I just heard the term "on the side of the virus" today for the first time since the 2020 election. I figured that with Trump gone people had abandoned this bizarre and incoherent little phrase. I was wrong.
For starters, nobody is on the side of any virus (except maybe the CCP who is hoping it will cause harm to US society). I thought even the left had overcome its Covid hysteria enough at this point to realize how absurd this slogan is, but it appears not. The same person spouting this phrase, Farron Cousins, even argued for the necessity of masking children, a debate that I thought had long been settled. What this makes clear is that there are people whose informational environment is utterly distorted. These people are completely unaware of the facts regarding children and Covid-19; namely, that children are at far less risk from Covid than they are from the common flu and that masking children, if it had any justification at all, was about protecting teachers—never about protecting children.
You cannot "side with a virus." The very notion does not make sense. What do you get if the virus wins? Does anyone side with herpes or HPV? Can the virus get you a job, or money? Big pharma, on the other hand, does clearly have a side. I have a feeling "the virus" is a stand in for "anyone opposed to the CDC and Big Pharma's handling of Covid." It is a very subtle and interesting phrase that makes so little sense that it must work on prerational parts of their mind. Its popularity is astounding, however.
What is odd about this phrase is that it has any resonance as a meme at all. What is it that makes people who say this think they are saying anything even remotely coherent? If there were an outbreak of prion disease, could I get people to say "you are on the side of the prions?" How small does an organism or molecule (if you can even class viruses as organisms) have to become before people see the idea of its having “a side” as incoherent. If we had a problem with poison gas, would people say "You are on the side of chlorine." Where does the rabbit hole of siding with microorganisms and molecules end, exactly?
If we were debating how to fight a forest fire, with some people arguing that we allow the fire to run its course (the most extreme of the anti-interventionist measures, which few even on the Republican side took; most favoured strategies aimed at protecting the vulnerable while allowing society to continue to function), no one would describe this person as being “on the side of the fire.”
Somehow the virus has been anthropomorphized in the minds of those who utter this ridiculous slogan. The government’s propagandists have succeeded in turning Covid-19 into “the Hun” even though people, if pressed on the matter, are certainly aware that “the side of the virus” is an utterly incoherent concept. Someday a whole chapter in a textbook on propaganda and psychological manipulation will be written on this one phrase.