Seven Questions Public Authorities Are Avoiding Like the Plague

Public authorities have taken advantage of the pandemic to expand their powers indefinitely and suspend citizens’ constitutional rights, with no compelling scientific or ethical justification to support their actions. It is imperative that they be held answerable for what they have done. Sadly, many journalists and mainstream media outlets have effectively renounced their calling to hold politicians to task, and become little more than mouthpieces of governments.

Fortunately, we are not all mouthpieces of government. There are still citizens and journalists out there with an independent, critical spirit. I hope those who are still willing and able to hold their political leaders to account find this post useful. In what follows, I lay out seven questions I think we should be pestering our political leaders with every day until their silence and evasions become a political embarrassment:

1. Where’s the Impact Assessment?

First, after nearly two years of rolling lockdowns and curfews, why have you not produced a single comprehensive impact assessment of the costs and benefits of this measure? For such a massive societal intervention, how is it not self-evident that we need to take the time to study its impact and figure out if its massive costs are justified by its benefits? What motive, other than criminal negligence, could possibly explain your failure to undertake this assessment almost two years into the pandemic?

2. What’s the Scientific Basis for Vax Passes?

Second, given that we now know, from data gathered by the UK Health Security Agency, that Covid positivity rates are at least as high among most cohorts of vaccinated people as among their unvaccinated counterparts, where is the scientific support for your claim that vaccine passports reduce disease transmission? Are you lying to people when you suggest, or imply, that vaccine passports will control the spread of disease? Or are you so incompetent that you are not actually aware of the Covid positivity rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations?

3. Whatever Happened to Informed Consent?

Third, if the intention of vaccine passports is to pressure citizens into vaccinating, how is this type of coercion consistent with the Nuremberg code and the internationally recognised right to informed consent to medical treatment? How can you justify throwing over board an international consensus against the forced recruitment of human subjects into experimental treatments, and more generally, against the coercive imposition of medical treatments?

4. Why Are You Refusing to Recognise the Superior Immunity of the Covid-Recovered?

Fourth, given the fact that people who have already been exposed to Covid-19 have been shown to enjoy more enduring and robust immunity than people who have been vaccinated but not exposed to the disease (see, for example, this study), how do you justify continuing to compel Covid-recovered citizens to vaccinate, either scientifically or ethically?

5. How Can You Possibly Justify Exposing Children to the Risks of this Vaccine?

Fifth, given the overwhelming evidence that healthy children are at negligible risk from Covid-19, and given that Covid vaccines are not succeeding at containing transmission of the disease, how can you justify vaccinating children and young teenagers with a vaccine for which we are already seeing reports - albeit rare - of myocarditis as one of its adverse effects, and for which we do not yet have data gathered on its long-term risks for children? (It is for this reason that the UK’s Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation recommended against administering the Covid vaccines to healthy children between 12 and 15 years of age).

6. Why Have You Not Applied the Logic of Emergency Use Authorisation to Safe and Inexpensive Repurposed Drugs with Promising Results?

Sixth, given that you have employed vaccines without long-term safety data on a large scale under Emergency Use Authorisation, why have you not promoted the large-scale use of safe and inexpensive repurposed drugs with promising results, for the early treatment of Covid-19? Even if we are uncertain about the full extent of the benefits of drugs like Ivermectin, nonetheless, when there are strong signals in the data that a drug is saving lives (as there are in the case of drugs like Ivermectin), and the drug has an excellent safety profile (as is the case for Ivermectin), it is inexplicable that such a drug would be withheld from doctors who want to treat Covid-19 early, given that early treatment is the key to reducing hospitalisation and death.

7. Why Do You Not Disclose Hospitalisation Data for People Early On in the Vaccination Process?

Seventh, why do you only publish the Covid hospitalisation and death rates for people who have had either zero jabs, or two jabs plus two weeks? Why do you not disclose the hospitalisation and death rates for people with one jab and people who have had two jabs less than two weeks ago? Surely it is in the public interest to have all of this data on the table? By failing to publish deaths and hospitalisations that occur between the first jab and two weeks after the second jab, Covid hospitalisations or deaths that may be caused by either the first or second jab and occur earlier than 2 weeks after the second jab are simply rendered invisible in the data.¹

Enough is enough. Politicians have been playing us for long enough, with ceaseless propaganda, incomplete and misleading information, and a refusal to face up to the consequences of their draconian interventions. It is up to us citizens to hold them accountable, by whatever peaceful and legitimate means we have at our disposal.

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1. Hospitalisation tables frequently omit data for the partially vaccinated for purposes of comparison with the unvaccinated. However, I recently found a more detailed breakdown by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, which is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it is not broken down into different age groups, which is obviously pertinent for a disease that has age-stratified risk. Here is one recent discussion of this data by Joel Smalley. Here is another one, by Norman Fenton.