[Adapted from the Zero Anthropology Telegram Channel]
After all this time (about 18 months), with all the debates, analysis, studies, reports, divisions, and anger...I finally saw my first “Vaccination Centre” today. I have seen open-air testing sites before, but not where people actually get injected. It was inside a mall in St-Jerome, Quebec. The mall was languishing badly before 2020, but is now even less populated by stores—there are only about five left, in a mall that could house ten times that much. In what used to be a large thrift store, the “Vaccination Centre” is now housed, like the parasite that killed its host. I was not alone in visiting.
We paced slowly, back and forth across the front of the centre, which is covered by glass from floor to ceiling. Two minor security guards were at the entrance. Everyone inside was masked; everyone outside was unmasked. The irony was lost on those who place such faith in a (non)vaccine that they still need “protection”. One would have thought that they were all wearing a vote of non-confidence. Brains have been disconnected from senses and both have been delinked from perception.
Inside, to the left, were banks of tables with computers where people entered and were processed. In the centre was a row of stalls where injections are conducted, with the walls high enough to block public view. To the right, rows of chairs filled with seated people as they stayed for the required monitoring time.
The stalls, about six feet long, arranged perpendicular to outside viewers, closely resembled the stalls through which cattle are marched from stockyards into slaughter houses. I realize that in writing this, it resembles a predictable and stock trope, but I could not help seeing the symmetry between the two forms.
Not expecting to see such a place, ever, I had no idea what my reaction would be.
I was sickened. I choked up like I have not done since my mother in-law’s funeral in 2019, when I came face to face with her body. I felt a knot of nausea grow in my stomach. My neck muscles stiffened. I was in disbelief, being just a few feet away from that evil, that mRNA.
I got closer, and kept moving back and forth along the length of the exterior, with the security guard becoming ever more suspicious. People inside stared back at us, with “what are you looking at?” expressions. I hope they would see us as their mirror: that if we stared at them, it was because there was something problematic to be stared at.
We had to leave as I started getting louder. There it was—the fetish, the centre of all attention, the tool of oppression that was used to frighten, divide, threaten, and punish Canadians. I would have liked to destroy the centre.
And the centre is active, while the mall housing it has been killed. How many will connect those two dots?
Dark days in Quebec. And McGill is once again ramping up we're in the 'Covid era' and that means we need to be in masks forever. I don't know what it will take for this hysteria to lift.
Anthropologists need strong stomachs.
In my neck of the woods a mobile vaccine parlor, likewise patrolled by security guards, was parked adjacent the farmers' market. Green and grey don't mix well, but like Maximillian's two dots they need to be connected all the same.