Commentary
A popular argument against the various vaccine mandates imposed upon citizens the world over is that they violate the
Nuremberg Code of 1947. Many an article points out that the Code states that, as regards any experimental medical treatment, “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential ... without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion.”
The common retort is to insist that the COVID-19 vaccines are not “experimental.” This appeal seems a little desperate—a grasping at straws.
In medicine, there’s no substitute for time, and when COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out to the public, there were no long-term studies into their impacts. Though they saved untold lives and protected the most vulnerable, senior citizens, from severe disease, many of the claims made about the vaccines’ effectiveness proved to be
wrong, and many
adverse effects in younger populations have manifested. People seem to want to pretend that the scale of the experiment—hundreds of millions the world over—somehow renders it not an “experiment.”
What’s most revealing is that so many vaccine apologists ignore whether these vaccine mandates meet the definition of “coercion.” No one seems to dispute the assertion that vaccine mandates are coercive—because the evidence is quite overwhelming.
In the name of safety, public health, and disease mitigation, countries across the world coerced citizens into getting double or triple-vaccinated. From small European states such as Slovenia—requiring
“Covid papers” at gas stations—to Central American countries such as Costa Rica—requiring
all children 5 and over to be vaccinated—measures varied widely across borders. In Europe, all EU nations adopted the broadly inclusive
Green Pass allowing those vaccinated, tested, and COVID-recovered to travel freely.
A handful of countries mandated vaccines for all citizens of qualifying ages. According to a
Statista report, Turkmenistan, Vatican City, and Tajikistan were the first to take the most draconian actions. Some countries, such as Italy and Greece, nationally mandated vaccines for older-age, vulnerable populations.
A Rolling Back of Mandates
More than a year after vaccines were rolled out to the public, a number of countries have reassessed the costs and benefits of mandating vaccines and chosen to suspend them. Australia, infamous for its
sinister crackdown on non-compliant citizens, has entirely
gotten rid of mandatory vaccinations outside of health and old-age care workers. The growing
worker shortage in states such as Victoria has prompted public officials to scale back their discriminatory measures.
Austria’s national vaccine mandate—which kindled tremendous uproar across the Western Hemisphere—has also come to a halt as the government says it has
created “deep rifts in Austria’s society” after months-long growing domestic strife and heavy protests in
Vienna.
In attempts to raise relatively low inoculation rates (
30 percent of Austrians remain unvaccinated and just under half are unboosted), country leaders previously instituted
targeted lockdowns of the unvaccinated and declared they would have to pay fines as high as 3,600 euros ($4,108).
Bloomberg
outlined the Austrian government’s gradual crackdown on the unvaccinated:
“In the first phase of Austria’s policy, the unvaccinated will get written notification. Starting in mid-March, police and other officials will start checking vaccine status, imposing fines, and ordering vaccine appointments if necessary. Continued dissent will prompt another 600 euro fine after a month.”
After taking the most aggressive approach to coercive vaccination, Austrian officials have recognized its demonstrable futility.
“The vaccine mandate won’t lead anyone to get vaccinated. Surveys have shown that 13 percent of people who live in Austria will not get vaccinated despite the vaccine mandate,” Health Minister Johannes Rauch of the progressive Greens party recently
stated.
European countries that made vaccination compulsory for specific age groups have also subsequently suspended their policies. In May, Greece
lifted its comprehensive vaccine passport system and
ended its monthly
$114 fines on unvaccinated Greek citizens of 60 years and older.
Earlier this year, Italy
threatened unvaccinated citizens over the age of 50 with a penalty of up to 1,500 euros ($1,698). Now, Italy has
abolished all its remaining restrictions, including
domestic vaccine certificates and vaccine requirements for foreign travelers.
The Case of Canada
Canada made international headlines for implementing de-facto compulsory vaccination as unvaccinated citizens were stripped of their rights to travel anywhere via plane or train and their ability to work at banks, law firms, hospitals, and all federally regulated industries. As of June 20, the Canadian government has
dropped most vaccine travel requirements, except for international travelers.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc stated this decision was “based on science“ and the government may ”bring back” mandates if a new wave of the virus hit Canada.
The Canadian province of Quebec instituted some of the most drastic COVID measures in the country, and was on the verge of financially penalizing unvaccinated citizens, but leaders
dropped the plan in order not to undermine “social cohesion.” The province also lifted a bizarre
requirement that those without a vaccine pass had to “be accompanied at all times by a store employee” in large retail stores such as Walmart.
Sumon Chakrabti, a top Canadian infectious disease specialist, said in an email interview that the suspension of federal vaccine mandates is better late than ever.
“Lifting of this vaccine mandate for travelers is a welcome one if very overdue. I do hope this is not the finished product, however, as there is still a stipulation on unvaccinated travelers returning from an international area. This needs to be lifted as well,” he wrote.
“With what we know about the vaccines now, they are excellent at preventing severe disease, but not so much transmission. Because of this, vaccine mandates to reduce transmission no longer make sense scientifically or ethically.”
The imposition of vaccine mandates in Canada shocked many because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s initial promise on record was to not take away people’s freedoms and force them to get inoculated.
“That’s not the way we do things in Canada,” he once
stated.
Last May, in his appearance on “The Brandon Gomez Show,” he
elaborated: “What do you do with someone who has an allergy, or someone who’s immunocompromised, or someone who for religious or deep convictions decides that, no, they’re not going to get a vaccine? ... We’re not a country that makes vaccination mandatory, for example, but we want to encourage everyone to get it.”
By August, he had completely reversed this position and demanded all Canadians get vaccinated or suffer from life-changing consequences such as being fired from their jobs and being unable to leave the country.
Canada’s sweeping mandates revealed the ethical implications of vaccine coercion given a
“nontrivial” number of vaccine recipients (young men particularly) have been disproportionately harmed by the known side effect of vaccine-induced heart inflammation. I interviewed Desh, a 38-year-old law enforcement member who almost died after being forced to take the second vaccine dose to keep his job. He had a severe case of vaccine myocarditis that almost resulted in heart failure. He continues to suffer debilitating consequences of the government coercion.
“Working out [at] the gym helped clear my mind and establish discipline in my life. ... I can’t jog, go for a hike, play tennis, or do any of the things for both my mind and body,” Desh
stated.“I’m living with the consequences of what the government made me do, not what I chose to do.”
He added, “If you don’t get the vaccine, you’re an outlaw ... and you must be vanished to some other place in society.”
Continued Concerns
The violation of informed consent—specifically, the failure of public health authorities to adequately warn of the risk of myocarditis in young males—and to accurately represent the relatively minuscule threat posed to them by COVID-19—remains a pressing concern as vaccine mandates haven’t been entirely abolished in the West. Virtually all U.S colleges have mandated the booster shot for the fall semester even though there’s zero clinical evidence that healthy double-vaccinated undergraduate students would significantly benefit (last year, elite American universities barred unvaccinated students from even attending online classes).Other sectors of American society continue to discriminate against the unvaccinated. Last week, a spokesman for NYC mayor Eric Adams told The New York Post that the city has
fired over 1,750 city employees for refusing to get vaccinated. Meanwhile, tennis champion Novak Djokovic was
not allowed to participate in the U.S. Open—not because the tournament has mandated vaccines, but because the Biden administration’s outdated vaccine requirements for foreign citizens remain in place.
The recent lifting of coercive mandates in Canada may also be transient as Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos has stated Canadians may need a booster shot
every nine months.
“We will never be fully vaccinated against COVID,” he declared. Given Canada’s
terrible civil liberties record over the past two years, many are worried their freedoms will be taken again.
It remains utterly mystifying why those most opposed to “systemic” forms of discrimination readily embraced the imposition of medical apartheid. Many on the left initially viewed the prospect of vaccine mandates to be a
conspiracy theory propagated by “anti-vaxxers.” During the Trump administration, notable figures such as Kamala Harris publicly declared their hesitancy about taking the rushed vaccine. A few months into taking power, the Biden-Harris administration began barring unvaccinated foreigners from entering the country.
The ACLU—f
ormerly opposed to vaccine mandates—bizarrely abandoned its core principles and voiced its support for systemic medical discrimination in a New York Times op-ed.
No Rationale
The only robust scientific rationale for instituting vaccine mandates—at the expense of violating bodily autonomy and core civil liberties—was the potentially greater benefit of reducing community transmission. Regardless of one’s own risk of COVID disease, critics argued, everyone must get vaccinated for the safety of others.
However, this promise swiftly failed. A study measuring the link between vaccination and COVID cases last year
found, “At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days .... In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”
Another
recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found natural immunity was more protective against symptomatic Omicron
a year after infection compared to two and three vaccine doses around a month after administration.
As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford, stated in an email interview:
“Given the sharp age gradient in mortality risk from COVID infection, the COVID vaccine was always most important for the elderly and others with chronic conditions that predispose to severe COVID disease. The vaccine does not stop transmission, so requiring everyone—regardless of their own personal risk from COVID relative to the side-effect risks from the vaccine—never made any sense. Mandating the COVID vaccine has diminished public trust in public health, which I fear will lead to many negative consequences in the years ahead.”
At a time when the left and the right could have united in opposition to the collective assault on our civil liberties, liberals and progressives—with some notable outliers such as Russell Brand, Joe Rogan, and Jimmy Dore—uncritically cheered-on government decrees.
As our polarized political landscape continues to induce collective psychosis, conservatives have become champions of bodily autonomy (at least for vaccines). In a great reversal, they have also become critics of pharmaceutical industries. Conversely, the left has decided to champion Big Pharma, extend extreme trust to these capitalist corporate behemoths, and has supported the discrimination and abuse of workers. The left has managed to marginalize itself from the working class—whose livelihoods have been destroyed by universal COVID restrictions—and it has turned its back on “people of color” who had lower vaccination rates than whites in many cities. The left has become a champion of censorship, and has promoted the victimization of a marginalized group.
The trend of nations across the world suspending mandates is a victory for civil liberties, but the imposition of such coercive measures in the first place marks a dangerous precedent for government overreach and authoritarianism.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
