Vaccine Passes Have No Place in a Free and Open Society
Western societies, at least up to very recently, have distinguished themselves by their commitment to two fundamental principles:
The first is the principle that social life is open to all citizens, irrespective of the colour of their skin, their religious creed, their political beliefs, or their personal history, provided they obey rudimentary rules of decorum and civility.
The second is the principle that each person should be afforded a space of personal freedom and trusted to act responsibly, rather than micromanaged in the minutiae of their everyday decisions.
The public and governmental response to the Covid-19 pandemic across much of Europe and parts of North America profoundly threaten both of these bedrock principles. Personal freedom is increasingly morphing into an obligation to blindly submit to arbitrary and coercive government edicts, while the ideal of an open and inclusive society is being corrupted by the notion that only those who make the “right” health choices (as defined by certain public authorities) deserve full access to social life.
In many parts of Europe, people find themselves compelled or pressured into complying with a string of odd health restrictions mandated by government, like asking customers to wear masks between sips of beer, requesting people to book into a hotel in order to enjoy indoor dining, or giving school lessons with one’s nose and mouth covered up.
Public health is increasingly based on top-down, coercive public health mandates, the policing of intimate aspects of our private life, and the abridgement of a broad range of civil liberties, including freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and freedom of worship.
The most recent step in the erosion of civil liberties in the name of public health is the introduction of vaccine passes. If you are not vaccinated and wish to travel between countries the European Union, you must now present a recent negative Covid test, obtained at your own expense.
Vaccine passes are now being extended in some European countries to domestic social venues. For example, Ireland, Austria, and Holland have made vaccination a legal precondition for access to social venues such as restaurants and bars. President Macron has implemented vaccine passes across France. The UK government, having initially taken vaccination passes off the table, now appears to be planning to introduce them for a certain range of domestic venues.
These discriminatory measures have proved controversial, sparking protests across Europe and North America. Soon after President Macron announced his intention in July to make vaccine passes mandatory in a wide range of social venues, over 100,000 French citizens marched through the streets of France, chanting slogans like “Liberté” and “Passe de honte” (“Pass of Shame”).
People who protest against vaccine passes are not protesting principally on scientific or strictly medical grounds – even though the evidence for the potential efficacy of vaccine controls at reducing Covid infections is underwhelming. Rather, they are protesting against the negative impact of vaccine passes on the freedom and social standing of the unvaccinated.
But it is worth mentioning, in passing, that the medical justification for vaccine passes, namely the notion that they would significantly reduce levels of disease and infection in the community, is wafer-thin.
To start with, selectively controlling some social venues to stop the spread of an infectious disease is naïve, considering that people are social beings, and when they are turned away from some venues, they will continue to socialize in others, or when all else fails, in their homes. Secondly, as it happens, Covid vaccines do not confer what is known as “sterilizing immunity”: in other words, they do not actually block infection and transmission. So people who enter venues controlled by vaccine passes will continue transmitting to each other.
Thirdly, the indiscriminate closure of social venues to the unvaccinated ignores the fact that millions who have been exposed to Covid-19 have much more robust immunity than the vaccinated who have not previously contracted the disease. Finally, the notion that the unvaccinated pose a “threat” to the vaccinated is an ideological mantra rather than a scientific fact, since the vaccine, if it works, should protect the vaccinated against severe disease irrespective of the vaccination status of those who share the room with them.
Now, let’s consider the impact of vaccine passes on civil liberties. While a health pass would not directly mandate vaccination, it would make social life and travel significantly more burdensome for those who opt, based on their own preference or risk assessment, not to vaccinate. This is medical coercion in all but name, in direct conflict with the right to informed consent to medical treatment, a hallowed principle of medical ethics in the West.
As a rational being, a large part of my dignity resides in not being coercively recruited into projects, enterprises, or relationships that implicate my life in a decisive way, such as marriage, employment, or sexual relationships.
While there is significant political and philosophical disagreement over the limits of a person’s rational autonomy, and it cannot give anyone a blank check to act in a self-destructive or other-destructive manner, there is nonetheless a broad legal and philosophical consensus that it includes the right of adults of sound mind to decline medical interventions in their body, even if those interventions are intended for their own benefit.
If we punish an adult of sound mind for making a different judgment call than that of a government agency about which forms of treatment are most conducive to their personal health and well-being, we are removing agency from that person, treating him like a ward of State. Societies that have given public authorities the right to medicate or treat patients without their informed consent have gone down the path of racist and eugenic policies of the vilest sort.
Besides trampling on individual liberty, vaccine-based discrimination also cuts directly against the ideal of equal citizenship, according to which all law-abiding citizens can participate freely in social life, irrespective of their ethnicity, place of origin, or vaccination status.
Vaccine discrimination is no more ethically acceptable than discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity, or religion. Citizens should not be penalised or excluded from social life for making decisions about their personal health and that of their families that diverge from those of some of their fellow citizens, on a matter of immense complexity that admits of significant variation across different persons and groups. We never applied this discriminatory logic to those who decline flu shots, and we have no good reason to suddenly start accepting this ethically perverse approach to public health now.
The fact that Western governments would seriously propose turning unvaccinated citizens into a new social under-class shows just how blind they have become to core Western values such as the right to informed consent to medical treatment and the equal standing of all citizens in the public square.
We can only hope that ordinary citizens, as well as bar and restaurant owners, will have the courage and integrity to refuse to have any hand or part in medical apartheid. If they do not, Western governments will only be further emboldened to keep chipping away at our civil liberties, as they have been doing from day one of the pandemic.