I saw someone refer to COVID discourse as “abstinence only guidance” and it caught me extremely off guard but definitely is a reference worth digging into. A thread by someone who grew up in the height of AIDS.

So to start with, the metaphor is imperfect and people will definitely try to use it to justify dangerous behavior. That’s not what I want to talk about though.
In a scary epidemic/pandemic, people are very, very quick to attach moral weight to getting sick.

You see it with this one in the racist “Wuhan virus” terminology, but also in things like associating eating meat with the emergence of this disease. The implication is always the same, if you can be morally “pure” then you’re safe. It’s a fear response at the root.

The fear response is fine, but when it filters through your biases and bigotries, the logic reverses. If being “pure” in some way will keep you safe, then people who get sick must have been “impure” and therefore deserve their fate. It’s where the Just World Hypothesis comes from

So look for that. Look for friends and family saying “oh those nutty pandemic deniers, got what they deserved”. Because while the logic leading up to that is seductive and pandemic-deniers make *me* angry too, that othering will end up being incredibly harmful

Citation: how AIDS was dismissed or even mocked because it was a “gay disease”

But then also expect people who treat the trappings of safer behavior, staying home, social distancing, mask wearing, etc. as proof that they are morally superior. Because in our heads that moral attribute becomes conflated with the causal factors, which sets the table for horror

Because this quickly turns into a “purity above all” position, where doing anything but the most pure option increases risk but now that has a *moral* dimension. It’s not just that going out with a mask on is riskier than staying home, but the people who do so are “bad”

This bias will absolutely interfere with things that are legitimately helping keeping people safe, like “abstinence only education” which argues that teaching people about *any* kind of safer sex encourages risky/immoral behavior and therefore is itself immoral

We’re definitely going to experience this. People are and will shame others for engaging in things that are riskier than total abstinence, but less risky than would have been their normal behavior, which will drive some of them to riskier behavior, which endangers everting.

We will also see this from surprising vectors. For example, did you know that there are people who have spent decades fighting for AIDS awareness and care who loudly oppose PrEP as a preventative measure? Sounds contradictory right?

But when you dig into what they are saying, it’s very similar to the abstinence only reasoning. I’ve seen comments that PrEP is a “party drug”. The implication being that reducing the risk means you’ll go do a bunch of risky things which then makes you dangerous or bad.

But this is wild, because it’s coming from people who were historically at biggest risk for AIDS in the first place.

So expect it here too. For example, if we get viable treatments before a vaccine, expect surprising people to suddenly talk about that in moral terms

Because at some point “catching it” won’t be about the biological process. It’ll be 100% about what was the bad thing you did that I can not do and that will keep me safe.

Everyone will experience this.

I experience this in a reflexive anger at people not wearing masks.

Be careful. This perfectly understandable human impulse will hurt people if you don’t temper it with something like kindness or empathy.

End.