Watching the ivermectin craze has been like opening a random page in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, reading with interest an apparent abortive ending and then trying to trace Memento-style the path backwards to the origin of the present disaster. What spawned this bad choice? What was the decision tree? Where had the adventurer gone wrong?
In truth, an entire constellation of quasi-religious attitudes leads to pretending that COVID-19 doesn’t exist: anti-masking, anti-vaccination, and pro-Ivermectin activities and advocacy all stand as observable hallmarks. This array of behaviors surrounds a cluster of ideas, a primary one being that an individual’s faith is sufficient enough to overcome anything that the outside world might throw at him or her. This is a common enough sentiment, especially in religious circles; you hear it in the bandied phrase, “God doesn’t put anything on a person that he can’t handle.” For certain charismatic believers (that is, those followers, usually in a religious context, who respond to emotional rather than staid ritual), this concept manifests as that of handling snakes, an expression that material danger loses its potency in the face of faith, i.e., being possessed of the Holy Spirit. Covid deniers demonstrate this belief as an (often violent) eschewing of mask wearing, of denial of vaccine attainment or of the vaccine’s efficacy, and of prioritizing folk remedies (namely ivermectin) against the new plague. These outward signs are in fact social signifiers of their membership of this community of thought, indicators of their deep well of conviction that faith will defeat contagion.
Snake-handling goes back to the very early days of the twentieth century, where in the mountainous areas of Appalachia some folks interpreted a scripture passage as an exhortation to demonstrate one’s infilling of the Holy Ghost via external signs. You can view snake-handling as performative faith (which is not to say that such faith is inauthentic--it is simply being shown extrinsically in this case as opposed to intrinsically). Believers see their faith as kind of a metaphysical shield, whereby they can withstand conditions that would normally fell a person (e.g., manipulating poisonous snakes, encountering fire or hot coals, or drinking toxic material such as crankcase fluid, according to one ethnographic study).
You can see parallels of this inner compulsion to demonstrate faith in some aspects of Covid denial. Anti-mask advocates are strident in their views, often to the point of confrontation. Many Covid deniers are not satisfied with disregarding public health guidelines, rules or statutes as they see fit; they also have crossed paths with those citizens who are complying with said guidelines and demanding that they conform instead to the belief system of those confronting them. One well-publicized instance saw a man forcibly remove the mask from a school teacher’s face at a school board meeting, a highly unusual form of aggression. It is important to at least some of these believers that the eschewing of masks occurs communitywide. For some people, I venture, the masks just remind them that Covid has disrupted their lives and therefore the masks need to be hidden away; but I would say that the majority of these believers intuit that there can be no demonstration of faith in an environment where there is no risk of infection.
Defiant non-masking can be seen as a form of social communication, unifying these public health rogues by visual cues as belonging to the same underlying insular community of purity and faith. In fact, these cues constitute a costly signaling, as engaging in these behaviors involves risk. As Wendy Welch said in Journal of Appalachian Studies,
[T]here is an aspect of faith-based fatalism that tends to be unexplored in literature. ‘Costly signaling’ is an anthropological term referring to ritual activities that require serious commitment of emotional, intellectual, and/or financial resources from members of that faith community. These costly displays identify a person as a member of a select community or group simultaneously signaling to those within and outside the group, the depth of the person’s commitment to the beliefs and/or causes of the community (Sosis 169-170). Costly signaling to faith communities means that people will engage in behaviors that are difficult, even dangerous, in order to publicly express faith. (“Self Control, Fatalism, and Health in Appalachia,” Journal of Appalachian Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1/2, p. 110, emphasis mine)
Ivermectin ingestion would qualify under such a definition as such a behavior that publicly expresses the faith of these believers. Even when the consumption of ivermectin isn’t lethal, it has the potential to be, and at the very least it has the ability to put the person ingesting it in a lot of discomfort and distress.
These outward signals are important to these believers, because it is only through faith that these threats from without can be defeated. “Serpent-handlers also agree that they must be filled with, or ‘anointed’ by, the power of the Holy Ghost at the time they wish to take up snakes,” Marsha Maguire states:
For the Christian not so anointed, snake-handling is as dangerous as for the nonbeliever. The same is true for the performance of other miracles, such as drinking strychnine and handling fire. [...]
Since most of these people believe snake-handling is a sign rather than a test [of faith], it follows that occurrences of snakebite are not the result of a lack of faith but rather a reminder to both snake-handlers and nonbelievers that the risk is real. [...]
Likewise, some view death from snakebite as punishment for past sins, while others see it simply as God’s will[.] [...] Some worshippers express an eagerness to die confirming God’s word (although again, none would handle serpents unless anointed by God to do so). (“Confirming the Word: Snake-Handling Sects in Southern Appalachia,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 175-76)
This goes some distance to explain the otherwise puzzling behavior of these believers. Why not simply accept the vaccine instead of going through these contortions, especially given that Covid can kill? From this perspective, we see that the possibility of martyrdom is sufficient, the idea that one would become so holy, so close to God that the only plausible consequence would be, in the midst of that closeness, being “taken up” by God.
Now, to be clear, the religious beliefs of the snake handlers studied by Maguire stipulate that the Holy Ghost must be present or “moving upon” a practitioner. This “infilling” is a distinct state of consciousness, described by some as being a trance state. This state of being does not correspond to the affect of those currently besieging veterinarian clinics looking for sheep drench or horse paste. They are not in a trance state. Thus they cannot definitely say via these costly signals that their actions are demonstrative of the metaphysical armor they purport to have donned. But such an ingestion, or the communication thereof after the fact, still marks a performance that indicates membership in an insular community of belief.
Another thing to keep in mind is the geographical aspect of this current phenomenon. Right now in the United States, Covid is flourishing in rural areas, mostly concentrated in the deep South. This just so happens to overlay with the same geographical area where this type of charismatic, spiritual emotionalism began and is entrenched. Maguire remarks, “Almost all of the social scientists, theologians, and physicians who have written about these sects have remarked that snake-handling, most often practiced by white, lower-class laborers, can provide one with a sense of power in a socially and economically grim and frustrating world” (Ibid., p. 177). Covid has isolated and atomized us in a way few of us have ever experienced; and we are all familiar with the ways Covid has turned our economy topsy-turvy for many. It is certainly possible that what gives rise to these religious practices is the same that causes these people to disavow life-affirming vaccines, disdain masks, and imbibe off-label medication: that these people feel powerless and are turning toward the few material interventions to which they have access.
So how do we counteract this? I don’t have a good answer for that. In the matter of the snake-handlers, there is no pressing outside need to have the adherents discontinue their practices (their “extreme behavior”, in Maguire’s description [p. 179]), other than to dissuade them from doing something so obviously inadvisable. But with Covid deniers there is a need, because they continue to be vectors where the virus can improve itself and possibly overcome our current vaccine and other mitigation efforts. We need to change their minds. But the beliefs of these Covid deniers are just that, belief structures. As such, they are resistant to logic and can’t simply be argued away.
One of the final things that Maguire leaves us with is this aside:
[Weston] LaBarre, who [in his They Shall Take up Serpents] finds the whole business both horrifying and perverse, asserts that snake-handlers have failed miserably to master either their psychological or their social problems; the cult, he writes, is “culturally pathological” and “headed for historical disaster” (Ibid., p. 178)
Many of us are at the psychological point where we want to let the Covid deniers go ahead toward “historical disaster.” Just write them off. But we can’t, as their destiny is tied up with ours. We must brainstorm solutions.