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Sacred Wings, Suspect Neighbors: Bats, Mosquitoes, Vaccine Mandates and a Public-Health Double Standard

By Vetita Mentis, Founder, Strategic Liberty Coalition

Why do the same voices that protect virus-carrying bats treat unvaccinated neighbors as the real threat? A look at a public-health double standard.

Some animals carry viruses that have killed millions. Some insects exist mainly as flying syringes. Why does one political culture treat the first as sacred, shrug at the second, and treat an unvaccinated neighbor as the real menace?

If the only question were human survival, the argument would be simple. Some animals carry pathogens that have already killed people by the thousands and are positioned to kill far more. Other animals exist mainly as flying syringes. A third kind of organism, the unvaccinated human, was treated during the COVID-19 years as a comparable public menace. The puzzle isn't that societies try to reduce disease. The puzzle is why one political culture treats wild reservoirs of disease as nearly sacred and human noncompliance as nearly criminal.

We should be precise about who that is. It isn't every Democrat, and it isn't everyone who likes parks. It's a recognizable package within American and European progressive politics: a conservation ethic that treats native species as having value in themselves, a public-health politics that treated an unvaccinated body as an affront to be managed, and a scientific vocabulary that insists none of this involves values at all. Plenty of people hold one piece of the package without the others. Our argument is that the package as a whole doesn't survive contact with its own premises.

The Case Against the Bat, Stated Without Romance

Bats aren't a Halloween prop. They're a documented part of the story of several of the most dangerous zoonotic diseases of the last century.

  • Rabies circulates in bats, and in the Americas, now that dog rabies is largely controlled, blood-feeding bats are the main source of human cases (WHO).
  • Nipah and Hendra viruses have their natural hosts in fruit bats of the family Pteropodidae (WHO).
  • Marburg virus has been isolated directly from Egyptian fruit bats (Amman et al., 2014).
  • Coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 circulate in horseshoe bats and their relatives.

Whether every headline linking bats to Ebola was precise is a separate question. (The Ebola reservoir still hasn't been confirmed.) Either way, bats are an important evolutionary warehouse for viruses that can jump to people.

A ruthless public-health utilitarian would therefore ask an impolite question. If a group of animals keeps producing pathogens that can empty cities, why is the default policy preservation rather than elimination? Livestock exposed to foot-and-mouth disease get culled. Since 2022, more than 200 million American chickens, turkeys and other birds have been affected by bird-flu detections, and flocks are destroyed as a matter of routine (USDA APHIS). Rats in a plague year aren't invited to stay on as heritage fauna. The difference isn't science. The difference is status. A chicken is property. A bat is nature.

The honest scientific reply isn't that bats are harmless. It's that wholesale eradication is a fantasy with ugly side effects. Bats pollinate plants, spread seeds, and eat huge numbers of night-flying insects. Mostly that means moths and beetles, not the cartoon diet of a thousand mosquitoes an hour.

Attempts to cull bats that carry disease have failed the way ecology usually punishes human impatience:

  • Vampire bats in Peru. A four-year study of 20 colonies found that culling didn't reduce rabies exposure. Colonies culled only now and then showed more exposure, and colonies never culled showed the least (Streicker et al., 2012).
  • Egyptian fruit bats in Uganda. After a Marburg outbreak, miners at Kitaka Mine wiped out the colony in 2008 and sealed the entrances. By 2012 bats had moved back in, and 13.3% of them were actively infected, up from 5.1% before the extermination. That same year Uganda had its largest Marburg outbreak to that date, 20 km away (Amman et al., 2014).

Stress a colony, scatter it, and you may increase the spread of disease rather than end it.

North America has also seen what happens when bats disappear for other reasons. White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, has killed bats by the millions since 2006. One widely discussed study found that farmers in affected counties raised insecticide use by about 31%, and that infant deaths from internal causes in those counties rose about 8% (Frank, Science, 2024). The infant-mortality link is contested, since other researchers argue the study never tied pesticide exposure to the deaths directly (critique). The first half of the finding is the simpler one: lose the bats, and people reach for the spray.

Those caveats matter. They don't dissolve the moral contrast. Institutions that will recite every ecological reason not to disturb a bat colony were not reciting parallel reasons for patience with a hesitant parent. Ecology is allowed to be complicated when the subject has fur and a conservation listing. Human dissent wasn't granted the same systems thinking.

Kill the Bats, Inherit the Swamp

Suppose, against the evidence that culling backfires, a government actually succeeded in stripping a landscape of bats. The brochure version of this policy promises fewer spillovers. The unadvertised version is an insect boom.

Bats aren't a precision anti-mosquito service. The famous "600 mosquitoes an hour" figure comes from a 1960 lab experiment in which bats were released in rooms filled with mosquitoes or fruit flies and little else to eat. Studies of wild bat diets keep finding mosquitoes to be a small share of what bats actually eat (University of Wisconsin). Still, removing a major night-time insect eater isn't a non-event. Moths, beetles and some mosquitoes would face less predation. People who sold bat houses as malaria policy oversold the mechanism. People who claim bats do no insect work at all are selling the opposite cartoon.

Here the eradication logic eats itself. If the reason for destroying bats is disease prevention, the side effect (more insects, including some that bite) reopens the ledger. The consistent next move isn't a candlelight vigil for Culicidae. It's to look hard at mosquitoes, the more straightforward target they've always been.

The Insect That Actually Keeps the Morgue Busy

Mosquitoes don't play the romantic role conservation posters need. There are thousands of species, and only a small minority are responsible for the human catastrophe:

  • Anopheles for malaria.
  • Aedes for dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.
  • Culex for West Nile.

Malaria alone killed an estimated 610,000 people in 2024. Ninety-five percent of those deaths were in Africa, and about three-quarters of the African deaths were children under five (WHO World Malaria Report 2025). Setting aside a once-in-a-century pandemic, along with the unresolved fight over how COVID-19 actually reached people, no bat-borne virus kills on malaria's annual schedule. Rabies, the deadliest, is mostly spread to humans by dogs. If disease prevention is the standard, the mosquito is the adult conversation.

Unlike "eradicate all bats," targeted suppression of a few vector species that have adapted to humans isn't a fringe idea. These are working public-health tools:

  • Wolbachia. Mosquitoes carrying the Wolbachia bacterium cut confirmed dengue cases by 77% and dengue hospitalizations by 86% in a randomized trial in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (Utarini et al., NEJM, 2021).
  • Sterile-insect releases.
  • Larval habitat removal.
  • Gene-drive research against Anopheles gambiae.

An expert review commissioned through the Target Malaria project concluded that removing Anopheles gambiae would have limited ecosystem effects. No predator was found to depend on it, and other insects would take its place in the food web (Collins et al., 2019). That claim can be debated. It's at least an argument about human lives rather than about the sacredness of a buzz.

Watch who has been on the other side of it. In 2016 more than 170 groups, led by the environmental organization ETC Group, asked the UN Convention on Biological Diversity for a global moratorium on gene drives, calling them a "genetic extinction technology" (ETC Group). In August 2025, Burkina Faso's government shut down Target Malaria's work there. It sealed the labs and ordered the mosquitoes destroyed, days after a release that had national biosafety and environmental approval and the agreement of the villages involved (Target Malaria). WHO estimates that malaria kills about 16,000 people a year in Burkina Faso.

Someone who cared above all about premature death would fund vector control before funding the spiritual upkeep of every native insect. Someone who treats every food-web uncertainty as a veto leaves malaria in place as the price of ecological humility. The politics we're describing tried to hold both poses at once: high-tech management of human bodies, low-tech reverence for nonhuman species, and a lecture about following the science.

The Unvaccinated as a Designated Reservoir

Now put a human being in the same frame. During COVID-19, many public officials and commentators described the unvaccinated less as citizens with a risk profile than as walking spillover events. The rhetoric wasn't subtle:

  • President Biden called it "a pandemic of the unvaccinated" and told unvaccinated Americans, "our patience is wearing thin," as he announced vaccine-or-test rules for some 100 million workers (White House remarks, Sept. 9, 2021).
  • A prominent infectious-disease expert called unvaccinated people "potential variant factories" (CNN, July 3, 2021).
  • Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said people fiercely opposed to vaccination were "often misogynistic, often racist" and asked whether the country should tolerate them. He later said the remarks were taken out of context (National Post).
  • France's President Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to "piss off" the unvaccinated and that "an irresponsible person is no longer a citizen" (BBC).

Schools, jobs, restaurants and travel became tools for shrinking the unvaccinated population. The federal rule for large employers covered about 84 million workers until the Supreme Court blocked it in January 2022 (NFIB v. OSHA).

Some of this rested on ordinary epidemiology. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known. Polio can paralyze. Vaccines against those diseases are among the strongest tools industrial society ever built, and the cost of letting them slip is no longer theoretical. The United States recorded 2,289 measles cases in 2025, the most since 1992, and more than 4,800 so far in 2026 (CDC). A parent who treats a measles outbreak as a lifestyle choice isn't a hero of bodily autonomy. He's gambling with other people's infants.

It's possible to say that without turning every respiratory virus into a moral emergency and every holdout into a vector species. The COVID vaccines were good at preventing severe illness. They were never as good at stopping infection, a fact the CDC's own director acknowledged in August 2021 when she said that against the Delta variant, "what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission" (CNN). The case for treating the unvaccinated as a danger to everyone else rested on transmission. Yet the exclusion went on for months after that.

The tell is the temperature difference. A bat that can seed a coronavirus lineage is a marvel of coevolution, to be conserved, buffered and explained. A neighbor who declines a shot is a biosecurity hole. One organism is Nature. The other is negligence. Both are biological facts that don't fill out paperwork. Only one is allowed to stay inconvenient.

If the principle is that uncontrolled reservoirs are intolerable, consistency would require a hard look at wildlife markets, cave tourism, farms pushing into wildlife habitat, and yes, the fantasy that bats can be deleted from the planet like a bad app. If the principle is that risk must be driven toward zero wherever institutions can reach it, then gene-drive mosquitoes and vaccine mandates belong to the same family of solutions. The politics we're describing accepted coercion for people and rejected deletion for insects. That isn't a risk calculation. It's a ranking of sacred objects.

Purity After God

What follows is interpretation, not data: our reading of why the double standard feels natural to the people who hold it.

The official story is that this politics is secular. It speaks the language of peer review, equity and evidence. But a species can't be both a resource to be weighed and an icon whose disease burden is impolite to mention. Icons belong to religion. Deep ecology, an influential strand of modern environmentalism, says so openly: its founding platform holds that human and nonhuman life have "value in themselves," independent of any usefulness to people.

What looks like conservation science in the brochure often works as a purity ritual in practice. Native is clean. Introduced is stained. Wild is authentic. Managed is suspect, except when the thing being managed is a human schedule of injections, speech and movement. The bat must be allowed to be a bat, viruses and all, because interfering would violate a state of grace called the ecosystem. The citizen must not be allowed to be an unedited body, because that would violate a state of grace called the public.

That's why the same culture can oppose "playing God" with a forest and demand that the state play God with a deltoid. The contradiction isn't resolved by pointing at climate models or CDC slides. It's resolved by noticing that two different gods are being served. One is Nature, imagined as an order before the Fall that human will can only defile. The other is Society, imagined as a clinic whose remaining pathogens are political failures. Atheism doesn't abolish worship. It changes the altar.

Marxism is a useful contrast, because it doesn't fit neatly on either altar. Classical Marxism is not a birdwatching club. It treats nature as the material that human labor transforms. Even Engels's famous warning that "for each such victory nature takes its revenge on us" ends by urging people to master nature by learning its laws, not to leave it untouched (Engels, 1876). Today's eco-socialists, such as John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito, have tried to graft a deeper ecology onto Marx, and that graft is exactly where the tension shows.

Marxist planning logic does fit one side of the double standard well. If history is a march out of necessity toward what Engels called "the administration of things" (we've written about where that promise leads in "Abundance Without Exit"), then an unvaccinated holdout looks like a kulak of biology: a private remainder that insults the plan. Wildlife doesn't insult the plan the same way, because it has been moved into a different myth, of a world that was innocent before capitalism. Save the bat to reject the Fall. Mandate the shot to complete the Plan. The two myths don't agree. They agree only that the stubborn individual is the problem. That's the same individual whose freedom to say no, and to leave, we've argued every collectivist system eventually has to close off ("The Dictatorial Commune and the Chattel Plantation").

A Single Standard, If Anyone Wants One

A serious country would stop pretending these are the same kind of decision.

Bats shouldn't be exterminated as a pandemic strategy. The evidence already in hand says massacre is a clumsy way to reduce spillover and a good way to lose pollination, insect control and humility. Keep people out of roosts, keep bats out of buildings, and leave the colonies alone.

The human-biting mosquito species are a different case. They exist to drink human blood and pass on parasites. Narrow them, crash them, replace them with Wolbachia-carrying lines, or drive their fertility into a wall. Then measure the ecology afterward like adults instead of like acolytes.

The same consent principle we ask for people applies here too. The Florida Keys put a trial of genetically modified mosquitoes to a local vote in 2016: Monroe County approved it, the neighborhood picked for the release voted it down, and the release moved elsewhere (NPR). That's how it should work. The people who live with an intervention should get the first say. They shouldn't get vetoed by a distant ministry or an international campaign. A self-spreading gene drive raises a harder version of the question, because it crosses property lines and borders on its own. Reasonable libertarians will disagree about where the line falls.

Human vaccination should be argued as vaccination, not as a metaphysics of cleanliness. Persuade with the evidence for each product: measles shots on their record, COVID shots on theirs. Libertarians disagree among themselves about whether any mandate can be justified. What should be common ground is that a policy that brands people unclean for a choice about their own bodies will burn trust it can't easily win back. Some campaigns earned distrust because the products were oversold, the dissenters were treated as unclean, and the same voices that called wildlife culling medieval called civil exclusion compassionate. People notice the caste system.

The test is simple. If a policy is justified by deaths prevented per dollar, apply it to Anopheles, to wildlife markets, to hospital ventilation, and to vaccines judged on what they actually prevent. If a policy is justified by the feeling that a living system must not be profaned, admit the feeling. Don't dress it up as science, and don't reserve the profanation taboo for animals while treating unvaccinated humans as an invasive species.

Until that honesty arrives, the spectacle will continue. Officials will fund bat conservation and bat-virus research in the same breath, as if the animal were both chalice and bomb. The federal government spent years funding the bat-coronavirus work of EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan, then barred the group and its former president from federal funding in January 2025 (House Oversight Committee). Officials will speak of "One Health," then rank the health of a colony above the patience of a parent. They will leave the swamp intact because it's natural and police the schoolyard because it isn't. That isn't public health. It's a liturgy with lab coats.

What This Means on Your Ballot

None of this is decided in a lab. It's decided by officeholders: governors who declare emergencies and legislatures that limit them (19 states passed limits on emergency health powers in 2021 alone, according to Temple University's Center for Public Health Law Research); school boards and state health departments that set exemption rules; mosquito-control districts, whose boards are elected in some states; and state agencies that approve or block new vector-control tools. Those are policy questions, and the Strategic Liberty Coalition's Methodology is built to weigh policy, not party. Score how much harm a rule does to peaceful people, how many people it reaches, how much the office can actually change it, and whether a candidate who would move it toward liberty can win. Then use the free worksheet to run the races on your own ballot. Sometimes the candidate who moves the policy furthest toward liberty is a Libertarian, and sometimes it's someone else. Vote for the person who moves the policy.

Sources

Bats and the diseases they carry

Mosquitoes and vector control

Vaccines, mandates and pandemic rhetoric

Nature, Marxism and ecology