Is Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy the 21st Century’s Own Mass Hysteria?

Periodically, throughout recorded history, pockets of the human population have often been suddenly plunged into fits of what has come to be known as mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness. These have often attributed to witchcraft, possession or spell casting in the middle ages. In Modern times, when mass hysteria occurs in a town, city or country, it often catches the attention of epidemiologists, emergency physicians, psychiatrists and government officials who struggle to bring the benign but potentially dangerous situation under control.

Mass hysteria often accompanies natural disasters or widespread disasters of any origin for that matter and are usually characterised by the same symptoms in different individuals, such as some form of psychosis, delusion, thrashing or simple widespread irrational panic. It has been identified during pandemics like the black plague (bubonic plague) and several other catastrophes that have plagued the human species. One classic feature of this form of hysteria is that it has no plausible organic origin. A famous example of mass hysteria occurred in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. Many young girls began screaming while contorting their bodies suddenly in what was tainted with many mimicries that continued to spread like wildfire in this town. It was first attributed to witchcraft, but even the minister who had been called to exorcise the girls decided that it was beyond the helms of witchcraft, with many of the girls ending up being jailed or hanged.

Today, I believe we are dealing with a pandemic (Covid-19) tainted with mass hysteria characterised by misinformation and hesitancy displayed by many individuals to present themselves for vaccination, which can save their lives and protect the global community. Sadly, while mass hysteria might have psychogenic or even idiopathic origins, the world has evolved to a point where some humans who wield influence can station themselves behind the knob or upstream channel that initiates the grimy flow of hysterical emotions or the milder irrational ones that seem to massage the sadomasochistic and narcissistic egos of these humans who have mastered the art of transmitting mass hysteria and are wielding it mercilessly for profit, or sheer fun.

In some countries of the world, such as in Nigeria, many influential religious leaders or social influencers first began manipulating their audience by spreading misinformation about the pandemic when it first started and are now performing a follow-through by advising their adherents not to take the vaccines which were developed in record time by scientists. Their reasons are wild conspiracy theories, such as one I recently heard from a Christian Minister in Nigeria. They claimed the vaccine would turn people into vampires or that a microchip would be implanted in them while claiming that it was the sign of Armageddon and eschatological times. If mass hysteria can be artificially spread in epidemic proportions, I wonder what else could be psychosomatically spread among us humans.

The human brain has evolved to a state where it is now possible to “remotely” manipulate people wrongly by making them believe in the same intersubjective reality. If this is true, then it is plausible to imagine that these tools of manipulation can also fall into the wrong hands and will likely be used to promote their aims. What beats my imagination, though, is, why would you willingly surrender your faculties to the prompting of an extraneous entity: imaginary and real. To buttress my point with an unrelated example, while terrorism has not been successful in terms of mortality, it has successfully done one thing in spreading a message: the aim of all terrorists-to instil fear in the mind of the population. That is the same way the efforts to control this covid-19 pandemic has been affected by the masters behind the knob of mass hysteria. Mass hysteria created by leaders at the helm of world affairs can result in many negative consequences at the grassroots of society.

By spreading fear of covid-19 vaccines and planting seeds of mistrust of health officials and scientists, they are slowing down the battle against this pandemic. And the one thing we do not have in a pandemic is time. You can’t let them win. Would you?

Photo credit: PAHO