Individual sovereignty means that people can make their own choices, based on their own assessment of risk. It means that others can advise them, but not compel them. It’s a basis for modern human rights and natural law.
COVID Vaccines Are Part of Life
Health bureaucrats have really found their feet during the COVID-19 years, prohibiting children from going to school, families and friends from meeting, and everyone from walking in more than one direction in supermarket aisles or sitting alone on park benches. They banned the use of safe repurposed medicines, claiming they were fit only for animals while continuing to use them for other human diseases. Then they mandated injections with novel pharmaceutical products, banning people from working or traveling without them. They have benefitted their sponsors but impoverish the majority with virtual impunity. They rightly feel important, the guardians of society.But all is not well. While medical fascism has paid well for three years, the public are starting to show signs of lack of trust—perhaps they are sick of being told what is best for them. They may be starting to think they are best placed to assess their own risks and priorities, and act accordingly.
This renaming had required a broadening of the definition of vaccine, as mRNA must co-opt the person’s cellular machinery, like a medicine, in order to eventually stimulate an immune response.
The Right to Choose
Truly informed consent is one of the most unpopular ideas in medicine. The idea that the health professional is there merely to inform a patient’s sovereign, independent decision is difficult for a self-entitled profession to accept. Most believe they have a right to limit the public’s freedom when they deem it necessary. While many on both sides of the COVID-19 vaccine debate act with good intent (and sometimes switch sides accordingly), their positions on mandates or bans require that governments use authoritarian approaches to implement public health policy.As this article will upset well-meaning people, my argument needs further explanation. A belief common to those for and against the COVID-19 response holds that people need to be protected from toxic substances and from malfeasance by doctors or pharmaceutical companies. It assumes that health professionals have a special place in society, shielding the public from areas where they lack knowledge and therefore cannot make sound judgment.
These arguments are reasonable, and in a world where all people live by high standards of integrity and ethics, they might represent the safest approach. Unfortunately, none of us seem able to infallibly uphold such standards. As 1930s Germany showed, and the COVID-19 response reiterated, the public health establishment is particularly vulnerable to influence and abuse by political or corporate sponsors.
While a penchant for authoritarianism is well-established within medicine, the inclination to ban pharmaceuticals is relatively new. The doctor–patient relationship previously determined use based on context and history, informed (one hoped) by an honest regulatory system. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been managed similarly to occasionally deadly penicillin: available at the doctor’s discretion with the patient’s agreement.
Who Should Be in Charge?
The primacy of decision-making within the doctor–patient relationship was based on recognition that illness is not just about a virus. It is the result of these within a body with particular genetic makeup, past exposure history, and underlying immune competence. Its severity further depends on the cultural context and value system of the sick person. Lastly, but most importantly, it was based on the principle that the patient is a free, independent being, with primary rights over their own body. A doctor could refuse to perform a requested service, but could not force one. Insanity was the only exception. This is fundamental to medical ethics.Medical practice also traditionally assumed that the doctor has a responsibility to help the patient, or a requirement to cause no harm. This requires expertise and may involve refusal to do all that a patient requests; the doctor is an adviser of the individual and not the individual’s subordinate. For this relationship to work, it must be free of conflict of interest and provided with reliable evidence and opinion. Various professional governing boards are supposed to support this process, so these boards and regulators must also be free of conflict of interest.
Market Forces Are Preferable to Self-Entitlement
Here we are in 2023 with the COVID-19 vaccines established on the market, amid allegations of fraud and misrepresentation of data, poor safety and efficacy, and a lack of clear overall benefit. Their target illness is confined in severity to a small segment of the population, nearly all of whom now have good post-infection immunity. The vaccines do not stop or substantially reduce transmission, and may over time increase it.Those who committed fraud should have to answer for it. Those who abandoned the precautionary principle and informed consent should be required to justify their actions and their right to continue to practice.
None of this should remove the right of the public to make their own decisions on accessing these new genetic vaccines as a currently marketed commodity. Where expected harm clearly outweighs benefit, no medical practitioner should offer it, just as it would be inappropriate to offer Thalidomide to a pregnant woman with nausea. Where there are plausible grounds for overall benefit, if should be available as an option. These individuals can decide, based on the information available. While this group of potential beneficiaries appears diminishingly small, it remains conceivable that elderly obese diabetics with no prior COVID-19 infection may benefit. Market forces can then decide whether the product is viable, rather than authoritarian dictates.
A Way Out
To fix the health and societal disaster of the past three years, the public does not need more dictates from the self-appointed medical guardians who caused it. Too many have proven unworthy and incompetent. The problem is deeper than the availability or withdrawal of a vaccine. Public health professionals have forgotten the primacy of individual freedom—of the right of each person to set their own priorities and manage their own bodies. The public are sovereign, not the doctors who wish to lead or mislead them.With reducing interest in vaccine boosters, it appears the public may solve the vaccine access issue themselves. A free flow of information and genuine informed consent will probably accelerate this. So would a responsible attitude from medical journals and regulatory agencies, if they can emerge from the yoke of their sponsors.
These are problems caused by the public health establishment. This establishment should reform itself, and never again presume it has the right, or the character, to dictate to others. The public will make mistakes, but these will pale beside the mess the health professions have already created.