Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948) which gives the right to medical treatment, but is silent
on the right to decline it
Is there a RIGHT not to be vaccinated? The question was raised over at Quora and I was spurred to answer it there.
People certainly think they have a right to your own body, indeed years ago Thomas Hobbes made this the basis of all our rights. But Hobbes recognised that people could be forced to do many things “with” their bodies.
And today, unvaccinated people are certainly finding that a lot of things they thought were their rights are not really. We are in unknown territory with vaccine mandates, really, and the ambiguities reveal themselves as governments perform all sorts of contortions to “appear” to leave people a choice, while in effect making the choice almost impossible to exercise. The US government s many other governments do, will sack people for not being vaccinated, but it does not explicitly seek to a law to make vaccination obligatory.
And so, there are concerted attempts all over the world to make ordinary, healthy people take corona virus vaccines that are known to have non-negligible side-effects including in some cases death. Databases like the EudraVigilance one operated by the European Medical Agency indicate that adverse side-effects are real enough. Two justifications offered for this are that (side-effects apart) the vaccine will protect you from the more serious effects of a Covid infection, and that they reduce transmission of the virus throughout society.
Many governments already mandate vaccinations on the basis that they are in the individuals’ heath interest, for example four doses of the Polio vaccine is recommended in the United States for children, and within Europe eleven Countries have mandatory vaccinations for at least one out of diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, poliovirus, Haemophilus influenzae type B, measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine.
So the idea that governments can force you to be vaccinated is a bridge largely crossed already: vaccines are not considered to be experimental health treatments of the kind that the Nuremberg Code has high-lit and banned ever since the excesses of the Nazi regime in the Second World War.
However, the corona virus vaccine does seem to me to come with many problematic ethical issues. Firstly, it is not actually a vaccine in the traditional sense. This matters, as the protection it offers against the disease is far from established. Today, governments like Israel that were first to vaccinate their populations (setting to one side the separate and inferior effort for people in the Occupied Territories) are now mandating third and even fourth shots as the virus continues to spread and cause illness there.
Secondly, it is experimental in the very real sense that the gene therapy technology is novel and comes with significant unknowns. It is for this reason that all the companies making the vaccines insisted on, and got, blanket exemption from prosecution for the effects of their products. One of the early developers of the MRNA vaccine technology, Robert Malone, considers that there is a risk of the method actually worsening the illness in the long run, so called antibody enhancement, and that the unprecedented effort to universalise the vaccine also creates unprecedented downside risks from such an enhanced vaccine.
A third area of concern is that there is no doubt that vaccinated people can both be infected with the corona virus and can be infectious while infected. Although you hear politicians say things like “get vaccinated and then we can get back to normal” this is just political rhetoric, as there never was any reason to think that the inoculations against the corona virus really were equivalent to the successful campaigns for things like polio and rubella.
So, to answer the specific ethical point! The right not to be vaccinated, or in this case injected with gene therapies, does not exist. In which sense, we cannot lose this right, much as I personally think there should be such protections (protections going well beyond marginal cases such as “religious exemptions”). What seems to be new is that governments have taken upon themselves the right to impose a much more risky programme of gene therapy treatments, dished out it seems at six monthly intervals in perpetuity, backed by pretty much unprecedented sanctions on people who would, if allowed, choose not to be inoculated. But the principle of government compulsion is established already: by which I mean we are fined for driving too fast, or disallowed from certain jobs if we don’t have the right training certificates.
What the corona vaccine mandates and penalties for being “unvaccinated” (the restrictions on working, social life, social activity, travel ) really reflect is not the loss of rights as the weakness of existing civic rights. Like taxation, there should be no vaccination without a process of consent expressed through genuine and informed public debate and political representation. But as I say, this is not a right that we have at the moment, so it can hardly be said to be lost.
At the moment, governments claiming to be acting in the “general interest” have targeted individuals and groups, and criminalised certain aspects of normal life, but this is merely an extension of a politics that we have long allowed our governments to exercise.
And today, unvaccinated people are certainly finding that a lot of things they thought were their rights are not really. We are in unknown territory with vaccine mandates, really, and the ambiguities reveal themselves as governments perform all sorts of contortions to “appear” to leave people a choice, while in effect making the choice almost impossible to exercise. The US government s many other governments do, will sack people for not being vaccinated, but it does not explicitly seek to a law to make vaccination obligatory.
And so, there are concerted attempts all over the world to make ordinary, healthy people take corona virus vaccines that are known to have non-negligible side-effects including in some cases death. Databases like the EudraVigilance one operated by the European Medical Agency indicate that adverse side-effects are real enough. Two justifications offered for this are that (side-effects apart) the vaccine will protect you from the more serious effects of a Covid infection, and that they reduce transmission of the virus throughout society.
Many governments already mandate vaccinations on the basis that they are in the individuals’ heath interest, for example four doses of the Polio vaccine is recommended in the United States for children, and within Europe eleven Countries have mandatory vaccinations for at least one out of diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, poliovirus, Haemophilus influenzae type B, measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine.
So the idea that governments can force you to be vaccinated is a bridge largely crossed already: vaccines are not considered to be experimental health treatments of the kind that the Nuremberg Code has high-lit and banned ever since the excesses of the Nazi regime in the Second World War.
However, the corona virus vaccine does seem to me to come with many problematic ethical issues. Firstly, it is not actually a vaccine in the traditional sense. This matters, as the protection it offers against the disease is far from established. Today, governments like Israel that were first to vaccinate their populations (setting to one side the separate and inferior effort for people in the Occupied Territories) are now mandating third and even fourth shots as the virus continues to spread and cause illness there.
Secondly, it is experimental in the very real sense that the gene therapy technology is novel and comes with significant unknowns. It is for this reason that all the companies making the vaccines insisted on, and got, blanket exemption from prosecution for the effects of their products. One of the early developers of the MRNA vaccine technology, Robert Malone, considers that there is a risk of the method actually worsening the illness in the long run, so called antibody enhancement, and that the unprecedented effort to universalise the vaccine also creates unprecedented downside risks from such an enhanced vaccine.
A third area of concern is that there is no doubt that vaccinated people can both be infected with the corona virus and can be infectious while infected. Although you hear politicians say things like “get vaccinated and then we can get back to normal” this is just political rhetoric, as there never was any reason to think that the inoculations against the corona virus really were equivalent to the successful campaigns for things like polio and rubella.
So, to answer the specific ethical point! The right not to be vaccinated, or in this case injected with gene therapies, does not exist. In which sense, we cannot lose this right, much as I personally think there should be such protections (protections going well beyond marginal cases such as “religious exemptions”). What seems to be new is that governments have taken upon themselves the right to impose a much more risky programme of gene therapy treatments, dished out it seems at six monthly intervals in perpetuity, backed by pretty much unprecedented sanctions on people who would, if allowed, choose not to be inoculated. But the principle of government compulsion is established already: by which I mean we are fined for driving too fast, or disallowed from certain jobs if we don’t have the right training certificates.
What the corona vaccine mandates and penalties for being “unvaccinated” (the restrictions on working, social life, social activity, travel ) really reflect is not the loss of rights as the weakness of existing civic rights. Like taxation, there should be no vaccination without a process of consent expressed through genuine and informed public debate and political representation. But as I say, this is not a right that we have at the moment, so it can hardly be said to be lost.
At the moment, governments claiming to be acting in the “general interest” have targeted individuals and groups, and criminalised certain aspects of normal life, but this is merely an extension of a politics that we have long allowed our governments to exercise.
