There is no doubt in my mind that vaccine mandates, whether decreed by governments or employers, whether explicit or implicit, are ethically repugnant.
Vaccine passports are just another coercive tool in the hands of governments to boost vaccination rates so that they can look good and claim victory over Covid – though in my view it’s just a way of glossing over their collective stupidity of falling for the most gigantic of frauds ever committed, resulting in a mass psychosis which has caused and will be causing immense harm to society for a long time to come.
As for employers, they just want to get people back to work – nothing else matters to them. Both governments and employers are saying these measures are about health and safety. I call bullshit.
This is about politics and economics, it has nothing to do with health.
If public health was the objective here, then governments and their advisers would have acted responsibly and insisted on proper, independent safety studies being conducted before allowing any vaccine near the population, especially experimental ones based on a technology never tried for this purpose in humans.
Or they might at the very least have insisted that pharmacovigilance was properly set up – they had sufficient time to do so. This means they would have made it mandatory to report all adverse events, regardless of when they occurred. They would have been transparent about reporting and investigating serious side effects.
They might have even questioned whether a vaccine was necessary at all for this disease with a recovery rate of close to 100%.
They might have done everything in their power to further rather than hinder the investigation of already available medication for treatment.
They might have invested billions into our hospital systems.
They might have properly investigated every single so-called Covid death.
They might have looked at what’s happening around the world, taken into consideration critical voices, they might have consulted more widely with a wide range of professions in order to assess the situation holistically.
They might have left no stone unturned in the quest to find out what precisely has happened here, rather than just perpetuate the simple-minded narrative they helped create whilst suppressing any criticism at all cost.
And if governments and employers actually cared about health, they would accept the perfectly rational arguments people like myself make in rejecting these experimental substances (whatever one might call them), and they would most certainly refrain from imposing vaccine passport requirements.
I want to focus on some ethical arguments against vaccine mandates and vaccine passports that to my knowledge have not received any attention.
Covid vaccine mandates and passport requirements are based on a most cynical view of humans, and they are fundamentally anti-democratic.
According to German political scientist and author Dr. Ulrike Guérot, who explains this all very well in this interview (in German only), all citizens must have the same rights in a democratic society. I find it interesting that although we live in the time of woke, when it comes to Covid, discrimination against the unvaccinated appears to be completely acceptable, just like it is suddenly acceptable for old people to die alone. So much for acceptance, inclusion, diversity, human rights.
In a democracy, there are many values, rights, and duties at play. Health is one of them for sure, but so too are freedom of movement, bodily integrity, the right to work, etc. In a well-functioning, democratic society you can never have one value that stands above all others. Instead, those values need to be balanced out carefully. When it comes to Covid vaccine mandates and passports, there was never any balancing out, there was never any meaningful open discussion or debate. When Bill Gates said famously not long after Covid began that seven million people would have to be vaccinated, it’s as if God had spoken and there was simply no other way. I saw the writing on the wall then.
From the beginning, anyone arguing against these coercive vaccination policies was immediately abused as anti-social, selfish, stupid…
I agree with Guérot, who says that stigmatisation, moralization, and coercion are not democratic values. She mentions the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, who postulated that it’s always problematic when an open society turns into a closed community. Closed communities are not democratic. They make their own rules, don’t protect minorities or minority opinions, because they’ve already weeded out the people they don’t like. It’s the kind of thing that happens in cults, for example.
Guérot argues that there are many studies that show that citizens act much more responsibly when they are acting out of their own free will and take responsibility for themselves.
But over the last 18 months or so, states all over the world have been acting extremely patronizingly – they infantilized citizens. Indeed. One only needs to consider the signage above sinks in public toilets which explain in so many steps how one should wash one’s hands, or the dots in public places that tell us where standing is allowed.
I’ve wondered for a long time now: what should the role of the state be? The state, Guérot says, needs to create a good framework for public health, and it needs to maintain a solid health system. I would add it should focus on preventative health. But it is certainly not the role or the duty of the state to protect individuals. Only a totalitarian state would do that – a surveillance state that has the power and the means to control and protect all of us all of the time from all dangers that exist. Would we really want that kind of life? Sadly, we seem to be heading in that direction.
If the state doesn’t trust the people, then the relationship between the state and the citizenry breaks down. The citizens will also no longer trust the state, at least not those who have realized they are being deceived – and as time goes on there will be more and more of us who become aware. As the saying goes: You can fool all people some of the time, and you can fool some people all of the time, but you can’t fool all people all of the time.
An important factor of trust is transparent communication. To people like myself, to people who think critically (and I would say society needs critical thinkers or we would still be living in caves), it was so obvious very early on that the official Covid narrative that spread like wildfire was full of inconsistencies, contradictions, half-truths, and outright lies. It is hardly surprising that I for one no longer have any faith at all in government.
According to Guérot, turning the vaccination status into a public matter has actually damaged democracy, and what makes it worse is that the division between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated is quite blurred. Arguably, there is no clear benefit of the vaccine, no need for a vaccine, there are at the very least considerable uncertainties about the efficacy and side effects of these experimental drugs. There are perfectly rational reasons why some people oppose and reject these alleged Covid vaccines.
For governments to issue mandates that are not based on a clear and strong empirical basis is dangerous for a democracy, because a democracy can only function when the law is plausible, Guérot says. Democracy works via the acceptance of legal norms. According to Guérot, the great contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben would call the laws with which we are being harassed now ‘valid but meaningless’. For example, there is currently a rule in place that demands all office workers wear masks in the office and in lifts etc. Even if one believed that masks actually have a medical purpose in the fight against a virus, to any person with commonsense this rule becomes completely meaningless when one is the only person in the office or in the lift.
Guérot argues further that democratic society doesn’t work if people are considered hypothetically suspect as a matter of principle. Such a cynical image of humans as being primarily dangerous unless proven safe is catastrophic for our society. And we have in fact been explicitly told by politicians and supposed chief health officers to behave as if all other humans around us were infected, to avoid our neighbours. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve crossed paths with a fully masked stranger on the footpath who would make a big detour around me and turn away their head or even cross to the other side of the street.
Our need for safety has seemingly become so extreme that even the most remote dangers must be ruled out, and we expect the state to be responsible, instead of us taking responsibility for our own lives as much as possible. I agree with Guérot who says that it cannot be that we view the state as some kind of life insurance. This is a plainly absurd expectation.
I realize more and more that democracy has little to do with the ballot box. It has everything to do with open and transparent dialogue and healthy debate, and mutual respect for differences. Democracy breaks down wherever that is not happening, and clearly, over the last one and a half years, there has been no debate on what to do about Covid. I’ve seen nothing but state propaganda and censorship, media beholden to state and corporate interests, and willful criminal blindness by those in power.
The latest tentacle of this ugly cancer are vaccine mandates and the utilization of vaccine passports, divisive policies that are deeply damaging to societies all over the world.
We have seen in the past what happens in segregated societies – through the apartheid regime of South Africa, or the situation in Northern Ireland over many years. We seem to forget so easily.
I can only laugh at the term “Freedom Day” being bandied about in New South Wales – the biggest oxymoron ever. On 11 October 2021, the latest public health order that rules our lives has no less than 53 pages of restrictions. The previous public health order valid until then had 57 pages. Big fucking deal!
Those few “freedoms” that the government so kindly gave us back, are only available to those who have submitted themselves and can prove to be “fully vaccinated.”
We now live officially in some form of apartheid. It might come to an end on 1 December, but then again it might not.
Short-sighted employers are increasingly introducing the same form of discrimination into their workplaces. Personally, I can only hope that commonsense, decency, and fairness will prevail in my workplace.
Tens of thousands of citizens have already effectively lost their right to make such an important health decision for themselves, otherwise, they would have lost their jobs and careers. And our politicians have the height to declare that vaccination will remain voluntary. Yet another blatant lie, yet another blatant betrayal.
I’ll say it again: Covid vaccine mandates and Covid vaccine passport requirements are unethical and destructive, and they have no place in a civilized, democratic society.
