Threats of house arrest and sacking will not be enough to persuade people to take the Covid vaccine

The establishment's push for a compulsory Covid vaccine is well underway, with top medical journal the NEJM the latest to call for one. But people power is against them, and no amount of propaganda will help them get their way.

On Thursday, The New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective entitled ‘Ensuring Uptake of Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.’ It quickly began to gain traction, with tens of thousands of views and reports in the media. Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist whose agitating against the Covid hysteria has been ceaseless and outstanding, brought attention to the paper on his Twitter account on Thursday.

The plan for forced vaccines

The paper is billed directly as a blueprint for foreign governments to roll out a mandatory Covid vaccine. And although the vaccine arrival date is unknown, the authors emphasise that "states can apply [this framework] now." The message is: it’s time to start laying the propaganda groundwork.

The paper begins with the schoolmarm-ish warning that "a recent poll found that only 49% of Americans planned to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2." I don’t know about you, but to me that seems remarkably high. Perhaps President Trump’s staunchly pro-vaccine rhetoric has contributed to the figure. But it is nowhere good enough for the high-priests of the NEJM, who all of a sudden seem very concerned with achieving herd immunity via vaccination. Funny, seeing as no one in power seems to like the idea of herd immunity when Sweden (who were never aiming for it) is brought up.

Nevertheless, the authors almost win the sceptical reader over with their plea for "the best available evidence about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy." That seems honourable – let the evidence decide. But they immediately affix that statement with "the possibility that the evidence underlying FDA approval of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines may be more modest than usual." Sometimes you have to admire the neck of these people. No doubt soon dissenters like me will be arrested on the basis of "modest evidence."

World’s fastest vaccine

One perfectly reasonable response to compulsory vaccines is that vaccines are not 100 percent safe. And this is not the rant of some paranoid anti-vaxxer, but something that the medical community and policy makers factor in when they weigh up the pros and cons of any mass vaccination campaign. If anyone ever tries to tell you that all vaccines are harmless all the time, you can stop listening to them immediately. Even if common vaccines are safe for the vast majority of people, nothing is 100 percent safe – not walking up the stairs, not eating your dinner.

That being the case, even the safest Covid-19 vaccine ever will have harmful effects for some of the citizenry. How does it look if that vaccine was forced upon the person suffering horrendous or permanent side effects under threat of prosecution?

There is a reason that most rich countries, including the US and the UK, have special funds set aside to pay compensation to people who are damaged by vaccines. But those funds will take a kicking if governments compel their entire public to take what would be the fastest vaccine ever developed. That is, unless they issue some diktat after the fact absolving themselves of responsibility in case of collateral damage. And why not? The Big Pharma firms already have (for ostensibly good public health reasons).

Substantive penalties

The authors are wily enough, however, to caution politicians against criminal penalties, as they "invite legal challenges on procedural due-process grounds." Ah, that pesky due process! Never mind though – there are plenty of other rights and privileges that can be stripped away from people without so much as an official letter in the post. 

The paper, for instance, says "Substantive penalties could be justified, including employment suspension or stay-at-home orders for persons in designated high-priority groups who refuse vaccination." Job losses and house arrest. But those are only some of the options. Technology and Big Data are handy tools, don’t you know. Just look to how China denies their citizens entry to certain buildings and transport if their ‘social credit’ score is not good enough.

Whatever ‘penalties’ politicians and bureaucrats devise for free, law-abiding people, though, we can be sure that there will be plenty of creativity on show.

And if you think the American populace is divided and politicized now in how it approaches measures to deal with Covid-19, imagine what mandatory vaccination will do to these rifts. So dear technocrat scientists, while top-down legal coercion seems like a neat solution to quickly achieve the desired medical result, the real world is a more complex place. Step carefully.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.