Commentary
COVID-19 presents a high risk of severe illness and death to a few and a negligible risk to the majority of the population. The median age of death with COVID-19 is similar to that of natural mortality in most countries. Ninety-five percent of hospitalizations occur in individuals with one or more existing health problems, and 99.95 percent (pdf) of individuals below 70 survive.
Survival is even higher for healthy individuals. Children and young people have almost zero risk of death from COVID-19.
The epidemiological reality of COVID-19 lends itself to a focused vaccine approach: offering a safe and efficacious vaccine to high-risk individuals (mostly people above 50, with other health problems) when the benefit of the intervention clearly outweighs the risk. This strategy achieves the best outcome for all.
Mandatory vaccination has no place in a free society. Public health policy should never be coercive and should always be participatory. Decisions must be made by those who have “skin in the game” and not by bureaucrats or a conflicted elite who will never have to live with the consequences of their actions. The role of public health agencies is to provide the public with accurate information and respect individuals and communities to make their own decisions.
Seven ethical principles of public health should be at the heart of any public health intervention: non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, health maximization, efficiency, justice, and proportionality. Human rights, scientific facts, and common sense should also be applied.
Here are 10 reasons why COVID-19 vaccination should never be mandatory:
- Non-maleficence: The Hippocratic duty of “first, do no harm.” There’s mounting evidence of serious adverse events, particularly myocarditis in the young, following COVID-19 vaccination. Adverse events reporting systems act as a signaling system so immediate action can be taken to prevent greater harm. There are currently strong enough signals (pdf) to warrant an investigation. Vaccines are also contraindicated for individuals with certain health conditions. Vaccination of pregnant/breastfeeding women must be approached with great care—pregnant women were excluded from the vaccine trials; COVID risk is low in healthy women of child-bearing age, while vaccine risks to the fetus/infant (pdf) can’t be determined yet.
- Beneficence: The duty to produce benefit for the individual. Health interventions should be based on individual needs. Vaccination is only indicated when the intervention clearly represents a greater benefit than risk for the individual. This criterion isn’t met for children and young people, individuals below 60 with no existing health problems, and individuals with past SARS-CoV-2 infection (including asymptomatic infection).
- Respect for autonomy: Allowing individuals to pursue their wellbeing as they perceive it. “Every person has a high value ... and cannot merely be treated as a means to the end of others’ good,” writes Peter Schröder-Bäck and colleagues in the journal BMC Medical Ethics. This entails seeking the individual’s informed consent (pdf) before any medical intervention: informing them of the risks and the benefits of the intervention and getting their voluntary consent without “any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion,” according to The Nuremberg Code. Currently, individuals can’t be provided with full information on vaccine side effects as no long-term data exists yet. The results of the vaccine trials should be replicated by independent scientists prior to vaccine rollout to the high-risk group. Public transparency of all efficacy and safety data is necessary.
- Health maximization: Maximizing the health of all members of the general public requires a holistic and multi-layered approach: educating the public about a healthy lifestyle to improve their chronic illness, the importance of vitamin D in fighting respiratory infections, the importance of home-based early treatment (pdf), the availability of life-saving treatment protocols, safe and effective drugs (such as Ivermectin (pdf)), as well as vaccines for the high-risk group. Vaccinating individuals who incur greater risk from the vaccine than benefit increases total harm.
- Efficiency: The duty to produce as many benefits to as many people given limited resources. Vaccinating individuals who do not benefit from the intervention diverts valuable resources away from the vulnerable as well as from far more devastating global health issues such as tuberculosis, HIV, diabetes, cancer, and cardiac diseases.
- Justice: All humans have equal worth and no one should be discriminated against based on their health choices. Unfair practices such as denial of services, requirements for employment, restrictions on travel, and higher insurance premiums for the unvaccinated create a two-tiered society. It breaks social solidarity and cohesion.
- Proportionality: The reasonable balance between the benefits and costs of an intervention in terms of individual welfare versus collective benefit. Vaccines are designed to confer protection to the vaccinated. It’s unethical for a person to incur any vaccine risk or lose personal freedoms for the sake of somebody else.
- Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 can result from both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The virus can also be transmitted among animals. Even if everyone is vaccinated, transmission will continue and variants will keep evolving. A zero-COVID strategy is unrealistic and unachievable.
- Herd immunity can be reached through a combination of natural infection and vaccination. Natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broad and long-lasting—more so than vaccine-induced immunity, especially in combating variants. Recovery from infection prevents serious illness if reinfected. It isn’t necessary to vaccinate the entire planet for the “greater good” of society.
- Non-derogable rights, as stated in Article 58 of The Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1958) (pdf), apply under all circumstances, even under threat of “national security”:
“No state party shall, even in time of emergency threatening the life of the nation, derogate from the Covenant’s guarantees of the right to life; freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and from medical or scientific experimentation without free consent; ... and freedom of thought, conscience and religion. These rights are not derogable under any conditions even for the asserted purpose of preserving the life of the nation.”We face two scenarios. Either the vaccines work, delivering protection to the vaccinated and eliminating the claim that everyone needs to be vaccinated, or they don’t work, and therefore, no one should get vaccinated. On both counts, vaccine passports are a pointless “public health” tool that will undermine trust in the medical profession and vaccination programs. They seem to serve economic, financial, political, and ideological agendas. Most fundamentally, they are unethical. They swing the gate wide open for totalitarian rule through a digital social credit system.
Vaccine passports represent the epitome of the greater evil of society. This is the inch we must not yield.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
