Summary of the strongest ethical arguments against vaccine mandates
Summary of the three strongest arguments against the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates and why any medical procedure imposed by coercion must be refused.
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. By refusing to acquiesce to vaccine mandates we take an ethical stance against discrimination on the basis of innate characteristics of the human race. (This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240).
2. Medical consent must be free – not coerced – in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion. Crucially, by accepting any mandated medical treatment we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Acquiescence to medical coercion is always unethical, even if the mandated intervention were a placebo.
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated (or a privileged treatment of the vaccinated) amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a result of this coercive treatment. By refusing to accept mandated vaccines we take an ethical stance in defence of the right to life.
I also object to the commonly made assertion that the people who do not comply with vaccine mandates are “unvaccinated by choice”. Apart from the fact that social and economic opportunity coercion removes our free choice in this matter, being unvaccinated is fundamentally not a choice; we were born this way. The premise of being “unvaccinated by choice” is as absurd as “having two hands by choice”. The right to preserve our innate characteristics without being discriminated against is paramount.
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here.
Source – https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/why-vaccine-mandates-are-unethical