Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: When most countries are racing against time to get their populations inoculated against the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a place in Central Europe, Poland, where over 40 percent of people are not only against vaccination, they have even threatened to kill the mayor, comparing him with a Nazi-era mass-murderer.
“You are opening the gates to hell,” shouted one group at the mayor’s home last week. “Death to enemies of the fatherland,” screamed another. All denounced the mayor as Mengele, the notorious “Angel of Death” from Auschwitz.
Interestingly, this mob then claimed that the churchgoing mayor was, in fact, a Jew, reflecting anti-Semitism that is endemic to Poland’s political fringes.
“They saw no problem in saying that I am both a Nazi and a Jew,” the amused mayor of Walbrzych town, Dr. Roman Szelemej, said. The doctor, a noted heart surgeon, and his City Hall staff also received a flood of abusive email messages and even death threats, forcing to police to provide him security.
Petty politics is at the root of this behavior, as in India and elsewhere.
When an elected council in Walbrzych, a former mining town in southwestern Poland, declared the vaccination program mandatory for all adults, a large crowd staged a massive demonstration outside the mayor’s house. Demanding revocation of compulsory vaccination, they even compared him to the dreaded Nazi death camp physician, Dr. Josef Mengele, who was among those responsible for massacres of Polish people in the 1940s.
Dr. Szelemej had merely said that “vaccination is the only thing that can prevent this disease.” He regretted that the strange campaign made the town and Poland “a place for all the skeptics of science and reality.”
But, media reports said, wariness of pandemic vaccines runs deep in Poland, particularly among younger people. A survey conducted by the University of Warsaw indicated that around 40% of the population is averse to getting inoculated. In France also, a significant number of people mostly Muslim minorities, suspect their elected government’s ‘sinister designs’ in getting them vaccinated.
“There are no rules, no laws, no facts, no scientific achievements, no proven data. Everything is questioned, everything is fragile,” he said. “This is dangerous, very dangerous.”
Politics is also taking a toll on the non-political vaccination program. The mandatory vaccine order, passed by a majority of Walbrzych councilors, was declared invalid last week by the regional government controlled by the rival party, Law, and Justice, which protests every move made by Dr. Szelemej, a centrist liberal.
His rival, Grzegorz Macko, a Law and Justice leader, blamed the liberals themselves for setting a precedent by marching on the Warsaw home of the Law and Justice leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, during abortion rights protests late last year.
The Roman Catholic Church, closely aligned with Law and Justice, eventually urged the faithful to get inoculated. Initially, it had expressed reservations about how some vaccines were developed allegedly using material derived from aborted fetuses.
But most people welcomed the chance to get an inoculation. Almost half the town’s 110,000 residents have had at least one shot, well above the national rate of about 33%.
Still, the anti-vaccination cause in Walbrzych and elsewhere, galvanized by false information and conspiracy theories flooding the internet, has found wide traction. Some far-right politicians and celebrities, and even government officials, have planted their own conspiracy theories, with a deputy minister declaring he would not get vaccinated as a matter of “liberty and personal choice.”
Piotr Sasinski, a Law and Justice member and former vice mayor of Walbrzych, said the internet, had turbocharged resistance driven by paranoia, turning a “tiny group of perhaps 1% or 2%” of the population into a noisy, passionate force.
He said that he shared the mayor’s desire to get people vaccinated but “it is part of our national heritage to oppose anything that is imposed on us.”
Aware that his compulsory vaccine program might get derailed, the mayor last week shifted from coercion to persuasion, announcing that anyone who gets inoculated will be entitled to incentives like half-price tickets to the municipal swimming pool and cultural sites.
This did not calm his most determined critics. A day later, a small delegation from a fringe group calling itself the Guardians of Freedom, which doesn’t believe that the pandemic is real, went to City Hall in Walbrzych to deliver a letter demanding that the mayor apologize and cancel the vaccination program.