Tomorrow I’m going to get tested for COVID against my will. I’m completely healthy and it’s all stupid theater anyway. If I test negative, how do we know I don’t pick it up on my way from the testing facility? Or the next day? The PCR test is ridiculously unreliable, and even the guy who invented it is horrified that the test is used diagnostically.
None of this makes sense if you think it has anything to do with preventing anybody from getting sick.
But it does if you understand that this is biopolitics. Some outside authority decides if you are entitled to participate in society based on some obscure physiological metric that hides inside your body and that you can neither perceive nor measure. You have no control over the process and your input isn’t solicited. It’s all decided completely outside of your knowledge, understanding, or control. The label of a “good, acceptable, essential body” is as seemingly random as the label of a “bad, unneeded, unacceptable body.”
As Zygmunt Bauman said 15 years ago, the real power is the power to assign the role of superfluous, unnecessary human beings.