Conscience and Non-Compliance: The Case of the COVID-19 Vaccine

by | Oct 12, 2021

Conscience and Non-Compliance: The Case of the COVID-19 Vaccine

by | Oct 12, 2021

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How selfish, ignorant and stupid can people possibly be? ask in various ways Emmanuel Macron in France, Jacinda Arden in New Zealand, Gavin Newsom in California, Bill de Blasio in New York, and even Queen Elizabeth in Britain, along with a surprising number of other public figures, including celebrities, who for some reason have agreed to join in on the global propaganda campaign currently underway. Many political leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Victorian (Australia) Premier Daniel Andrews, have repeatedly informed their constituents that “Our patience is wearing thin.” “Do the right thing!” they continue to chant. “Just get the vaccine!” But where carrots have failed, governments are now taking up sticks, mandating vaccination for large classes of persons based not on their health profiles—as ethical medical practice would require—but only on where they happen to work or to live.

In truth, there are plenty of epistemologically respectable reasons, firmly grounded in data, for declining to roll up one’s sleeve for the COVID-19 “vaccine.” Among people who read books, some are wary of Pfizer’s track record. The drug giant holds the dubious distinction of paying out the largest fine for healthcare fraud in history. For fifteen years, Pfizer’s anti-smoking drug Chantix (varenicline), having received a “priority FDA review,” reaped billions of dollars in profits. More than 500 suicides were reportedly committed, and another ~2000 attempted, by persons taking the drug. The “suicidal ideation” side effect began to be reported within the first year of the 2006 marketing launch. Chantix was finally pulled from the market in September 2021, not for its untoward psychological effects, but because it had been determined to be carcinogenic.

Johnson & Johnson, too, has a checkered past, having repeatedly lied to consumers about its products, including its widely used baby powder, for decades. AstraZeneca, whose vaccine remained the primary choice in Britain throughout 2021, despite having earned the sobriquet “clot shot” (and having been banned altogether by Denmark), has also been subject to hefty fines for malfeasance, including the off-label marketing of Seroquel (quetiapine), which has been linked to suicides and other deaths among soldiers to whom the antipsychotic drug was prescribed as a sleep aid. Like the other manufacturers of psychotropic drugs, AstraZeneca has based its marketing claims on shortterm, not longterm studies of its products. Critical studies in recent years have concluded that placebos are in fact at least as effective as the psychiatric products being peddled to everyone for anything, and less harmful in the longterm. As for DARPA-funded Moderna, there are no “skeletons in the closet,” because the COVID-19 mRNA therapy is the first of their products ever to make it to market.

Even setting aside concerns with the pharmaceutical and biotech firms making a killing from the COVID-19 pandemic, there are specific reasons for doubting the wisdom of undergoing innoculation in this particular case. Most obviously, the elixir being shot into billions of arms all over the world is a treatment touted primarily for its efficacy in averting severe symptoms and death. If one is vulnerable to those effects, then one has some reason for considering the treatment. In fact, according to data readily available from many sources, including the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), the vast majority of people are not vulnerable to such effects, so the rational choice of whether to get the jab can only be a matter of personal risk assessment, just as is the choice of whether to undergo any optional medical treatment. Yes, there is a small chance that a healthy person under the age of seventy with no comorbidities will succumb to the virus, developing severe symptoms, requiring hospitalization and perhaps even dying. But there is also a chance, if ever-so slim, that the person may find himself on the losing end of the adverse effects bell curve, suffering one among dozens of possible complications, including myocarditis, Bell’s Palsy, or even death.

The insidious charge of “selfishness” directed toward those who decline the treatment is based upon the old definition of vaccine and the idea that the good of society requires everyone to pitch in and do their part for public health. Before the Coronapocalypse, vaccines were defined and designed as substances which would prevent transmission of and infection by a disease. If you already had and survived the disease, then you did not need the vaccine, because vaccines were developed specifically to mimic the wondrous workings of the human immune system. The vaccines of the past introduced a small dose of the enemy virus—whether dead or alive—into the body to provoke an immune response so that, should the full force of the wild virus be encountered in the future, the body would already have the needed antibody and T-cell apparatus in place, ready to attack and eliminate the invader rather than allow it to take over and possibly kill its host.

Not only has the concept of vaccine been redefined by public health officials so as to subsume the current injections, which do not prevent transmission and infection, but people who have already recovered from COIVD-19 are being told that they, too, should undergo vaccination. This is a medically—and indeed logically—dubious prescription, given that the vaccines provoke the body to produce a small subset of the virus (the spike protein), which was already defeated by the previously infected person’s body, in the case of anyone who survived. Moreover, numerous studies have demonstrated the robustness of protection acquired through previous infection.

It is no longer a matter of dispute that undergoing innoculation with foreign mRNA to induce one’s body to produce a viral spike protein which will jolt the immune system into generating antibodies does not prevent transmission of or infection by COVID-19. Accordingly, this now debunked early marketing point should not figure into anyone’s personal decision at all. We know that cases have continued to spike to new levels exceeding those of a year ago, back when nobody was vaccinated. The accuracy of the testing regimen has been called into question over and over again, but because the same PCR tests used this year were used last year, only time will tell how the tallies will change once the emergency use authorization of the test expires at the end of 2021.

We also know from the rich body of statistics available from Israel, the most highly vaccinated country on the planet, that what we are witnessing is not, as the propaganda puppets continue to claim, “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” We know that vaccine efficacy wanes rapidly (particularly for the Pfizer product), with a vulnerable vaccinated person’s protection dropping from 88% to 47% and continuing to diminish further over time. Many “fully vaccinated” people have been hospitalized and died. So what are we to conclude?

Tellingly, elderly persons and those who for other reasons are more vulnerable to COVID-19 are the only ones in the United States being offered  “booster shots” after six months, to elevate their protection to the initial level, which is not 95%, as the marketers initially claimed, but at most 88%, for the most vulnerable persons. Recent studies have revealed that the adverse effects odds are actually worse than the virus odds for some cohorts, including males from the ages of twelve to fifteen, who suffer a greater incidence of myocarditis than other groups postvaccination, making the jab nothing short of irrational for them. We can further deduce from the fact that boosters are only being provided to the most vulnerable persons in the United States that invulnerable persons (such as children and healthy adults) never really needed the mRNA treatment in the first place. For anyone who remains confounded by this perhaps astonishing implication, let us spell it out explicitly: If you were “fully vaccinated” many months ago, at some point you will no longer be vaccinated at all. But the government is not offering you a booster shot? That’s because you number among the vast majority of people who are not vulnerable to COVID-19.

That’s right: you, Gentle Double-jabbed Reader, served as a voluntary subject (pro bono!) in an experimental pharmaceutical trial for a product of which you had no need. Instead of being incensed with people who did not roll up their sleeve, you should be angry with the powers that be who persuaded you to undergo an unnecessary medical treatment. And you should be relieved that you were not one of its victims. See VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System) for more information on that.

Government bureaucrats lie all the time, Anthony Fauci being only one of the most brazen figures in recent history to claim that his serial prevarication is somehow “noble.” Rarely have so many people so openly embraced so many lies. Through a relentless propaganda campaign, a large swath of the population has been persuaded to believe that their neighbors are selfish and even evil for their rational disagreement on a matter of medical choice. Preposterously, in cities such as Los Angeles and New York, proof of vaccination is being demanded for participation in most social activities, despite the fact that booster shots are not being offered to healthy young people vaccinated more than six months ago, and previous infection provides robust protection. In other words, the “vaccine passports” being required in such places serve no public health purpose whatsoever but instead constitute a badge of compliance, and are part of a frightening global effort to forge a two-tiered society where “some people are more equal than others.”

The extreme, Manichean polarization we are witnessing has been no mean feat of propaganda, rivaled in history only by calls for war in violation of international law, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some of the people being threatened with the termination of their jobs for refusing to undergo COVID-19 “vaccination” do not have the luxury of living off their savings as an alternative to working. Some among them are heads of households with children to feed. They are facing a moral dilemma: whether to sacrifice the well being of their family in order to heed their own conscience. For it is indeed a matter of conscience; it is not a matter of need. People have been offered free vaccines for more than nine months in the United States. Some among them chose to decline, for reasons offered above, or for religious reasons, or for whatever their reasons happened to be. It does not even matter what their reasons were, for human beings have the dignity of choosing what to put into their own bodies.

We should be concerned not only with the disastrous financial consequences for the thousands of people who are now losing their jobs, but also with the moral consequences for a society of persons being coerced to violate their own conscience and renounce their medical freedom. In fact, much more is at stake here than people’s livelihood and physical health. We are witnessing a culling of conscience across all sectors of society as individuals who dare to disagree are disparaged, denounced, and marginalized as miscreants whose civil liberties may be taken away, as though they were convicted felons.

The sinister nature of what is unfolding before our very eyes in real time is betrayed in part by the fact that citizens are being ordered to submit to vaccination despite the immunity from legal prosecution of the product companies in the event of negative or even deadly side effects. (This is because of the PREP [Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness] act.) If the populace agrees to this pharmaceutical takeover of their very own bodies, then they will no longer have any rights, not even the right to life. They will have become, in effect, slaves. Any pharma goo deemed necessary by the powers that be in the future will, following this precedent, become a condition on the exercise of what were formerly considered citizens’ God-given rights to conduct themselves as they please, within the limits of the law. The hitch here is that the laws are being rewritten so as to criminalize medical choice, in a stunning denial of human rights which, lest we forget, resulted only from centuries of hard-fought battles against tyranny, now rearing its ugly head all over again.

Standing up for what is right is never easy in the face of angry mobs fueled by fear. But holding the line is indeed what we must now do. Whatever our personal medical choice happens to be, we should support the healthcare workers losing their jobs, the dissenting doctors who bravely speak out, and all of the people attempting to abide by their conscience in these difficult times. We must defend the perimeters of our own bodies and reject the obnoxious idea that anyone else should be able to decree that we be injected with whatever they happen to believe we should be forced to accept. This is a very slippery slope on which we must refuse to step. If we surrender our bodily autonomy to the government, then we will have nothing left. Wrong is wrong. Do not comply.

Laurie Calhoun

Laurie Calhoun

Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic's Critique. In 2015, she began traveling around the world while writing. In 2020, she returned to the United States, where she remained until 2023 as a result of the COVID-19 travel restrictions imposed by governments nearly everywhere.

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