(LifeSiteNews) — Nine highly credentialed academics issued a comprehensive pre-print paper documenting an array of significantly negative outcomes that result from experimental COVID-19 vaccine mandates, passports and discrimination policies based on vaccine status.
“The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good” was released February 1 and written by scholars with expertise in public health, epidemiology, bioethics, statistics, pediatrics and law from Johns Hopkins University, Oxford, Harvard, the University of Washington, and other institutions.
This group of scholars argues “that current population-wide mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable, ethically problematic, and misguided.”
“Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport, and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarization, and adversely affects health and well being.”
Though perceiving some positive results of the vaccination campaigns, the authors observe the injections show a “significant waning effectiveness against infection (and transmission) at 12 to 16 weeks, with both Delta and Omicron variants.” This makes the scientific rationale for vaccine policies “increasingly questionable” as does the fact that there is “little quantitative evidence of the threat the unvaccinated pose to high-risk individuals.”
Making a broad criticism of vaccine policy, the scholars write that such mandate and passport requirements “do not seem to recognize the extreme risk differential across populations and, in many countries, ignore the protective role of prior infection.”
Furthermore, such vaccine policies “include elements that are punitive, discriminatory and coercive, including conditioning access to health, work, travel and social life on vaccination status in many settings.”
Highlighting an irony, the paper cites studies that find such policies “are likely to entrench distrust,” provoke “a motivation to counter an unreasonable threat to one’s freedom,” and “induce a net decrease in inclination to vaccinate.”
Health authorities and media provide ‘misleading’ information
The authors documented how “[i]ncomplete or misleading information by health authorities and the media” caused great confusion and distrust among the public. Such examples included a 2020 stance by the World Health Organization and governments around the world that they would not be mandating injections of these experimental products, “only to shift positions in mid-2021.”
In addition, initial communication that the COVID-19 vaccines would prevent the injected from catching the virus were later shown to be misleading with high rates of “breakthrough” cases of the vaccinated as compared with the unvaccinated (74%), including hospitalizations.
Moreover, “concerns about safety signals and pharmacovigilance [from sources like VAERS] have been furthered by the lack of full transparency in COVID-19 clinical trial data.” This is also the case for “shifting data on adverse effects such as blood-clotting,” myocarditis, and menstrual periods.
‘Stigma as a public health strategy’ including ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and ‘scapegoating’
In order to counter the natural distrust resulting from these policies, the authors stated that public health and political authorities adopted “Stigma as a public health strategy” by singling out the unvaccinated for “scapegoating, blaming, and condescending language using pejorative terms and actively promoting stigma and discrimination as tools to increase vaccination.”
To illustrate, they provide a selection of quotes from heads of state, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called the unvaccinated “extremists who don’t believe in science” who are “often misogynists [and] … racists.” President Emmanuel Macron of France affirmed his goal of “pissing them off even more,” and Naftali Bennett of Israel claimed the unvaccinated were “endangering their health, those around them and the freedom of every Israeli citizen.”
The authors observe that such dangerous political rhetoric “has become socially acceptable among many vaccinated individuals and pro-vaccine groups as well as the public at large. The effect is to further polarize society – physically and psychologically – with limited discussion as to the reasons why people may remain unvaccinated.”
Citing one study by Günter Kampf in The Lancet, the scholars concluded that utilizing “stigma as a public health strategy … is likely to be practically ineffective at promoting vaccine uptake.”
Additionally, “[u]nvaccinated or partially vaccinated individuals often have concerns that are based in some form of evidence,” they assured. These include “prior COVID-19 infection, data on age-based risk, [and] historic/current trust issues with public health and governments, including structural racism.”
Reasons for avoiding the injections may also be based on “personal experiences,” including adverse drug reactions or “concerns about the democratic process,” such as the “belief that governments have abused their power by invoking a constant state of emergency, ignoring processes of public consultation, and over-relying on pharmaceutical company-produced data in their decision-making.”
“Current inflammatory rhetoric runs against the pre-pandemic societal consensus that health behaviors … should not impact the way medical, cultural, or legal institutions treat an individual seeking care,” the authors wrote.
Yet some governments “are now imposing medical insurance fines or premiums on the unvaccinated, while medical staff and hospital administrators are considering using vaccination status as a triage protocol criterion.”
In absence of transparency, ‘alternate explanations’ emerge, including ‘micro-chips’
According to the paper’s authors, data reveals “the importance of being transparent about negative vaccine information to increase trust,” and “when health authorities are not transparent, it can increase receptivity to alternate explanations.”
And thus, it can be observed that “‘conspiracy theories’ have become widely circulated, especially among unvaccinated people.” For example, some concerns “include adoption of implantable tracking devices (including micro-chips), digital IDs, the rise of social credit systems, and the establishment of authoritarian biosurveillance governments.”
“Paradoxically, the COVID-19 pandemic happens to coincide with far-reaching technological advances that do provide the capability for new and future forms of mass state surveillance,” the scholars observed.
Such technology includes “biocompatible intradermal devices” and “multifunction implantable microchips.” Combining these possibilities with vaccine passport policies “as well as censorship by social media companies” will likely “reinforce and exacerbate suspicion and distrust.”
Vaccine mandates and passports ‘a tool for authoritarian behavior’
In addressing the erosion of civil liberties, the scholars assert “COVID-19 vaccine policies represent a broad interference with the rights of unvaccinated people.”
“Vaccine passports risk enshrining discrimination based on perceived health status into law, undermining many rights of healthy individuals,” the authors wrote. In fact, “unvaccinated but previously infected people will generally be at substantially less risk of infection (and severe outcomes) than doubly vaccinated but infection-naïve individuals.”
This was the case for top-ranked men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic, who despite having recovered from COVID-19, was deported on the eve of the Australian Open last month. “The explicit characterization of Mr. Djokovic as a threat to Australian ‘civil order and public health’ … underlines concerns of vaccine mandates and passports as a tool for authoritarian behavior,” the scholars proposed.
Ethical principle of informed consent displaced by aggressive coercion
After addressing the pronounced political polarization resulting from vaccine policies, the privacy violations associated with passports, and grave violations of human rights, including the right to work, the authors turned their attention to the eroding of informed consent.
“Informed consent in standard healthcare settings requires that a person’s decision to undertake a health treatment be voluntary, and that the person receive adequate information about the comparative risks and benefits and can weigh these with their individual circumstances. Voluntariness is considered undermined by undue influence, duress, threats of harm, and coercion,” they wrote.
Yet, “many policies clearly limit choice and the normal operation of informed consent,” and thus qualify as coercion. Some policies “attach very serious consequences to refusal, such as loss of employment and livelihoods, potentially resulting in poverty and inability to care for family.
“Others are at first glance less restrictive (e.g., restricting access to bars, concerts, sports events, international travel, some healthcare settings), but can still lead to a significant exclusion from social life, thus creating pressure towards compliance.”
In many cases, such as Macron stating his strategy was to “piss off [the unvaccinated],” government officials have “admitted that such policies are inherently designed to be coercive,” and thus “one can conclude that they not only limit, but largely disregard, the ethics of informed consent.”
‘Punitive’ vaccine policies ‘have failed,’ violate ‘constitutional and bioethical principles’
Summarizing their conclusions, the authors warned that the “adoption of new vaccination status policies has provoked a multilayered global and local backlash, resistance and polarization that threaten to escalate if current policies continue.”
“Denying individuals education, livelihoods, medical care, or social life unless they get vaccinated does not appear to coincide with constitutional and bioethical principles, especially in liberal democracies,” they wrote.
For these purposes, the scholars conclude that “the scientific case for punitive COVID-19 vaccine policies, given the proprietary nature of our current vaccines, no longer fits with pre-pandemic bioethical norms and public health ethics.”
It is therefore time “to regain a focus on non-coercive public health measures,” including data transparency, “media independence, and public debate and scrutiny about COVID-19 vaccine policies,” the authors concluded.
RELATED:
CDC admits to hiding data on the risk, efficacy of COVID jabs because it could be ‘misinterpreted’
Ottawa police on horseback trample freedom protesters
The Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy has massive support, but the mainstream media is ignoring it
Novak Djokovic says he’s prepared to put career on hold rather than take COVID jab
Global protests against vaccine passes, lockdowns rock Europe, Australia