphor or superstition must be given equal or superior authority to the science that has created our current health, safety and prosperity.

 But what really struck home was his demand for an explanation why there was simply no public discussion in New Zealand of what to him was an obvious correlation. He asked why we’d started no urgent and rigorous research to find out if there was a causal connection of life and death importance, between the cultural subordination of science to matauranga Maori, and Maori resistance to vaccination? Its a fair question. Have the various  elevations of superstition over the secular rationality previously pursued by our law come to leave a generation of Maori without the intellectual bullshit detectors that our forebears developed when science confronted religion and culture?  

What else explains the lower takeup of vaccine among Maori and the huge investment going into babying Maori into being vaxxed.  If there is not a connection between the dominance of cultural safety, a woeful susceptibility to snake oil salesmen, and a lack of real science understanding, why not? In our civilisation a false compulsory respect for superstition was ridiculed out of the mainstream of other cultures decades ago (despite quaint relics such as astrology and dabbling in exotic imports like feng shui).

 He says he takes absolutely nothing on trust from a ruling education and health elite pretending that matauranga Maori is science. Why should he respect any authority dumbly confronting Maori  resistance to vaccines/science, knowing it is a problem of huge importance to Maori and great cost to the whole population? Why are DHBs or MOH alleged to be at fault, but the mechanisms and causes seem to be an undiscussible  mystery.

The weird prevalence of vaccine resistance should be sounding the alarm for the Professional and Managerial Class discussed by Kim and Danyl.  But it will possibly be overtaken by the more simple anger of the Auckland hordes looking for reasons to suspect that the elite has been lying to them, patronises them, and cannot be trusted. Our peculiarly pantheistic PMC  may be about to get a Trump style shock. Thankfully no Trump has yet emerged here.