Hollywood origins of vaccine virtue signaling
The Killer That Stalked New York may be the source for today's virtue signaling by social media users providing real time updates on their vaccine schedules.
This fictional account of a smallpox outbreak was mostly forgotten after its appearance on the big screen in 1950 until the World Socialist Website renewed interest in it with a feature it ran just last month. This follows the sudden return of smallpox to the nightly news with a series of stories in recent months.
Starring Gone with the Wind actress Evelyn Keyes, the film noir is a semi-documentary in which diamond smugglers unknowingly start a smallpox outbreak in New York City.
The World Socialist Website article explains their sudden interest in the movie: “Over protest signs, “Stop Vaccinations! Vaccine is poison!,” the narrator intones, “‘Sure, there were some who didn’t believe in the city’s fight. But the ball was rolling, and whether you liked it or not. Unless you grabbed for the life insurance that only cost a 10-minute wait in a line, you were out of fashion. Not in style. An aching arm told your neighbor you had good sense.” [Emphasis added].
David Walsh, the article’s author, laments that, later, “anti-communist purges transformed conditions in Hollywood and made critical attention to contemporary social life [in films like this one] far more problematic and even hazardous.”
Mr. Walsh need not worry, though. The film’s makers could never have imagined how far today’s technology, without help from Hollywood, would take their campaign of “you’re out of fashion, not in style, lacking good sense” without “an aching arm.”
The European Commission, creates virtue signaling memes on their twitter account that are ready for social media posting pre- and post-jab, including these:
In an op-ed entitled, Tribalism and Virtue Signaling in Post-COVID Vax Messaging, Dr. Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, a supporter of the vaccine campaign, provides a somber approach to such signaling. “I believe that this messaging, ‘Despite being vaccinated, I will continue to wear a mask and social distance’, is a form of virtue signaling. It further divides us into the bad people (those who spread COVID) versus the good ones (those who fight it).
“This has been unhelpful the entire pandemic. It sanctifies folks who have the privilege to detach themselves from society. And it divides people who should be seeking honesty and middle ground. I see it as a base human reaction to fear and anxiety.”
Clapping for healthcare professionals
The film may even be seen as providing the impetus for extraordinary displays of appreciation for public health officials. The Killer That Stalked New York was dedicated, “To the men and women of public health—the first line of defense between mankind and disease.’”
In this pandemic, a screenshot from an Ariana Grande video featured people holding a huge picture of Dr. Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser for its response to the coronavirus, while dancing to the words, “my favorite MD, Anthony Fauci.”
In the UK, citizens took the streets in weekly salutes to health care workers to “Clap for Carers.”
Smallpox in the news
Smallpox was mostly relegated to academic discussions until an FDA announcement in June 2021 that it approved a drug to treat the disease, which was eradicated in 1979. To make that approval possible, a number of extraordinary exceptions to normal testing rules were employed. The FDA made its Animal Rule, for investigational treatments that cannot be tested for a specific indication in people, available to the drug’s developer. The FDA also applied three separate drug designations that bypass its own rules and regulations: priority review, fast track and orphan drug.
Then, in November 2021, vials labeled as smallpox were discovered at a Merck lab in Pennsylvania only to be found, in a subsequent report, to have contained the virus used in the vaccine against the virus, not the virus that causes the disease.
