Have You Had Your Jab, Yet? Part 2

Left Lockdown Sceptics is pleased to publish part two of an article by guest contributor Phil Shannon.

Part one can be read here

4. Mandatory Covid Vaccinations and Medical Ethics

The world is in the midst of a gigantic medical experiment involving genetic meddling with human DNA by inadequately regulated pharmaceutical snake-oil. Rather than being perturbed by this on ethical grounds, Australia’s Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, for example, is giddy with excitement, boasting that “the world is engaged in the largest clinical trial, the largest global vaccination trial ever” (ABC Insiders, 21 Feb 2021), apparently unaware that trials are meant to detect any problems before a pharmaceutical product is unleashed on a population-wide scale. The wise consumer always tests a new carpet cleaning product on a small, unobtrusive patch of carpet before going all-in on their expensive Axminster. A sea of ethical red flags should be raised by the universal implementation of a rather risky new medical procedure, based on deficient clinical trials, for a virus that is a risk to so very few.

One of those red flags is the prospect of Covid vaccination becoming mandatory. Although some politicians have unguardedly expressed a desire for mandatory vaccination (Emperor Dan Andrews, at the height of the Australian Labor Party state premier’s dictatorial regnum in lockdowned Victoria, said in July 2020 that “until a vaccine is developed, and then administered to every single Victorian, we will have to live with and embrace a COVID normal”), there are no sinister vaccine snatch squads abducting people for forced jabs. No, it is more subtle than that. There is a full-court press by pro-vaccine, Covid hysterical media and government to scare, cajole and shame people into mass Covid vaccination.

This makes a mockery of the ethical pillar of informed consent. Coerced medical treatment, whether by crude force or crude propaganda, is coerced and therefore unethical. Some people, who face zero mortal threat from the virus, will be killed, or seriously harmed, by an unnecessary (and ineffective) experimental Covid vaccine. Other people, who do face a non-negligible risk from the virus, will die or be harmed from the vaccine itself.

Along with ‘informed consent’, the medical principle of primum non nocere (‘First, do no harm’) is also an ethical casualty of the potentially deadly, experimental, unlicensed, mandatory-in-all-but-name Covid vaccines for a disease that most people are either unaware of getting or which results in only mild symptoms. The Hippocratic Oath has been placed on hold during the Covid lunacy.

5. ‘Vaccine Passports’

As well as the propaganda divisions massing for large-scale vaccination, the vaccine passport brigade are being deployed to the same end. Whether introduced by government decree or, more likely, by governments allowing private businesses and public institutions to adopt a policy of proof of vaccination for access to their premises or services, the vaccine passport (or ‘immunity certificate’ based on a negative test for Covid) is being proposed as the way for loosening ‘social distancing’ restrictions by allowing only allegedly immune, and therefore allegedly non-infectious, citizens to safely participate in mass gatherings without spreading the virus to the unvaccinated. The passports are being mooted for travel, concerts, sports events, restaurants, employment, etc. Amongst the many early adopters are the University of California network, the New York Jets and New York Yankees, and the Eurovision 2021 song contest. The vaccine passport wheels are in motion in a number of countries, including the UK, the US, Israel, Germany, New Zealand and Australia, where implementation or government planning is well advanced.

The bribe for the good citizen is getting their travel and other freedoms back. They will become the new float in the parade of the obedient – the Covid Hysterics will now be able to say ‘Yes, I stayed home’; ‘Yes, I masked up’; and, now, ‘Yes, I vaxxed’. The chronic virtue-signallers amongst them will take selfies of their jab.

The more reluctant conformists who say they will get around to vaccinating sometime but who may be having second thoughts folowing the reports of harmful vaccine reactions, will, along with the principled vaccine holdouts, need the threat of being denied participation in society to help them focus their minds. Unvaccinated Covid miscreants (‘No freedom for you!’) will face penalties for their refusal of the vaccines. The vaccine passport (or, more accurately, and damningly, ‘freedom licenses’) thus amounts to de facto compulsory vaccination. By rewarding the compliant, and by coercing the hesitant or disobedient, to take an experimental drug against their will or without fully-informed consent, the vaccine passport fails to clear the medical ethics bar.

Even on their own terms, vaccine passports are a crock, as well. If the vaccine works, then the vaccinated should have nothing to fear from mixing with the unvaccinated because the vaxxed would theoretically be immune, whilst they should not be able to transmit the virus to the unvaxxed. Since the Covid vaccines neither prevent infection nor transmission (and since the PCR test is notoriously shonky as proof of being Covid free), however, any ‘immunity certificate’ is completely pointless. Covid vaccine passports can’t work because the Covid vaccines don’t work.

So what is the point of the things? The point, of course, is political – the passports are simply a tool to coerce a high vaccine take-up which will mark the political exit door from the lockdown madness for lockdown-addled governments. The Covid vaccine passport is also another high-profile part of the attempt by governments to show that they are ‘doing something’, the more radical and unprecedented the better, to protect their citizens from the virus.

The vaccine passport belongs in the Covid policy skip, along with staying home, doing the QR sign-in thing, masking-up, getting tested, getting tracked-and-traced or taking part in any of the other nonsensical rituals of the Covidian cult.

6. Vaccine-Shaming and the New Normals

Whilst vaccine passports are intended to do the heavy lifting of mass, mandatory-in-all-but-name Covid vaccination, an auxiliary Citizen Army of ‘New Normals’ will provide vital support. The New Normals, who have been successfully reprogrammed by demented propaganda about the virus and the hare-brained policy response, will willingly advance the vaccine cause. Even if hit for six with health problems following vaccination, they will claim that ‘at least the vaccine reaction shows that it is working’, proudly wearing their hairy vaccination experience as a badge of honour, as some sort of bravery medal. Point out that the ill-health following the injection of, say, sump oil into your bloodstream in the belief it will do you good doesn’t mean the sump oil is ‘working’ and they will look at you like dogs being shown a card trick – completely uncomprehending. You may as well be speaking Russian.

So, the double-masked members of the Covidian cult will line up in their droves at mass vaccination centres to be injected with an experimental, risky ‘vaccine’ that they believe will save the human species. Critics of the Covid vaccines will be shamed into becoming a vaxxed, New Normal cult member. Covid vaccine-doubters will be misrepresented and caricatured as anti-vaxxers who need to dial down their hysteria about the dangers of the Covid vaccines. In doing so, the New Normals, who are the very same people who so readily instigated, or encouraged, or fell for all the baseless hysteria about the virus which unnecessarily resulted in lockdown stupidity, will not be conscious of any doublethink. Rationality has deserted the New Normals who will smoothly segue from righteous mask-shaming to virtuous vaccine-shaming against the new outcasts, the new lepers of the Covid political era, the new Unclean – the Unvaxxed.

7. Covid Vaccines and the Left

Where has the Left been in all the Covid vaccine hoopla? You’d think that with mandatory, coerced medical interventions with unproven and potentially dangerous experimental drugs by a financially rapacious and ethically reckless Big Pharma capitalist behemoth, and with medical discrimination in the offing, the Left would have been up in arms but with the Covid vaccine rollout, as throughout the entire Covid saga, the contemporary, woke Left’s record has been dismal.

Following on from its hysteria over Brexit (Racism!) and Trump (Racism! Fascism!), against a background of angry woke obsessions (Racism! Transphobia!, etc.), the Left has fallen for virus hysteria in a big way. The Left, almost in its entirety, has been solidly behind the pseudoscience of lockdown and social distancing even as lockdown has laid waste to the livelihoods, education, health and recreations of the working class. The Left has fully complied with masking. It has been mute on the heavy-handed, lockdown-enforcing bio-security police state (except when it affects demonstrations over its pet causes such as BLM). The Left has been supportive of censorship of lockdown dissidents, curtailment of parliamentary democracy, suspension of civil liberties and, irony of ironies, closed borders, all in the misbegotten belief that it is all about ‘public health’ and ‘saving just one life’.

Now the Left is four-square behind the unnecessary, ineffective and potentially dangerous experimental ‘vaccines’, pausing only to worry with bemused consternation about ‘people of colour’, who, quite disconcertingly for a woke, pro-vaccine, Covid hysterical Left, are showing the most ‘vaccine hesitancy’ (making them ‘bad people’ like Trump voters?). The Left has also not raised a peep against vaccine passport discrimination, although with ‘people of colour’ being the least likely to get the Covid jab, it is this political constituency that will be a big loser under the new system of medical apartheid. The Left is also now in the remarkable position of becoming an enabler of mega-profits for Big Pharma, an industry which the Left would once have scorned for its greed, deep-pocketed political influence-buying and harm-causing products in pursuit of a buck. No one does (un-self-aware) irony quite like the modern, Covid-crazy ‘Left’.

Covid has seen the contemporary ‘Left’ finally become unmoored from its traditional political principles. Its abandonment, through divisive identity politics, and through lockdown, of the working class, and its retreat from science and medical ethics through its support of social distancing and masks, is now complete with its acceptance of the vaccination coda to the virus hysteria.

8. The Temptation of the Lockdown Sceptic

So, the Covid vaccine balance sheet is looking pretty lop-sided:

• The vaccines aren’t necessary because the virus threat is not out of the ordinary seasonal flu range.
• For some people, the vaccines may lessen the severity of non-serious virus infection outcomes but they do not work as vaccines because they neither confer immunity against infection nor stop transmission of the virus.
• They are still experimental gene therapies (although not labelled as such because that would be like putting a skull-and-crossbones sticker on them) which provide real, non-zero risk of harm for zero gain for almost everybody.
• Symbolically, they keep afloat the artificial spectre of a deadly virus and provide political cover for most of the world’s governments whose initial alarmism panicked them into disastrous lockdown policy extremism.

Yet, such is the level of virus paranoia, that a large majority of the population are nevertheless embracing the Covid vaccines with desperate longing whilst any critical thinking has been corralled by the establishment media to second-order questions such as the relative merits and demerits of the different Covid vaccine brands, their effectiveness against this or that virus variant, the logistics of vaccine rollout, and ‘vaccine nationalism’ and other jurisdictional, geographic and demographic vaccine rollout equity.

The Western left has gone along with these limits on vaccine debate with woke alacrity. Australia’s Green Left Weekly, for example, is representative (Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine shambles a symptom of neoliberalism), blaming Australia’s “messy vaccine rollout” on global neo-liberalism and the lack of a publicly-owned vaccine infrastructure. Their rote denunciation of Big Pharma (and “logistics and supply chain behemoths”) as villains can sound superficially radical in an old-school, socialist sort of way until we realise that the Left gives a complete pass to the experimental ‘vaccines’ themselves as their Third Worldist, woke instincts kick in, training their political ire on “vaccine hoarding” by the wicked West which denies Australia’s brown-skinned Pacific Island neighbours their chance to line up for an early shot of the unnecessary, ineffective, untested, risky and unethical pharmaceutical hooch.

Whilst Covid vaccine acceptance rules the day amongst the contemporary Left, as amongst the establishment elite and the population at large, even some lockdown opponents, mostly of right-of-centre proclivity, have thrown in the towel to, with more or less reluctance, accept the vaccine as the closing chapter of the Covid horror novel. ‘Ah, the hell with it’, goes their end-of-tether reasoning, ‘let’s all just hope and pretend that the vaccines work so we can get back to normal’. Peter Hitchens, the British Daily Mail columnist, for example, has been one of the prominent anti-lockdown voices but even he now hails “the huge success of the vaccine” whilst publicly announcing his own jab so that he can travel, as has Richard Littlejohn, the Daily Mirror columnist, who writes that “mass vaccination is the only way we’re ever going to escape the nightmare of the past 13 months” whilst also supporting ‘no jab, no job’.

The Australian columnist, Adam Creighton, almost the sole voice of calm and reason amongst mainstream Australian media on the virus and lockdowns, has also been tempted and is now backing vaccines (lining up for his own vaccination to show how ‘safe’ they are) as well as praising vaccine passports. Meanwhile, the editor of the lockdown-scorning Spectator Australia believes Australia’s Covid vaccination rollout must be “put into UK-level gear” to hasten a “return to normality” whilst any Covid vaccine sceptical material has been noticeably absent from the publication.

Other lockdown sceptics are less starry-eyed about the vaccines but fatalistically accept that vaccine passports are inevitably coming down the chute and that by holding out against a medical apartheid state on principle, they will simply become the victims of discrimination, denying themselves the pleasures of concerts, the footy, restaurants, gyms, employment (over 50% of British managers favour refusing work for those who have not been vaccinated) and who knows what else in an empty gesture of political defiance. ‘Persuasion’ of this sort (‘give us your healthy body’s genetic blueprint for experimentation in return for your civic freedoms, economic security, holidays abroad and recreational pleasures’) is the sort of ‘persuasion’ that works so well for a certain ‘business’ organisation, famed for employing standover thugs making offers that can’t be refused.

These are the thoughts – ‘please make all this lockdown nonsense stop. Here’s The Vaccine. That’ll do’ – that must have crossed the minds of many of the non-hysterical, free-thinking but utterly frustrated people who are aggravated by the monomaniacal fixation on Covid as the only disease worthy of attention and who find lockdowns, ‘social distancing’ restrictions and face-knickers a pile of unscientific bilge serving as unendurable, round-the-clock reminders of the pre-Modern hysteria about the virus.

The temptation to go with the vaccine flow is alluring but the vaccines are every bit as worthy of scepticism as are lockdowns. Guilt by association is generally to be avoided but, for once, it is acceptable for the Covid vaccines which are, after all, being brought to us by the same crowd of pseudo-scientific loons and panic-peddlers who brought us the disastrous lockdowns. Why would any self-respecting lockdown sceptic buy the latest dud product from the same outfit? ‘Once-bitten, twice-shy’ and all that.

Lockdown sceptics are in a war against unreason and political folly. As in any war, falling for the enemies’ Trojan Horse is a rookie error, and to accept, at a political or personal level, the Covid vaccines as either necessary or inevitable, is just such an error. Support for the Covid vaccines undermines the lockdown sceptic’s case against the fable that this particular coronavirus is so uniquely deadly and civilisation-threatening that extreme measures such as lockdown – and mass, experimental, coerced vaccination – are justified. After a year of putting the virus into properly diminished perspective through diligent analysis of real world data, to now support vaccination is to infer that, against all evidence to the contrary, there must have been some rational basis to the hysteria and panic that started it all in 2020. The frenzy surrounding the vaccination ‘emergency’ sustains the charade of a virus ‘emergency’ demanding ‘emergency’ measures.

The vaccine bait conceals a lockdown hook – take the bait and you also get stuck with the foundational myth of the virus that we are all going to die so let’s lockdown good and hard and often, mask up, cancel the footy and get jabbed with an experimental vaccine (of two types – for any coronavirus, and using gene-based technology) that has never worked safely in decades of trying. Tempting though it is for lockdown opponents to fold their tents to see off lockdown, vacating the field like this concedes that lockdown was the only thing capable of saving humanity from viral Armageddon until vaccines could offer final deliverance. Lockdown and Covid vaccines are both non-solutions to a non-problem. Lockdown is wrong (and bad) and the vaccines are wrong (and bad). They are peas in the Covid pod and both should be opposed on principle.

Making one’s peace with the Covid vaccines also means that, when qualitatively different new strains of SARS-CoV-2 arrive, the whole lockdown/vaccine cycle would, if the Covid authorities were to be consistent, kick in again. Leave intact the vaccination limb of the Lockdown Terminator, and Arnie-like, the anti-human destroyer ‘will be back’, laying waste to society through lockdown.

Two involuntary, global experiments are being conducted involving all of humanity as lab rats – the social experiment of lockdown and the medical experiment of gene-altering vaccines. Watching the whole Covid drama unfold with stunned amazement, many of us have been unceremoniously disabused of many taken-for-granted assumptions about our democratic and political rights – ‘that will never happen’, we naively thought about economy-crushing lockdowns, masks, school closures, the ‘social distancing’ ruination of all that makes life joyful, mandatory-by-stealth vaccinations with experimental gene-based drugs and a vaccine passport to separate the worthy from the unworthy citizen in a Beijing-style, population monitoring-and-control Social Credit way. The same level of scepticism that the lockdown experiment deserves should also apply to its doppelganger, the Covid vaccine.

9. Vaccine Supporters Start Backpedalling

Covid vaccine scepticism is not just the province of the (consistent) lockdown sceptic, however. Whilst most authorities are publicly sticking to the script that the vaccine is the ‘Get Out Of Lockdown’ card, other members of the vaccine lobby itself are showing scepticism about its own product and have commenced hosing down expectations. The UK Prime Minister and lockdown heavyweight, Boris Johnson, for example, is warning that the vaccines are not entirely effective and that lockdowns, social distancing restrictions and masking will therefore continue to be required. The Chilean government has plunged that country back into lockdown after their universal Covid vaccine rollout. The irritatingly ubiquitous US Covid Czar, Anthony Fauci, has warned that people who take the vaccine should behave as if they haven’t had it. Such power players are effectively admitting that the Covid vaccine doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

In New Zealand, when a fully vaccinated Auckland airport cleaner recently tested positive to Covid, the Prime Minister, the ‘Zero-Covid’ queen, Jacinta Ardern, said that NZ health officials “entirely expect people who are vaccinated to get COVID-19″ (whilst just “reducing symptoms of the virus”). The country’s border closures (with mandatory medi-hotel quarantine for in-bound travellers) will therefore remain in place because even vaccinated Kiwis can still catch the virus from travellers and thus spread it in the community to other vaccinated Kiwis.

Across the ditch, Australia’s Health Minister agrees on the failure of the vaccines to vaccinate, saying that “if the whole country [Australia] were vaccinated, you couldn’t just open the borders”. The Australian government, sounding surprised, has now just announced that six people from overseas, who are cooped up in mandatory medi-hotel quarantine, have tested positive for Covid despite having been fully vaccinated. By now, the only surprising thing about this is how anyone can be surprised about it.

All the familiar and loathsome activity of the Covid New Normal – closed borders, the mask charade and all the other ‘social distancing’ farces of the Covid Theatre of the Absurd, the mobilisation of an army of contact-tracers, the scrambling of testing centre staff to combat low double-figure ‘outbreaks’ as if it were the Battle of Britain – all this is set to continue ad infinitum because the vaccines aren’t all that they are cracked up to be and won’t make a blind bit of difference to the culture of lockdown, as even their biggest political and ‘scientific’ promoters are now admitting despite having ramped up vaccine fever to save their hides from accountability for the disastrous lockdown mess they got us into in the first place.

For the Covid vaccine, as with everything about Covid, our political and health elites are making it all up as they go along rather than having to say ‘Oops, looks like we got it wrong – sorry about ruining your lives like that for no good purpose’.

10. Vaccines – The Verdict

The provisional verdict on the vaccines is in. On the grounds of necessity, efficacy, safety and ethics, it’s fail, fail, fail, fail. The vaccines may scrape a bare pass in terms of lessening the severity of non-serious Covid symptoms for some but on every other metric, they fail.

Healthy people with normally-functioning immune systems who are effectively at zero risk from the virus don’t need the vaccines at all, whilst, for the most vulnerable who would benefit from a (properly tested, safe and effective) vaccine, the Covid injection could be as bad as, or much worse, than the Covid infection.

When most people, however, are so terrified of the virus, and with the media censoring any alternative information, they won’t, and can’t be expected to, get a handle on basic virology and immunology and to make their own informed decision on whether to have the jab. They will, to their potential cost, take their cue from medical, government and media authorities whose abject failure to challenge virus hysteria, unscientific lockdowns and masks, or to interrogate the vaccine frenzy, means that such authorities have all the credibility of a whiskey priest.

Two years into a ruinously expensive World War Covid (the war that was going to be all over just two weeks after ‘the curve was flattened’, remember, just like World War 1 was ‘going to be all over by Christmas’) and whose miracle vaccine weapon is firing blanks or blowing up in our faces with a mounting toll of friendly-fire casualties, the political and public health generals in charge are still behaving like donkeys (but this time leading lambs, not lions, to ‘public health’ slaughter) as the Covid campaign of lockdowns, masks and vaccination develops a bureaucratic momentum and institutional inertia of its own, becoming part of the policy furniture and heralding yet more fiscal, economic, political, social and health disasters.

It is time to call the whole shebang off, and decommission the dud vaccine super-weapon, whilst we learn to live with what is a bog-ordinary virus and retire the artefacts of the ‘war’ against Covid to a museum where those who are to come after us can look, learn and wonder ‘what on earth were they thinking?’.

So, if being interrogated, especially by a New ‘Left’ Normal, on whether you have had your jab yet, and, as a ridgy-didge lefty you want to ignite a really interesting discussion, you can reply with ‘No, I won’t be getting the jab. I’m a socialist, not a Covid Hysteric’. Light the blue touchpaper and stand well clear!