Is there a RIGHT not to be vaccinated?

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.

Identity: the Interminable Struggle for Right

by Thomas Scarborough

Social psychologist Peter Weinreich wrote that one’s identity is ‘the totality of one's self-construal’. To put it in the simplest philosophical terms, it is about the way that individuals relate things to things. Therefore, identity is ordinary. It lies neither in great things, nor in special characteristics, but in all the detail of my daily existence.

In former times, the subject of identity was not much considered. A hundred years ago, the very concept ‘identity’ was virtually unknown. The reason for this is simple. In former times there was, by and large, no other race, no other religion, no other language, no other role to play. Further, there was little choice in the matter. The very survival of the family, and of the larger clan and society, often depended on fairly fixed identities.

Today, this has changed. A global mix of cultures has driven the diversification, even proliferation of identities, while at the same time, economic and social necessity has retreated.

An obvious question now arises: what should we do with identities? More than that, what should we do with conflicts of identity?

As things stand, we have set ourselves up for serious conflict. On the one hand, we have embraced social pluralism which, according to philosophy professor Calvin Schrag, may be described as ‘diversity rather than homogeneity, multiplicity rather than unity, difference rather than sameness’. On the other hand, we have adopted the doctrine of absolute rights, which in the words of philosophy professor Carl Wellman, ‘always hold, that is, disadvantage some second party, within their scope’.

Such pluralism, writes the sociologist Ronald Fletcher, makes 'the problem of preserving order and freedom very great'. On our current views, we set ourselves up for interminable wrangling and conflict.

Within the limited space which is afforded to me here, I propose an alternative to our present, call it ‘trench warfare’.

On the one hand, we must reject the levelling of identities—if that was ever possible. This, on the basis that identity is about the way that individuals relate things to things. It is about the arrangement of the world in our minds—therefore identity represents a kind of virtue ethics. It comes from within. We reject, too, the policing of norms by the state, since authoritarianism skews the way in which things are naturally ordered, and so can prove perilous. Nor can groups or institutions, of course, compete with the state. 

This has the following corollaries.

• A citizen, as a citizen, has the right to their identity, and the right to protection from abuse. Such ideas are familiar to us today. 
• An identity-bearer, as an identity-bearer, has the right not to be involved in another person’s identity, or to have their own identity transgressed. This differs from the present status quo, which regularly penalises or disadvantages some second party. 
• Beyond this—apart from this—the state applies principles which transcend identity, and provide a sense of security to all identities. Within reason, of course.*

Someone may object. These corollaries, these principles, may solve some problems, but potentially leave discrimination in place. Conflicts are inevitable. One or the other identity must yield, or suffer the consequences.  Punitive measures are essential.  No one may refuse, on the basis of their beliefs, culture, traditions, ethics, or conscience, to be involved in another person’s identity, or to have their own identity transgressed. 

This is 'problematic', writes Oxford researcher Alberto Giubilini—namely the 'freedom to act, or to refrain from acting'. He advances, as examples, the refusal of military service or the denial of medical procedures—conversely, the compulsion which brings about the objection in the first place. There would be many more examples, involving event catering, child discipline, traditional rites, or censorship, among other things.** 

We may, however, imagine a different scenario. While the state continues to protect identities against abuse, as it generally does, where there is loss for reason of identity—which need not be synonymous with abuse—the state may develop a system of equality benefits. That is, in cases where there are penalties today, benefits may take their place, which are provided by the state. Thus losses would be offset by the state.***

The approach is a positive one, to help and enable those who could be disadvantaged by their identity. In theology (it is a theological problem, too), this may be reconciled with common grace—a grace which applies to all humankind, regardless of their identity, or what one may think of it. More than this, it affirms the value of diversity and mixing, and enriches the common experience. Perhaps such principles would help turn down the temperature. 

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* In some cases, identity may not serve the common good—alternatively, will do harm to all. Where this becomes apparent, the state will need to act in the interests of the greater good. 

** One modern justice system (South Africa) puts it like this: No one, on the basis of identity, may 'impose burdens or withhold benefits or opportunities'. The proposal here is that the state alleviates burdens, or provides that which is withheld.

*** If one is faced with loss without warning, however, this may cross the line of discrimination. Identities need to be sufficiently transparent to prevent conflict by surprise.

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