Vaccine Discrimination Is About Money and Power, Not Public Health

We are living through an extraordinary and potentially seismic moment in Western history: a time when adult citizens’ lives can be turned upside down by public authorities for refusing to inject a State-mandated vaccine into their bodies.

Citizens of Western nations can now be turned away from coffeshops and restaurants, ejected from their jobs, and even held hostage in their own countries, not because they have committed a crime or revolted against the State, but because they have not consented to introduce a government-mandated medication into their body.

The right to informed consent to medical treatment, while remaining an essential part of medical ethics and international law, is now violated systematically and on a daily basis by a host of Western governments and private companies across the world.

The latest sorry episode of vaccine discrimination is Austria’s imposition of a lockdown targeting unvaccinated citizens, who, as of last Monday 15th November, may only leave their homes for work or essential purposes, while their vaccinated counterparts live in relative freedom. The Austrian government has since announced that vaccination will become legally mandatory in February 2022.

The constant mantra of public authorities - almost always echoed uncritically by mainstream media - is that Covid cases are rising because of the recalcitrant hold-outs who refuse to be vaccinated. It is the unvaccinated, allegedly, who are filling up our hospitals or causing them to be filled up. It is the unvaccinated, we are told, who are needlessly putting the lives of their fellow citizens in danger, and consequently have forfeited the right to lead a normal life and be treated as equals in the public square.

There are three problems with this story: first, it is a massive simplification to suggest that “the unvaccinated,” as a group, are uniquely responsible for Covid hospitalisations. On the one hand, we now know that a significant number of vaccinated individuals both transmit the virus and get hospitalised with it.

According to official data collected by the UK Health Security Agency, case rates recently detected among over-30s who are vaccinated are substantially higher than among their unvaccinated counterparts. While this is not based on randomised testing, it shows that the vaccinated probably do not have a much lower rate of Covid infection and transmission than the unvaccinated.

On the other hand, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that hospitalisation and/or infection rates are higher among the unvaccinated in the aggregate, treating the unvaccinated as a uniform cohort makes no sense from a medical perspective, given that Covid risk is extremely age and health-stratified, with elderly people literally thousands of times more likely to be hospitalised than children, and people with underlying health conditions far more likely to require hospitalisation than people in good health.

Under these circumstances, saying that “the unvaccinated,” as a collective, are increasing the strain on our hospitals, is a bit like saying that men over 60 are putting a strain on our hospitals. If we aggregate all groups that make up the unvaccinated or all men over 60, we may find these generic cohorts contribute more to hospitalisations than others.

However, this sort of aggregate statistic conceals the vast diversity within it. To infer from such a coarse-grained comparison that all men over 60 or all unvaccinated people are equally susceptible to hospitalisation or are equally likely to transmit disease, is simply nonsense.

Second, even if we could bring case levels down by introducing some form of medical segregation, this would be absolutely unacceptable from an ethical perspective.

There are certain things that you simply don’t do, even if they may seem expedient to solve an immediate problem. One is to force people to medicate against their will; another is to treat people like social outcasts because you don’t approve of their personal health choices.

Atrocities have been committed only a few generations ago in societies that were permeated by sectarian and exclusionary rhetoric of the sort we are now seeing directed at the unvaccinated. We should never forget what it meant in 1930s Germany to brand Jews as “the enemy within,” and how they were stripped of their rights based on perverse, pseudo-scientific rationalisations, such as the absurd notion that they were an “inferior race.”

Third, the incoherence and arbitrariness of vaccine discrimination (at least as it has been implemented in practice), viewed as a strategy of disease control, points to the bad faith of policymakers and suggests that the true reasons for vaccine discrimination go far beyond public health.

For example, if the huge pressure being applied upon citizens to vaccinate was genuinely motivated by a desire to minimise disease transmission and hospitalisation, then there would be every reason to welcome the unvaccinated Covid-recovered into society with open arms, as the cohort least likely to be reinfected or transmit SARS-CoV-2.

Indeed, according to a major Israeli study, Covid-recovered individuals are 13 times less likely to be re-infected with SARS-CoV-2 than vaccinated individuals who have not been previously exposed to the disease.

Yet the unvaccinated Covid-recovered are being shut out from social venues and amenities just like the rest of the unvaccinated (in some cases, with some narrowly defined exemptions that most Covid-recovered individuals cannot satisfy, such as a 6 month old positive PCR test).

So the goal is clearly not to minimise disease transmission, or to maximise population immunity, but to force every eligible member of the population to vaccinate. Let me repeat that: the goal is not to minimise disease, but to maximise vaccine uptake.

Why would you harness the police powers of the State to effectively force everyone, without exception, to submit to a vaccine or medical treatment, including those who manifestly do not need it? Why would you compel Covid-recovered individuals to undergo a therapy designed to enhance their immunity when they belong to a cohort that already has a substantially higher level of immunity, on average, than the non-Covid-recovered vaccinated population?

I will let the reader draw their own conclusions. For now, my working hypothesis is the following:

First, the libido dominandi or lust for power might go a long way to explaining why political and (some) scientific elites would start to arbitrarily treat a minority as a “dirty underclass,” based on a simplistic, un-nuanced caricature of the unvaccinated. Put simply, people get a kick out of exercising power arbitrarily over others.

Second, it is by no means far-fetched to speculate that the multi-billion-dollar Pharma industry may have found ways to exert pressure on governments, directly or indirectly, to impose universal vaccination. Who else stands to gain economically from a form of mass coercion that pushes vaccination on citizens irrespective of their personal circumstances or level of natural immunity?

---

Thanks for reading! Check out my other writings and videos at davidthunder.com. You can also subscribe to my Telegram, Youtube, and Rumble channels.

You will receive free content on a regular basis but you also have the option of subscribing (below) on a monthly or annual basis to get access to the full archive that includes subscriber-only posts, and to support the independent work I do advance the public’s understanding of the supports and impediments to free and open societies.

Here is a quick 2 minute pitch for The Freedom Blog: