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The Moral Case against Vaccine Passports

By Vinay Kolhatkar

August 13, 2021

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For the record: I am a pro-vaccination, highly vaccinated individual. And I state this:

If your “freedom” depends on your taking part in an ongoing clinical trial without informed consent, then it’s not freedom at all.

 

And then, just like that, in the northern summer of 2021, a year and a half after the virus upended the whole world, heads of state—governors, state premiers, presidents, prime ministers—began promising “freedom”—freedom from snap lockdowns, masking, quarantining, travel. The U.K. announced and celebrated “Freedom Day” on July 19, 2021. Even someone as suspicious of the dictatorial heads of state as I, was enthusiastic at first.

Only the vaccinated were to be free to wander around, attend events like Wimbledon, go to concerts, mingle with friends—routine things that even Communist Russia did not stop its comrades from doing.

Of course, there was a catch. Only the vaccinated were to be free to wander around, attend events like Wimbledon, go to concerts, travel within the country, mingle with friends at cafes, and enjoy fine dining—routine things that even Communist Russia did not stop its comrades from doing.

By the end of July, from France to Greece to Italy, several EU countries had enacted new regulations that required citizens to “buy their freedom” by getting vaccinated, showing a certificate of recovery (from COVID), or a certificate showing a negative test for COVID in the prior 72 hours—the tests are free today, but President Macron hinted that they would no longer be free.

An EU vaccine “passport” is being introduced across all 27 member nations, plus Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. Anyone holding the vaccination certificate would be exempt from testing or quarantining when crossing a border within the EU (despite new breakout cases containing a large percentage of the vaccinated).

In France, despite weeks of hundreds of thousands taking to the streets to protest, the “health pass” became law on August 5, 2021.

In France, despite weeks of hundreds of thousands taking to the streets to protest, the “health pass” became law on August 5, 2021. The health pass permits people to access restaurants, bars, planes, and trains. In order to obtain the pass, people must have proof they are fully vaccinated, recently tested negative, or recently recovered from the virus. Never mind the fact that SARS-CoV-1 antibodies have lasted for 12 years. And real experts contend that by far the strongest defense against a COVID infection is a prior infection. Israel started a vaccine pass earlier this year with only two exemptions: vaccination or a recent infection. In the Arabic countries, too, governments are making certain privileges and positions contingent on vaccination.

In the U.S., President Biden, in one of his senior moments, blamed the pandemic itself on the unvaccinated, saying they were not as smart as he thought they were. Perhaps he meant to say the pandemic would end if everyone got vaccinated. Biden has since urged the Pentagon to require a mandatory COVID vaccination of all members of the U.S. military, while, in a leaf straight out of a sci-fi novel, the U.S. CDC is openly discussing on its website, “camps” for those whom they deem to be “high-risk” individuals. The CDC presumes it has the legal power to imprison these individuals in “camps” in what they call a “humanitarian” setting:

The shielding approach aims to reduce the number of severe COVID-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (“high-risk”) and the general population (“low-risk”). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or “green zones” established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.

“Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 26, 2021.

Explicit talk of concentration camps? In America? By the State? Welcome to 2021.

Explicit talk of concentration camps? In America? By the State? Welcome to 2021.

In every country, the Left, which previously divided citizens over gender and race wars, has now commenced a war of words against the unvaccinated … but the words are set to become law.

It’s compulsion in all but name—already in some countries, you can’t buy groceries, go out and meet friends at the cinema, a pub, a café, or attend a football match … unless you are vaccinated—some nation-states require you to be vaccinated just to be permitted to work (depending on the type of work you do). In Australia, states trying to get to a zero virus state tried to put the delta-variant genie back in the bottle. They panicked in July 2021 and imposed snap lockdowns even for a few detected infections—the town of Armidale was shut down for a week when two infections were detected. Prime Minister Scott Morrison pretended to rule out making vaccination compulsory, but will allow employers to mandate such requirements if within the law. And this is where the liberty lovers’ blind spot comes in.

Surely employers ought to have the right to require employees to not endanger the health of their colleagues? Let’s say a general rule, even if the specifics were not written into the employment contract at inception (but the general rule was).

 

The Blind Spot on COVID

Surely employers ought to have the right to require employees to not endanger the health of their colleagues?

First and foremost, employers and employees bound themselves by an employment contract. For two parties to a contract, their rights and obligations are determined by the contract, ideally not at law (other than preventing illegal contracts). Perhaps the terms may not allow a unilateral change in the terms relating to, say, vaccination status, after the employment commences. Some libertarians, overexcited by the prospect of defending employers’ rights to employ whomever they wish, forget that two parties to an existing contract are already bound by the contractual terms so entered into; the terms may constrain the employer to only require new employees to vaccinate themselves, or have a right to retrench existing ones at the cost provided for in the existing contract. Such cost may at times run into millions (say, for CEOs).

But even if the contract allows the generic, say, the employer “may require, from time to time, the employee to safeguard his own health at work as well as that of his colleagues and/or customers,” it still elicits the question—does this so-called vaccine safeguard anyone’s health or endanger it? Who is to decide? By what standards?

Apparently, a private school in Miami has deemed the vaccinated to be more risky and will not employ vaccinated teachers or staff due to health concerns. Well, why not?

What if a pressurized employee dies from taking a jab required by his job? That he otherwise would not have taken? The risk of a multi-million dollar lawsuit looms large. Employers are justly demanding a blanket federal indemnity along the lines granted to Big Pharma for an experimental rollout to be made mandatory for employees.

Under a proper moral code, and even at law, employers do not have a pre-existing unilateral right to decide what is and isn’t safe for you unless the contract explicitly provided for their judgment, or some third party’s judgment, to be decisive.

But today, we have nothing like a free market anywhere on the planet, only varying degrees of what Ayn Rand defined as fascism (intrusion by the State) or Guild Socialism, or what Professor Rectenwald calls “corporate socialism.” Small businesses are ruined by snap lockdowns and rescued by issuing ever more debt payable by the taxpayer. The rescued begin to obey the State’s directives even if a vortex of regulations had not already ensnared them into the State’s net. Meanwhile, many of today’s behemoths, including Google and Facebook, were created by the venture capital arms of the State, and rely on the State for much of their revenue. Their independent “fact-checkers” merely act as the bootlicking servants of the Establishment.

But the failure to hallmark the distinction between ex ante rights to negotiate and the ex post rights and obligations within a contract, and the total absence today of truly private employers are the least of the blind spots of an otherwise freedom-loving community.

The bigger failure results from the pitfalls of the implicit equation in simplistic thinking, which assumes: Vaccine = Science = Reason = Moral Imperative (attributable to some, but not all, objectivists).

“Vaccines” are arguably the greatest invention of medicine, the most extraordinary exemplars of how science has extended life spans and improved the quality of life. Real vaccines undergo rigorous testing for several years, first on animals, then on cooperating humans. They most often contain the actual pathogen, dead or attenuated. As of his date, no such “real vaccines” for COVID have been available in the West, we have only what Dr. David Martin calls a gene-therapy experiment.

So let’s design a COVID experiment which issues a challenge to the Establishment while maintaining individual rights.

But shouldn’t that be our right, a right to access an experimental genetic shot and bypass the regulator? Yes, of course … a right, not a duty.

In a morally proper experiment, participation would be strictly voluntary.

So let’s design a COVID experiment which issues a challenge to the Establishment while maintaining individual rights:

  1. Every adult citizen would be free to join one of two groups, or not join any group at all (let’s call the last, Group 3).
  2. Group 1 would be the under the strict medical advice and control of the State’s “health experts”—they would follow all the masking, precautionary, and vaccination guidelines issued by the State. But that’s not compulsion, because, ex ante, people would be free to not join the group so controlled.
  3. Group 2 would follow the advice they trust. In conjunction with their preferred medical advisers, this group would also log their prophylactic and treatment protocol and be monitored if they contract COVID. Of course Group 2 would not all be uniform, but is likely to be limited to the two or three protocols that are currently popular, say 2a to 2c—our experiment may well require a minimum size to make the monitoring worthwhile.
  4. There would be no state-imposed lockdowns, PCR testing, or masking requirements, but obviously everyone would be free to follow whatever precautions they deemed necessary. The virus would go around, and over time, we would all get excellent data for judging the efficacy and safety of various methods. We may well get some cautious people who do it all—social distancing, masking, vaccination, and prophylactic and treatment protocols currently scoffed at by the Establishment—if there are enough of them, we have an even better experiment.

What if many more people in Group 2 died as the State currently claims would happen?

This issue is at the heart of the debate. Who manages our health? We should. Who is to provide us with expert advice? We should choose whom to trust and rely on, same as we choose which electrician or architect or lawyer to use when we need one. If some people wish to put their blind trust in whomever the Establishment calls the “experts,” that, of course would be their choice.

And we should flourish or languish, live or die, by our choices—as we do by our career choices, by our choice of partners, employers, clients and the like. It is immoral for the State to force our hand, to make us choose against our better judgment, to use taxes paid by us for causes we abhor, to force us off work, to destroy our livelihood because of a false epidemiology, to lecture us ad nauseam on how to deal with a virus … to assume, in effect, that we are incompetent to live, to flourish, to make informed choices, that only an elite technocracy can guide us, the masses, away from dangers that they alone understand. That is the moral case against the vaccine pass decrees.

But is there a scientific case against this gene-therapy experiment as well? Yes.

 

The Establishing of an Establishment

Today, originality, integrity, independence have become a road to martyrdom, which only the most dedicated will choose, knowing that the alternative is much worse.

–Ayn Rand, The Establishing of an Establishment

Rand wrote about integrity leading to martyrdom in the Sixties. But today, this trend has accelerated beyond belief. Censorship of highly-qualified pro-scientific method voices that dared to oppose the orthodoxy has been endemic. The independent have lost their jobs or given up their originality; anti-establishment public intellectuals get ridiculed, snubbed … cancelled.

Doctors who merely assert a reasoned medical opinion stand to lose their practicing license.

Doctors who merely assert a reasoned medical opinion stand to lose their practicing license. In Melbourne, a physician had his registration suspended merely for expressing opinions counter to the State’s narrative.

The State will have no bar of anything other than the Establishment narrative, which is:

  1. All the vaccines administered in our country X are very safe (but not in country Y; curiously, country Y says the same thing of X). The risk of a major adverse event is less than the risk of a major long-term injury or death from COVID itself.
  2. The unvaccinated are causing the pandemic to spread. Even if you have recovered from COVID, you must take the vaccine.
  3. We can only reach herd immunity with vaccinations. The vaccinations work against the delta strain, and they will work against any future mutations to date unknown.
  4. Lockdowns, masks, rules governing social functions, and social distancing are imposed for your own good. They reduce transmission.
  5. No treatments have any measurable impact against COVID until our health experts say they do. Then they suddenly do.

But by using our faculty of reason, among the things we glean by research are:

  1. Big Tech colludes with the State. YouTube has demonetized and even taken down content that dared oppose the official narrative. Facebook and Twitter have removed accounts of influential people, including Donald Trump’s while he was still in the White House and of outspoken Australian politician Craig Kelly, who is now absurdly introduced by Wikipedia as a “prominent conspiracy theorist.”
  2. The current batch of vaccines are not vaccines as per normal definition, containing weak or dead viruses. They use unrelated viruses (Astra Zeneca) or messenger RNA (Pfizer, Moderna) to mimic only the spike protein part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s a novel technology. It was approved by regulators only for emergency use. The antibodies so produced offer insufficient protection against the real virus. Moreover, unlike normal vaccines, the product (the spike protein) does not stay in the arm, it spreads in the body, and that may cause substantial damage in the long term. Claims, even from doctors, include the extreme theories, but you need not buy into them. Keep reading if you don’t.
  3. Inexpensive medication (Ivermectin) whose risk profile has been known since the Seventies works in around 90% of cases to reduce the impact of the virus, whether it’s administered as a prophylactic, in the early stage, or even in the late stage. Vitamin D also works well as a therapeutic agent. Budesonide, Zinc, steroids, injectable Vitamin C, antibody injections and HCQ have all proved promising.

Thus, there is no emergency. which requires an emergency authorization of insufficiently-tested vaccines. We are dealing with a treatable disease with a fatality rate is dropping below 1% even without the ubiquitous use of therapeutics.

  1. The Establishment has silenced discussion and research of therapeutics, and this is unprecedented in human history. See the testimony of Dr. Peter McCullough at a Texas Senate hearing. As I mentioned in The Pandemic of Deceit, the doctor-patient bond has been severed by the State. Doctors in the public health system have been virtually disallowed from treating COVID patients. Only treatments that have gone through a double-blind trial and have its efficacy established in peer-reviewed journals reach physician protocols after several years (twenty years says Dr. Pierre Kory). So, even if patients have a risk of hospitalization and death from not doing anything, and even if the therapeutics are long-standing medications that have a known risk profile and very few side effects, they are not used.
  2. The reported deaths from the COVID vaccines are rare. This figure may understate the actual deaths. Perhaps by a lot. But the reported deaths alone have exceeded the deaths from all other vaccines combined over the last 30 years. See here, minutes 27-30.
  3. COVID vaccines are also causing severe adverse events in some. These voices are silenced, their case histories removed from VAERS (the vaccine adverse event reporting system), the suggestion that the vaccine may have caused their problem scoffed at, even if a new medical issue arises within hours or days of administering the vaccine.
  4. Relying on vaccinating multitudes of people may cause the virus to mutate and increase transmission, worsening the outcome for the population as a whole.
  5. Viruses generally mutate in the direction of less severity and more infectiousness.
  6. Vaccines may not reduce hospitalization and death rates appreciably, if at all. They do not provide full protection, and may not even reduce the likelihood of getting the disease. The U.K.’s Chief Scientific Adviser admitted this (and later tried to retrace his steps).
  7. No immunity works anywhere near as well as recovering from COVID itself. Only the recovered will lead to herd immunity. But antibody testing is ridiculed or ignored. There may already be hundreds of millions of undetected recovered cases out there.

The PCR test may detect viral remnants of a virus long dead in your body/. It may even record a positive result even if there never was the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is not a diagnostic test. And, if the primary detection test itself returns many false positives, it affects everything—the fear factor, treatment, and quarantining.

 

Is it possible that the voices of reason—that I linked to above—articulate, intelligent, highly qualified—who are being censored, ridiculed, or losing their plum consultancies—are all dead wrong? Or is it more likely that what Ayn Rand called the “entrenched mediocrity” is silencing its opposition? Please peruse some of those links before forming an opinion, especially “The Crime of the Century” podcast.

In any event, if you value liberty, you should not favor compulsion—that’s the road to serfdom.

 

This essay benefited from comments and edits by Brishon Martin and Donna Paris on an earlier draft.
 
 

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