Altruism and Mandates Don’t Mix

Those who have demanded that we shut up and do everything the government and its “experts” have told us to do from the beginning of the bat flu scare have insisted that doing so is necessary for the sake of protecting others and that it is “selfish” to be worried about such things as traditional rights and freedoms and their constitutional protections at a time like this.   Of course, when someone allows a fear of the bat flu that is absurdly out of proportion to the actual risk posed by the disease to so distort his thinking that he is willing to throw away, not only his constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, but those of his friends, family, neighbours, and countrymen as well, it is rather rich of him to be shooting his mouth off about how caring and compassionate he is and how “selfish” all those who object to tyranny are.   Nevertheless, they continue to talk this way, and are now telling us that we need to abandon our “selfish” insistence upon our right to make an informed choice before accepting medical treatment and agree to be vaccinated for the sake of others.   This adds yet another layer of dark irony to this entire farce.

 

People do not, as a rule, undergo medical treatment for the sake of others.   If someone takes an aspirin it is to get rid of his headache not his wife’s headache.   If her headache is caused by his complaining about his own then his taking the aspirin may have the incidental effect of curing his wife’s headache but that is not why he takes the aspirin.    You do not inject yourself with insulin out of fear that your neighbour’s blood sugar is too high.   You do not have a bypass because somebody else is experiencing chest pain.

 

Vaccination is no exception to this rule.   While using vaccines to immunize people can benefit others by making it harder for a disease to spread, each person who gets his shot does so for his own protection.   Whatever protection it may provide to others is incidental and if he thinks of it at all it is at most a secondary concern to him.     

 

There is one rather obvious exception to this rule, however.   When someone donates either his blood or one of the few organs he can donate while he is still alive he undergoes a medical procedure that is entirely for the benefit of someone other than himself.  

 

We have arrived at the stage of bat flu mania where a large number of people are insisting that governments suspend our right to withhold our consent and compel us to take the vaccines.    Such people might object to this description of their demands but it is accurate nevertheless.   Putting a gun to someone’s head and telling him to get vaccinated or you pull the trigger – get the shot or get shot – is not the only form of compulsion.   To tell someone that to retain his employment he must get the jab is to put a metaphorical gun to his job.   To tell someone that to regain all the freedoms that were taken from him at the beginning of the bat flu scare, especially access to all the public spaces that were closed at that time, he will have to prove he has been fully vaccinated is to put the same gun to his freedom, which he will not get back even if he does comply, because access to all these places if you can produce the right documents is not the freedom that he had before.  The person who gets vaccinated in any of these instances, who would not have gotten vaccinated otherwise, has not given his voluntary, informed, consent.   The coercion involved invalidates the consent.

 

While banning a medical procedure is justifiable under certain circumstances, forcing someone to undergo a medical procedure is never justifiable.    The closest thing to an exception to this is when an emergency procedure is needed to save someone’s own life and he cannot give consent, voluntary and informed or otherwise, because he is unconscious and likely to remain that way apart from the procedure.    This is very different from forcing someone to undergo a treatment that he consciously rejects.

 

Those who support these vaccine mandates and passports attempt to justify this suppression of each person’s right to reject medical treatment that he has not been persuaded to his own satisfaction that it is in his best interest to accept with arguments that ultimately reduce to the same old “it is for the protection of others” line that the bat flu bullies have been using all along.   It takes on a whole new level of absurdity when applied to vaccines.  

 

Who are the others that one is supposed to be protecting by getting vaccinated?

 

Presumably, these would be the vaccinated.   The people, that is to say, who are supposed to be already protected by their own vaccines. “Your vaccine protects me, my vaccine protects you” is not how vaccines work.

 

Imagine what it would look like if this kind of reasoning were used to mandate the medical procedure discussed above that genuinely is undertaken solely for the benefit of others.   It would play out something like this:

 

The chief public health officer announces one day that deaths due to kidney failure are on the rise.   “This is unacceptable”, he says.   “We must get these numbers down”.

 

The problem, he then informs us, is that all the cadavers, corpses, and carcasses of car crash victims have not been yielding enough salvageable kidneys to meet the needs of the growing number of people requiring a transplant.    Nor is the gap being sufficiently bridged by voluntary donors.

 

Therefore, he announces, the government will be offering incentives for people with healthy kidneys to donate.    Everyone who donates at least one will be entered in a lottery with a chance to win a million dollars.

 

A month or two later, he informs the public that while kidney donations have gone up, the latest computer modelling projects that a rise in kidney failure deaths is about to begin.   In an effort to ward this off, the government is now making kidney donation mandatory for all public employees and encouraging private employers to consider doing the same.   To facilitate matters it will begin issuing kidney donor cards and has developed an app whereby you can confirm your donor status with your smart phone.   Those who have not done their part to stem the tide of kidney failure death by donating one or more of their kidneys can expect to find themselves denied full participation in society as the card/app will also be used to restrict access to anything not deemed essential to only those who have donated a kidney.

 

Such a scenario would be monstrous, of course.    Yet, if the government is going to override people’s right to reject medical procedures that we do not want on the grounds that forcing us to undergo a procedure is necessary for the sake of others, the underlying reasoning would be more valid in this situation than in the real life one.  

 

It is interesting to note, by the way, that the persecution of prisoners of conscience in Red China, especially of targeted groups such as the Falun Gong and Uyghurs, reportedly involves forced organ harvesting.   Communist China is the pattern on which all the governments of the formerly free world have modelled their draconian measures to combat the bat flu.   It is time that we stop doing this and start respecting our own tradition of freedom and constitutional limits on government power, don’t you think?