How many people still obsess over your vaccine status?

It really became a non-issue faster than any of us thought it would

Italy this week announced the end of its ban on “unvaccinated” medical personal, i.e. doctors and nurses who haven’t received the required four or five or whatever doses of the COVID shot. That’s welcome news but honestly I was surprised to learn that such a mandate was still in place there. It seems like Europe has largely abandoned the vaccine fanaticism that defined the continent even less than a year ago—Italy, France, Austria, England, Germany, Ireland, all of them have dropped major mandates and restrictions and requirements of various degrees, rules that the countries’ respective leaders vowed were indispensable but which turned out to be pretty dispensable.

There are still plenty of vaccine mandates and requirements all over the world, including here in the United States. But I feel like the general trend, both administratively and personally, has been an overall mellowing out. That is something to marvel at. This time last year it seemed that we were entering a permanent state of global vaccine hysteria, wherein everybody, everywhere would forevermore be judged by whether or not they had gotten the shot (and whatever four or six or twelve “boosters” were presently required by public health authorities). Your job, your recreation, your healthcare, your ability to shop for groceries and other necessities—all of it seemed tied to whether or not you were “fully vaccinated.”

You just don’t hear about that so much anymore. People have calmed down. Governments are backing off. The businesses that demanded vaccine passports have increasingly ceased to demand them; the ones that said they would demand them never got around to it. More and more people who would recoil slightly when they found out you were “unvaccinated” have stopped doing that. The strident, angry social media posts about “doing your part” and “growing up” and “getting your shot” have essentially disappeared. I’m not saying that this is all gone away—it will probably never fully go away—but it’s simply not anywhere near the issue it was a year ago or even eight months ago.

What changed? I suspect two things. First, the vaccines have obviously been completely ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus, at least by the flawed metrics we’ve used to judge that sort of thing for the past two years. The shot was pushed pretty heavily as a sort of omniprotective medicine: If you got it, we were told, you wouldn’t get sick and perhaps most importantly you also wouldn’t spread it. That’s why people like Fauci encouraged Americans to avoid their unvaccinated loved ones, and why people were legitimately frightened to be near you if they found out you hadn’t gotten the shot. Everyone believed that “unvaccinated” people were dangerous, risky vectors. Now we know that even “fully vaccinated” people can easily spread the virus. So people kind of sheepishly backed off from that talking point.

Perhaps more importantly, I think people are just relaxing. I suspect it is no more complicated than that. Everybody went sort of nuts over this thing at first and now it’s subsided. I suppose that is normal. People were told by health authorities, politicians, friends and neighbors to be really scared of the virus and really trustful of the vaccines; they were primed to respond in the ways they did. But it’s been over a year of that and I think many people realized, even if unconsciously, just how silly and counterproductive it all was. I don’t think you’ll find many people willing to admit that, but it’s hard to think of any other explanation. Few of us want to live our lives in complete and total comprehensive fear and paranoia. It gets exhausting.

I suppose the whole thing could start up again—health officials could reignite the fear machine, encouraging all of us to see “unvaccinated” friends and family as essentially national enemies—but I suspect that’s unlikely to happen, at least at a large scale. Vaccine panic in retrospect feels a bit like disco: It was there, it was dominant, it seemed like it would never go away, and then one day it did. And like disco we should be profoundly grateful for its demise; the world is a lot better off without it.