Our Default State: Compulsory Vaccination for COVID-19 and Human Rights Law

On Monday, 14 December, in response to a petition signed by 325,797 people asking the Government ‘to prevent any restrictions being placed on those who refuse to have any potential COVID-19 vaccine’, 6 Members of Parliament debated the issue for just over an hour. At the end, Nadhim Zahawi, since 28 November the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment, repeated word for word the Government’s initial response to the petition on 11 September:

‘There are currently no plans to place restrictions on those who refuse to have any potential Covid-19 vaccine.’

I won’t go into the discussion between the MPs, which was as empty, uninformed and meaningless as all the other debates about coronavirus-justified policy held in Parliament. Indeed, the greater part of the hour was devoted to the MPs promoting the benefits of vaccines, affirming their own intention to take one as soon as it is available, repeating factually inaccurate statements about the threat of the coronavirus and the effects — both known and unknown — of the COVID-19 vaccine, and almost entirely ignoring the petition or the issues it raises. All agreed that compulsory vaccination was not ‘British’ — or ‘Irish’ in the case of Jim Shannon of the DUP — and all were appeased by Zahawi’s bland assurance. No-one questioned what ‘currently’ might mean for the future.

 

I’m going to take a look myself, therefore, at what that future might be; for the question of whether and how the UK Government will make a vaccine for COVID-19 compulsory has been around almost since this crisis started. On 22 July, in response to an open call by the Joint Committee on Human Rights for evidence on the ‘The Government’s response to COVID-19: human rights implications’, four academics from the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Dr. Lisa Forsberg, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Law, Dr. Isra Black, a Lecturer in Law at the University of York, Dr. Thomas Douglas, a Professor of Applied Philosophy and the Director of Research and Development at the Centre, and Dr. Jonathan Pugh, a Senior Research Fellow, together submitted a response under the same title. Although only 1 of 226 responses published by Parliament, it is this text I want to discuss, for its authors’ extraordinary proposal is that the legislation under which a vaccine for COVID-19 could be made compulsory in the UK is the Mental Health Act 1983.

1. Qualifying Human Rights

Their strategy is to address the justification and proportionality for interference with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) — the ‘right to respect for private and family life’ — entailed by compulsory vaccination, and in particular how it accords, in the Guide on Article 8 issued by the European Court of Human Rights, with Section B, ‘Physical, psychological or moral integrity’, subsections 3, ‘Forced medical treatment and compulsory medical procedures’ and 5, ‘Health Care and treatment’. The authors do this by what they call two ‘parity’ arguments, in which they draw equivalents between powers in already existing legislation and the power to make a vaccine for COVID-19 compulsory.

First, if the restrictions on persons, things and premises known as ‘lockdown’ are compliant with human rights under Sections 45B and C of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 and Schedules 18 and 19 of the Coronavirus Act 2020, then it is arguable that compulsory vaccination is too. They call this the ‘lockdown parity argument’. However, neither the Public Health Act nor the Coronavirus Act grant the Government the power to mandate vaccination. In fact, as the authors point out, Section 45E of the Public Health Act and Schedules 18 and 19 of the Coronavirus Act specifically rule out provisions requiring medical treatment, including ‘vaccination or other prophylactic treatment’. From this the authors conclude that ‘a policy of compulsory vaccination would thus require primary legislation’, which is to say, a new Act of Parliament.

Second, however, if non-consensual treatment under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act 1983, (c) ‘for the protection of other persons’, is also compliant with human rights law, then it is arguable that compulsory vaccination is too. They call this the ‘mental health parity argument’. Under Section 63 of the Mental Health Act, the consent of the patient, even those with the capacity to make decisions, ‘shall not be required for any medical treatment given to him for the mental disorder from which he is suffering.’ This derogates from the common law requirement that individuals must give consent in order for treatment to be lawful. From this the authors conclude that:

‘Mental health law permits the detention of a person for treatment for the protection of others, and permits compulsory medical treatment of a person so detained.’

Now, under Article 8 (2) of the European Convention on Human Rights:

‘There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’

The European Court of Human Rights has established that medical treatment without consent constitutes an interference with Article 8, with case law (Pretty vs. United Kingdom, 2002) stating:

‘The imposition of medical treatment, without the consent of a mentally competent adult patient, would interfere with a person’s physical integrity in a manner capable of engaging the rights protected under Article 8(1) of the Convention.’

And since vaccination is defined as medical treatment for the purposes of the Public Health Act, compulsory vaccination is likely to constitute such interference for people who would otherwise refuse.

Article 8, however, is a qualified right, meaning such interference may be justified in pursuit of the aims listed above, which include ‘public safety’, ‘the protection of health’, and ‘the protection of the rights and freedoms of others’. From this the authors conclude that:

‘The most important element of the evaluation whether a measure constitutes a violation of article 8 ECHR is the analysis of its proportionality.’

From this conclusion they develop what they call their ‘strategy’, which is that since interference with the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights are ‘commensurable’, it is possible to ‘evaluate the degree of different kinds of interference with human rights on a comparable basis’, including the qualified rights in Article 8 of the ECHR. From this proposed standard for measuring the degree of violation of our human rights that is permissible, the authors jump to a series of assumptions about what they deem comparable. They do this by liberal use of the word ‘seems’:

‘Even accounting for any harms associated with non-consensual administration, the interference with an individual’s private life that compulsory vaccination entails seems proportionate in light of the seriousness of COVID-19 risks and impacts.’

‘A policy of compulsory vaccination seems less burdensome on the interests the ECHR protects than “lockdown”; that is, the degree of interference with bodily integrity entailed in compulsory vaccination seems less than the degree of interference with liberties from lockdown.’

In both these comparisons, the authors judge that forcibly sticking a needle into someone and injecting them with a foreign substance against their wishes is proportionate with the risks and impacts of COVID-19, and less of a burden to the so-enforced public than the loss of our civil liberties under lockdown measures. By this argument, the very extremism and disproportionality of lockdown measures in response to the deliberately exaggerated risk of COVID-19 to the general public becomes the basis for the equivalent extremism of compelling British citizens to take a vaccine against their will for a disease that presents no risk to 99.8 per cent of us, and to an even higher percentage of those under 60 years of age. From this leap of equivalence, the authors are brought to their chilling conclusion:

‘In the event that a policy choice between “lockdown” and compulsory vaccination were coterminous, it would in our view be strange to opt for lockdown over compulsory vaccination. The absence of the legal power to require individuals to undergo vaccination is hard to explain.’

2. Sectioning the Public

After this response was published by Parliament on 21 September, the public response was such that the authors, on 9 November, issued a statement to the effect that their concern was merely to investigate the possible policy options available for making vaccination compulsory under existing legislation, and that they were ‘not endorsing a policy that imposes COVID vaccination in the UK’. As the conclusion in their original response makes plain, this is pure sophistry, issued by collaborators in the implementation of the UK biosecurity state who have been caught in the glare of publicity for their abhorrent proposals. Indeed, they opened their initial response with the statement that:

‘Our chief conclusion is that, as and when a vaccine becomes available at scale, the Government should give serious consideration to compulsory immunisation as a means of reducing the impacts of Covid-19.’

If this isn’t an endorsement I don’t know what is. In reality, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics is actively promoting compulsory vaccination. On 25 November, Dr. Alberto Giubilini, a senior researcher at the Centre, wrote in the The Conversation that it should be mandatory, with ‘penalties for failure to vaccinate, such as fines or limitations on freedom of movement’; while on 2 December the Centre’s Director, Professor Julian Savulescu, made a case for mandatory vaccination at the Imperial College Union Debating Society. The authors of this conclusion may find it ‘hard to explain’ why the legal power to force rational individuals to undergo medical intervention against their will doesn’t already exist, but the reason they do becomes all too apparent when they go on, in the rest of their response, to challenge the rationality of individuals who refuse to comply with any future policy enforcing the violation of their bodily integrity.

All four authors of this response are involved in research on the ethics of consent to medical interventions, but Dr. Forsberg and Dr. Douglas are also researchers on neurointerventions. The former is currently leading on a project titled ‘Changing One’s Mind: Neurointerventions, Autonomy, and the Law on Consent’; and before that she worked on the project ‘Neurointerventions in Crime-Prevention: An Ethical Analysis’, for which Dr. Douglas, the Centre’s Director of Research and Development, was the lead. The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust — whose CEO, Jeremy Farrar, sits on the board of SAGE — and looked at the ethics of neurointerventions. These are medical interventions that act directly on the brain and alter some of its functions, for example, through drugs administered to attenuate desire in sex offenders, treat addiction for repeat drug offenders or reduce aggression in violent criminals. In particular, the project looked at making such treatments a part of a criminal sentence and — more pertinently for the ethics of making a COVID-19 vaccine compulsory — a condition of parole.

On the one hand, such neurointerventions throw up images of the Beethoven-loving hero of Anthony Burgess’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) A Clockwork Orange being trained through drugs to associate violence with feelings of nausea; but there’s another, much darker comparison, whose influence on medical ethics was discussed by Giorgio Agamben in his 1995 study of biopolitics, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. At the Doctors’ Trial held in Nuremberg in 1947, German doctors who had compelled prisoners in concentration camps (Versuchspersonen, ‘human guinea-pigs’, drawn initially from camp criminals) to undergo medical experiments, argued that there was an equivalence between their studies and those conducted on prisoners and persons sentenced to death in medical experiments in the early Twentieth Century — and in particular in the USA, the country from which most of the Nuremberg judges came. Not only that, but that the benefit of such tests to German soldiers forced into extremes of cold, altitude, injury, disease or pain to defend their country and its people made them proportionate to the costs to the individuals subjected to such tests — and, indeed, dozens of studies of hypothermia, for example, have since cited their research. ‘From this point of view’, Agamben writes, ‘the inhumanity of the experiments in the United States and in the camps is, therefore, substantially equivalent’.

Equivalence and proportionality have ever been the excuses of dictators seeking to justify the means of their present dictatorship by the purported ends it serves, and these arguments for what the authors of this response euphemistically call the ‘harms’ of compulsory vaccination are no different in kind, if they are in degrees of violence. Behind their claims to address compulsory vaccination as an abstract question of law, the neuro-interventionists at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics are in the line of those doctors and judges who, not so long ago, prescribed chemical castration for homosexuals, lobotomies for social misfits and sectioning for women who didn’t obey their husbands. The exact degree of violence, however, to which the authors of this response are prepared to find equivalence, proportionality and benefit only becomes clear when they go on to argue the second of their parity arguments. This is the equivalence they make between mentally unstable patients unable to consent to medical treatment and British citizens who refuse a vaccine for COVID-19.

Section 3 of the Mental Health Act, they argue, empowers the state to detain a patient suffering from a mental disorder not only for their own protection and the protection of others, but also in order to administer medical treatment for both these purposes. Importantly, Section 63 of the Act permits treatment without consent to persons so detained, ‘even if they possess decision-making capacity’. As Agamben observes, it was this granting of consent, even in the conditions in which its withholding meant continued imprisonment or a sentence of death, that the Nuremberg judges cited as differentiating the ethics of medical trials on prisoners by US doctors from the lack of consent in the concentration camps. The authors of this response 70 years later, however, appear not to be concerned with such fine distinctions, and from this legislative authorisation of medical treatment without consent they conclude:

‘Mental health law provides an example where the law permits — exceptionally — compulsory interference with a person’s bodily integrity for their own protection and that of others when the nature and degree of their circumstances gives warrant.’

It’s important to note that, under Section 63 of the Mental Health Act, treatment without consent is only authorised ‘for the mental disorder from which [the patient] is suffering’, and not for this blanket interference with our bodily integrity assumed by the authors of this response. This too they ignore. But drawing on the case law compiled in the Guide on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and published by the European Court of Human Rights, they argue that this establishes that compulsory treatment in this context may be compatible not only with Article 8 but also with Articles 3, ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. I’ll merely note here the hypocrisy of citing such a right in a country which continues to hold Julian Assange in solitary confinement in a high-security prison, where he is strip-searched several times a day, without a criminal charge having been laid against him under UK law; but from this assumed compatibility of compulsory medical treatment with human rights the authors draw yet another equivalence between their violations:

‘We can argue by analogy from the compatibility with ECHR of compulsory treatment in mental health law to the human rights law compliance of compulsory vaccination.’

Finally, the authors end their response with a statement which encapsulates the medical and legal basis of the biosecurity state:

‘In the context of highly infectious disease, every person is at risk of infection and a potential threat to the life and health of others — a person’s default state is of a nature and degree to warrant immunisation.’

This decisive statement, which asserts that we are born into a defective biological state of which it is the right and duty of the state to cure us, reveals, if nothing else, the religious basis to the UK biosecurity state, in which the Church, as Giorgio Agamben has written in his own commentaries on this crisis, has been replaced by medicine, the ‘fallen’ nature of Christian Man by our newly-deficient biology, and the priests who sold us salvation (or at least purgatory) are now the salesmen of Big Pharma, having exchanged their dog-collars for stethoscopes. According to this biopolitical fundamentalism, our ‘default state’, in both nature and degree, is a threat to the life of others, and must therefore be sectioned, detained, contained, monitored, treated, cured, chastised, immunised, purified and regulated in perpetuity for evidence of apostasy. ‘Stay alert!’ is its ethical motto. ‘Live in fear!’ is its religious instruction. ‘Obey our laws!’ is its threat of retribution.

3. Future Legislation

This is probably the most terrifying document I’ve read in a year of unremitting terrorism. That it has been written by middle-class academics who have accorded themselves the right to judge the degree of the state’s power over the bodies of its citizens only makes it more chilling. In summary and effect, these Oxford doctors of medical law and ethics have advised the UK Government to equate anyone who refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccine voluntarily with someone with a mental health disorder. Under the Mental Health Act, which creates an exception to the common law requirement that medical treatment is only lawful with an individual’s consent, this would allow the Government to enforce ‘treatment’ without our consent, for our own protection and the protection of others. Anyone dissenting would, by definition, be regarded as mentally unbalanced, and therefore subject to enforced vaccination without their consent. This, effectively, answers the question Agamben poses about how compulsory medical experiments are justified by the greater good:

‘If it was theoretically comprehensible that such experiments would not raise ethical problems for officials and researchers inside a totalitarian regime that moved in an openly biopolitical horizon, how could experiments that were, in a certain sense, analogous have been conducted in a democratic country?’

If we believe such sweeping powers in violation of our bodily integrity and albeit qualified human rights couldn’t be made into law under a single Section of the Mental Health Act 1983, we should recall that, as of the time of publication, 80 coronavirus-justified Regulations in violation of our civil liberties have been made into law by an equally contentious interpretation of a single Section, 45C, of the Public Health Act 1984.

As I said, the publication of this response didn’t pass without comment. On 5 November, Rosalind English, a former lecturer on law and genetics at the University of Cambridge and currently part of the editorial team of the UK Human Rights Blog, wrote:

‘Even assuming an entirely safe and effective vaccination, it is something of a step to proclaiming the entire population of a country is on a par with mental health patients who have been deemed enough of a danger to themselves and others to warrant medical treatment under detention. Compulsory interference with a person’s bodily integrity is not something that a democratic society will tolerate without detailed regulations and specialist tribunals in place.’

Unfortunately, the repeated failures of both Parliament and civil society to question, oppose or stop coronavirus-justified restrictions to our human rights and civil liberties throughout 2020 and into 2021 have demonstrated very clearly that we do not live in a democratic society, but rather one that is moving, to use Agamben’s phrase, ‘in an openly biopolitical horizon’. Ms. English, nevertheless, concludes that, notwithstanding the Mental Health Act:

‘Vaccination without consent would be prohibited by the criminal law on assault, and even grievous bodily harm, if the consequences of the treatment are serious.’

In this she appears to take comfort from the conclusion the authors draw from their first parity argument, that new and primary legislation would be required for the Government to make a vaccination for COVID-19 compulsory. But given the almost total acquiescence of both Houses to each and every Government Regulation and Act made into law on the justification of nothing more than unproven assertions about the threat of the coronavirus to public health, can it be long before such primary legislation is brought before Parliament?

This is the legislative context in which Nadhim Zahawi, the Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment, told the 6 MPs debating restrictions on those refusing vaccination that there are ‘currently no plans to place restrictions on those who refuse to have a COVID-19 vaccination’. Zahawi, however, has considerable knowledge about the financial benefits of changing legislation. Following the Health and Social Care Act 2012 he helped push through Parliament, Zahawi’s former company, SThree, which specialises in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector, provided staff for clinical commissioning groups benefiting financially from the privatisation of healthcare services. And in June last year Zahawai founded a new company, Warren Medical Limited, which is registered in his wife’s name and whose two directors are his sons. Doubtless the company will soon find itself awarded numerous untendered Government contracts for vaccine distribution. To this end, just four days after allaying the fears of these 6 MPs, on 2 December, the market research company, YouGov, which was also founded by Nadhim Zahawi, its former CEO from 2005-2010, asked 5,351 adults in the UK:

‘Would you support or oppose the Government making it legally compulsory for all people in Britain to be vaccinated against COVID-19?’

37 per cent of respondents supported this proposal; 44 per cent opposed it; and 18 per cent said they didn’t know. Then on 17 December, YouGov held another survey:

‘And, once a vaccine has been found, would you support or oppose the Government prosecuting and fining people who do not get a vaccination against the coronavirus?’

Interestingly — and worryingly for our future — the results of this survey have not been published on the YouGov website, which presumably did not want the public to know they had even asked such a question. But this is how close we are getting to the UK Government enforcing vaccines produced by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, and any other multinational pharmaceutical company it cuts a deal with, on us and our families.

4. A Living Laboratory

The UK enters the New Year with 68 million people under house arrest and the expansion of the biosecurity state being offered to us — like criminals offered neurointerventional treatment — as a condition of the freedom the Government now holds in its hands like a prisoner governor. This gives it the freedom to do whatever it wants, and it hasn’t been slow to take advantage. The Government has now announced that the vaccination of the UK population will be conducted on a new timetable. Instead of the 3 weeks between the two doses at which the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine has been tested, the Department for Health and Social Care, the four Chief Medical Officers, the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, Public Health England and the National Health Service have all agreed that the doses will now be administered 12 weeks apart. This, apparently, is to offset either a shortage of supply or a lack of administrative capacity or both, depending upon who’s making the excuse. Not only that, but with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine authorised by the MHRA for use in the UK as of 30 December, the Government has now suggested, in its Green Book for Vaccinations, that it is ‘reasonable’ for the vaccines to be mixed — with, for example, a first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine and, 12 weeks later, a second dose of AstraZeneca’s or any other COVID-19 vaccine developed by Moderna, which has been authorised for use in the UK on the evening I publish this, or GlaxoSmithKline, or Johnson & Johnson, or some other pharmaceutical company.

Now, first of all, there have been no trials of such a vaccination programme, the results and consequences of which are therefore completely unknown. Even Pfizer, which has a long history of mis-administering their products with fatal consequences, has issued a joint statement with BioNTech declaring that:

‘Pfizer and BioNTech’s Phase 3 study for the COVID-19 vaccine was designed to evaluate the vaccine’s safety and efficacy following a 2-dose schedule, separated by 21 days. The safety and efficacy of the vaccine has not been evaluated on different dosing schedules as the majority of trial participants received the second dose within the window specified in the study design. There is no data to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is sustained after 21 days.’

Indeed, even the World Health Organisation, which more than any other organisation is responsible for inventing the ‘pandemic’ and then authorising the testing-programme that assures its continuation as medically meaningless ‘cases’, has expressed its reservations at the UK’s arbitrary changes to the dosing programme. Perhaps this is just another way to indemnify pharmaceutical companies and the vaccine producers even further from liability for the effects of their hastily fabricated and authorised products. But to suggest that the BioNTech vaccine, which uses experimental mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) technology that encodes the viral protein spikes with synthetic genetic material and has never been approved for use on humans before, is compatible with the Oxford vaccine, which uses adenovirus-vectored technology that carries a gene from the protein spikes that triggers an immune response, sounds at best like medicine bowing to political and economic expediency, and at worst like playing Russian roulette with British lives. Even Public Health England says there is ‘no evidence’ of their interchangeability; while the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control has stated flatly that different mRNA vaccines are ‘not interchangeable’ even with each other, let alone with vaccines using different technologies.

What we do know, thanks to Belgium’s Budget State Secretary, is that the AstraZeneca vaccine (€1.78) is a fraction of the price of either Pfizer’s (€12.00) or Moderna’s (€18.00), which presumably is the Government’s motivation for substituting it as the second dose; and that in the New Year all three are being included in trials to ‘mix-and-match’ their effects. The obvious question to be asked when presented with this witches’ brew is: why are these trials not being conducted, and their long-term effects studied, before we start experimenting on the UK population? At the time of writing, some 1.3 million people in the UK have had their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, most with the expectation of a second dose of the same vaccine being administered in the time frame in which it was trialed. But the fact the entire UK medical establishment has unhesitatingly signed up to this medical experiment — ‘effectively turning the UK into a living laboratory’, as one US news website described it — is evidence of one thing: that all its bodies and their representatives are now following Government directives rather than any recogniseable scientific procedure, and in doing so have reneged on their Hippocratic oath to care for the best interests and medical safety of the UK population.

5. Pathologising Dissent

In saying so, however, I have identified myself as suffering from ‘vaccine hesitancy’, a term that has gained popular acceptance and use in the UK with worrying ease and speed. Defined by the World Health Organisation as ‘the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines’, behind this branding of a choice as a pathology there lies the additional accusation of a conspiracy, which the authors of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics response are quick to conjure into reality:

‘Vaccine hesitancy in respect of COVID-19 may arise because of the influence of anti-vaccination movements, the uneven demographic distribution of Covid-19 morbidity and mortality risks, or the mistaken belief that COVID-19 immunity has already been acquired.’

All these statements, however, are contestable at best, and at worst deliberately misleading. Reservation about taking a vaccine produced in such an unfeasibility short time by an industry synonymous with corruption and law suits from which only its vast profits allow it to escape prosecution, for a disease to which 0.23 per cent of the population is at risk even after being infected (and only 0.05 per cent of those under 70 years of age), does not immediately qualify the person holding these reservations as the member of an ‘anti-vaccination movement’. And since there is no evidence that any of the COVID-19 vaccines on the market do anything to stop transmission of the coronavirus, questioning why the other 99.77 per cent of the population (99.95 per cent of those under 70) not at risk from infection should take it is not only entirely rational but a question the authors attempt to brush over with this accusation of ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Finally, numerous eminent epidemiologists, immunologists, biochemists and disease modellers from across the world have argued precisely that a large percentage of the population already had or has since acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and the authors of this report provide no justification for their casual dismissal of this vastly important point — on which rests the very basis of mass-vaccination, compulsory or otherwise — and the empirical data on which it is based. Indeed, perhaps the greatest reason for what they dismiss as ‘vaccine hesitancy’ is the presence of such unquestioned suppositions in a document by academics and lawyers advocating compulsory vaccination — that, and the seeming ease with which these Oxford doctors of medical ethics jump to the violence consequent upon their recommendations:

‘Should a Covid-19 vaccine become available at scale, we cannot expect sufficient voluntary uptake. It is necessary for the Government to consider a policy of compulsory vaccination, with appropriate exceptions.’

This, unmistakably, is the voice of the petty bureaucrat drunk with the power of the policeman’s truncheon. And they’re not alone. I have written previously about the growing number of medical reports that equate refusal to comply with coronavirus-justified regulations with mental deficiency and sociopathic behaviour. But whether it’s the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics advocating sectioning the UK public to enforce compulsory vaccination, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies terrorising the nation with predictions shown to be deliberately misleading, or the Academy of Medical Sciences justifying the current lockdown of the UK back in July with a worst-case scenario predicting a quarter of a million UK deaths by June 2021 — scientists, academics and lawyers collaborating with an authoritarian government to justify the implementation of a biosecurity state that removes our human rights and civil liberties in order to ‘protect’ us from an imaginary threat is neither new nor normal.

One of the most prominent doctors put on trial at Nuremberg was Wolfram Sievers, the Director of the Institute for Ancestral Heritage (Ahnenerbe), an SS think-tank composed of over 100 professors and scholars whose anthropological theories and medical experiments between 1935 and 1945 were used by the NSDAP Government to justify its eugenicist and biopolitical policies, which like today were implemented under Regulations made without parliamentary approval under a permanent State of Emergency that in Germany’s case lasted 12 years. Prior to his trial, Allied officers produced a report on this Institute in which they concluded with this warning about how even the most educated minds can be used to justify barbarity:

‘It cannot be too strongly emphasised that this was not a crackpot organisation. These were men of the highest calibre, professors from the leading universities, men of the calibre of the atom-splitters and the V-bomb designers, engaged in a project to rewrite the record of the past, in order to influence the future course of history.’[1]

Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing

Further reading by the same author:

Bowling for Pfizer: Who’s Behind the BioNTech Vaccine?

Five Stories Under Lockdown

Bread and Circuses: Who’s Behind the Oxford Vaccine for COVID-19?

The Betrayal of the Clerks: UK Intellectuals in the Service of the Biosecurity State

Bonfire of the Freedoms: The Unlawful Exercise of Powers conferred by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984

When the House Burns: Giorgio Agamben on the Coronavirus Crisis

The Infection of Science by Politics: A Nobel Laureate and Biophysicist on the Coronavirus Crisis

The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 2. Normalising Fear)

The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 1. Programmes and Regulations)

The Science and Law of Refusing to Wear Masks: Texts and Arguments in Support of Civil Disobedience

Lockdown: Collateral Damage in the War on COVID-19

The State of Emergency as Paradigm of Government: Coronavirus Legislation, Implementation and Enforcement

Manufacturing Consensus: The Registering of COVID-19 Deaths in the UK

Giorgio Agamben and the Bio-Politics of COVID-19

Good Morning, Coronazombies! Diary of a Bio-political Crisis Event

Coronazombies! Infection and Denial in the United Kingdom

Language is a Virus: SARs-CoV-2 and the Science of Political Control

Sociology of a Disease: Age, Class and Mortality in the Coronavirus Pandemic

COVID-19 and Capitalism

Architects for Social Housing is a Community Interest Company (no. 10383452). Although we occasionally receive minimal fees for our design work, the majority of what we do is unpaid and we have no source of public funding. If you would like to support our work financially, including the research for these articles, please make a donation through PayPal:

1. This is a transcript taken from Michael Wood’s documentary film, Hitler’s Search for the Holy Grail, which was first screened in 1999 as a Secret History Special on Channel 4. I have written to Professor Wood to ask for the exact source of the quote, which he reads at the conclusion of the film, and which I have been unable to find in the court documents from the Nuremberg Trials or in the National Archives and Record Administration; but the research notes for the film are in storage and inaccessible under the ongoing lockdown of the UK. He assures me, however, that the quote is accurate. I should make it clear that I did not tell Professor Wood why I wanted to identify this quote, or the comparison I would be making between the role of intellectuals in implementing the respective biosecurity states of the Third Reich and the UK Biosecurity State, and no inference of his support for this thesis should be made.

from:

https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2021/01/08/our-default-state-compulsory-vaccination-for-covid-19-and-human-rights-law/

Pfizer’s Experimental Covid-19 Vaccine—What You’re Not Being Told

 

The vaccine information war has kicked up a gear, and the mainstream media vultures are circling to descend on any content that they can easily label and dismiss as misinformation. Laws will be passed throughout legislatures globally to criminalise anyone who publicly misunderstands any part of the complex biological processes involved in many of the new experimental vaccine technologies that are being used to produce Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

Even now, intelligence agencies and intelligence-backed tech companies are set to deploy sophisticated methods to censor content and deplatform news websites that they view as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as well as ‘vaccine misinformation’, particularly as a Covid-19 vaccine candidate lurches closer to approval.

It is expected that by month’s end the mRNA vaccine produced by the scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will be approved by the US government via an emergency-use authorization, with other countries expected to follow suit. Pfizer, in anticipation of the seemingly imminent and assured approval of their vaccine candidate, has already been manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses of its vaccine for weeks and has received praise from governments and mainstream media alike for its self-reported claims that its vaccine is 90 percent effective.

In particular, the success of the experimental mRNA mass vaccination program appears to hinge on the general population being unable to effectively articulate their concerns and objections. Whilst the mainstream media are quick to point out when somebody makes an error in how they believe the mRNA vaccine works, they don’t offer any further information than the official government line. Public distrust in vaccination programs is not the fault of those who don’t understand the way this brand-new technology works. Public distrust is all-pervasive because only one side of the argument is allowed to be heard. We do need to understand the technology involved, as there is a difference between mRNA vaccines and DNA vaccines. Having a general understanding of the reason why someone should object to being given an experimental mRNA vaccine is necessary for creating a clear and coherent argument.

We are about to examine a subject that has been one of the most censored topics in the modern era. But now, more than ever before, we are in desperate need of the information that is being systematically hidden from the public. This article will be banned and attacked by those who believe we, the general public, shouldn’t know all the information about what they want to achieve from the coming mass global vaccinations. The reason for the current establishment’s unwillingness to speak about this subject leads to perhaps unnecessary suspicion. Such suspicions will never be dismissed via the currently employed tactic of smearing anyone who questions intentions. If governments worldwide want their populations to submit to these vaccinations, then they need to stop patronising people and speak honestly. However, since that is unheard of, they will continue to employ coercive tactics, as they will be trying out a never-before-approved experimental method to boost the immune system by manipulating the process our DNA uses to signal for the creation of certain proteins, and we have little idea of what the long-term impact this brand-new therapeutic technology could have on our health. No politician, medical expert, or pharmaceutical representative is willing to accept responsibility for challenges that might be around the corner.

Many of the pharmaceutical companies researching potential coronavirus vaccines are using old methods. They take a proverbial pinch of the virus and infect your immune system at a very low and slow rate, allowing your body the time it needs to build up a natural immunological resistance to the illness. But developing those types of vaccines is a slow and arduous process, and the current leaders in the race to mass global vaccination are pharmaceutical companies using a radical new method that has never been tried before.

‘They are going to hack the cells in your body in order to make them into drug factories’, says Nathan Vardi, a staff writer for Forbes, in a video titled Why Pfizer Is Betting Big on an Unproven Treatment for Covid-19, from March 2020. ‘The problem is with this approach’, Vardi admits, ‘is there’s never been an approved mRNA product’.

The various scientific explorations into the therapeutic applications of potential mRNA treatments are still in their infancy, but the method has been lauded as a potential solution to the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases, for protein replacement, and for gene therapy.

In January 2020, the de facto leader in the mRNA field was the pharmaceutical company Moderna, but—in the wake of Covid-19—other major companies began to focus on the mRNA method. Moderna was able to pioneer that method several years ago, thanks to funding largely provided by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Now, as 2020 draws to a close, the race to develop the winning Covid-19 vaccine is in full swing, and another Big Pharma company has seemingly beaten Moderna to the development of a supposedly effective mRNA vaccine, thanks to Pfizer teaming up with BioNTech, a small German company, to pip Moderna to the post. But, in this race to ‘save humanity’, there are bound to be pitfalls, especially when introducing completely new health technologies into mainstream use. Has Pfizer rung the finishing bell in this global race to end the current pandemic, or, instead, is it hurtling towards a disaster of epic proportions?

There are very informative scientific papers available from just before the pandemic began that give us an insight into this new mRNA technology. So here I’ll examine the DNA manipulating method, the vaccine, the people behind the research and development at BioNTech, but most important, I’ll examine Pfizer, and look at how the company has avoided accountability when things go wrong—and things do go wrong at Pfizer.

 

mRNA Vaccine Technology and How It Works

The vital interaction that mRNA has with our DNA has made selling mRNA vaccine technology extremely difficult for those who believe it’s the future of human medicine. The fact that it will alter the function of your DNA in your body has made many people suspicious of what unexpected horrors could arise through mass use of this new and experimental technique.

Unsurprisingly, the people marketing the vaccines have tried to downplay the aggressive and genetically manipulative nature of the treatment. In fairness, trying to explain the workings of such a complex new technology in plain English is exceedingly difficult. This is apparent when one listens to representatives of the mainstream media, who are often mealy mouthed when describing the biological processes that will take place when you receive the mRNA vaccine. But inability to articulate the technology isn’t surprising when you consider that part of your DNA, after breaking in two through a natural process, will then be combined with the experimental mRNA in a way that seems esoteric to many of us. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a process taking place in one’s own vulnerable biological system, in one’s DNA, the most precious building blocks of life that define your very existence.

After a preprogrammed strand of mRNA has merged with a naturally severed part of your DNA, it will request the production of a protein that should help trigger your immune system. In theory, this should boost your immune system and aid in the mass production of the proteins necessary to successfully fight the specific illness. The inserted messenger-RNA (thus, mRNA) should be relatively easy to design and programme as long as the scientists involved have the genetic coding for the infection it is to fight. In this case, the necessary data was released in January 2020 by the Chinese. Mild side effects to this process should be expected.

Although no extreme side effects were reported by Pfizer during the stage 3 testing of their mRNA vaccine, nearly every participant suffered mild symptoms, including swelling of the arm, irritation of the skin, and headaches, to name just a few. But, as we shall see, the information that Pfizer releases about its clinical trials and what happens in reality can be quite different.

I have just described the basic information you require for understanding how the coming mRNA vaccine works, but what I can’t describe to you is what happens in the long term. This form of therapeutic alternative has never been allowed or sanctioned before, aside from small clinical trials. There has never been an FDA-approved clinical trial for mRNA medicine because its usage comes with an abundance of ethical and moral questions and unknown possibilities.

At the same time, the utilisation of the mRNA method could also be one of the biggest leaps forward in technology ever recorded in human history. If we give the technology the benefit of the doubt and assume that it has no negative long-term side effects, then it is a potential treatment for almost every human illness on earth. Opening this mRNA floodgate would mean normalising regular vaccinations for nearly every imaginable ailment. In the best-case scenario, you could be vaccinated against cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and Alzheimer’s, and any other human ailment that derives from a fault in your DNA. In the worst-case scenario, you could be left dead or crippled like Pfizer’s victims in its experiments on Nigerian children during the late 1990s.

All that being said, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has a major downside to it. Pfizer and Moderna have stated that their mRNA vaccines need to be kept at -70° C and -20° C, respectively, which is a significant logistical challenge. Without these extremely cold temperatures, the mRNA and combined nanoparticles will lose their integrity. There are no studies on the effect of poorly stored mRNA vaccines on the human body. In comparison, DNA vaccines are much easier to transport and store as they are much more stable molecules.

As we have seen, the potential for mRNA technology is boundless. If the vaccine is successful in normalising the process of gene editing for medicinal benefit, there will be pressure to continue editing genes in other ways. It isn’t hard to see that the technology could have cosmetic, medical, and military applications that could range from phosphorescent skin to military bioweapons beyond our imagination. That is the reason why the people behind this technology are reluctant to speak about its potential game-changing mRNA method, for it represents our first real steps into transhumanism.

Pfizer’s Profitable Partnership with Germany’s BioNTech

As we have seen, Pfizer wasn’t the primary company in the mRNA business at the turn of 2020, but its immediate partnership with BioNTech saw it beat its main competitor, Moderna, to the finish line. BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, is led by a husband and wife team and, prior to the partnership with Pfizer, was dedicated to mRNA-related cancer-treatment research.

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the couple leading BioNTech, are of Turkish descent. Şahin’s family were from southern Turkey, and he studied for his doctorate in Cologne, whilst Türeci’s family came from Istanbul. The two met at the University of Hamburg.

BioNTech already had a collaboration agreement to develop mRNA‐based vaccines for prevention of influenza with Pfizer as far back as February 2019, and their commercial strategy of collaborating with selected partners paid off when the race to the coronavirus vaccine began. Since then, there has been global media interest in BioNTech, mainly in the form of puff pieces focussing on Şahin and Türeci’s romantic life. But BioNTech also has many links to other Big Pharma giants and some of the well-known movers and shakers in the medical world. As well as its partnership with Pfizer, in 2019 BioNTech also had partnership deals with Bayer, Genentech, Sanofi, Genmab, Eli Lilly, Roche, and of course they received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In September 2019, just before the first people were infected with the new strain of SARS-CoV-2, the German news outlet Handelsblatt reported that ‘the Gates Foundation is investing around 50 million euros in the Mainz biotech company BioNTech. The money will be used to research HIV and tuberculosis vaccines’.

BioNTech has a small five-person management team and a four-person supervisory board. Şahin is the CEO of the company; he was also the head of the scientific advisory board of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG from 2008 until 2016, when the company was acquired by Astellas Pharma. BioNTech’s chief business officer, Sean Marett, previously worked in global strategic and regional marketing, and in sales at GlaxoSmithKline in the United States and at Pfizer Europe, as well as for Evotec and Lorantis. The company’s chief operating officer and CFO, Dr Sierk Poetting, joined BioNTech in September 2014 from Novartis. The chief strategy officer at BioNTech is Ryan Richardson, who had previously been an executive director of the global health-care investment-banking team at J. P. Morgan in London, where he advised companies in the biotech and life sciences industry on mergers and acquisitions, equity, and debt capital finances. The German BioNTech’s four-man supervisory board includes Ulrich Wandschneider, who is also a member of Trilantic Europe.

Pfizer: A Company Never Held to Account

If it were only BioNTech that was responsible for the creation of this futuristic vaccine technology, then maybe people would have more faith in the product. But Pfizer casts a dark shadow of conspiracy wherever it does business. Pfizer’s previous use of experimental drugs in secretive and scandalous studies has inspired Hollywood movies and court cases lasting over a decade, as it resulted in the death of many children. Yet, the media organisations touting its coronavirus vaccine as a heaven-sent miracle have provided little to no coverage of Pfizer’s previous experimental disasters.

Pfizer entered into the vaccine business in late 2006 by acquiring the British influenza-vaccine company PowderMed for an undisclosed fee. Pfizer was admittedly excited about the deal, stating that ‘PowderMed’s unique DNA vaccine technology is particularly promising’ and that ‘its pipeline of vaccine candidates for influenza and chronic viral diseases could have major potential’. In fact, beginning in autumn 2005, many Big Pharma companies had taken their first steps into the vaccine industry. Novartis entered the vaccine business by acquiring 56 percent of Chiron, whilst GlaxoSmithKline expanded its vaccine base by acquiring ID Biomedical of Canada. Competition was heating up among the big players, and the vaccine industry was seen as a safe bet, with reports of new vaccines selling for hundreds of dollars. But Pfizer’s reputation over the preceding decade had taken a severe knock due to the company’s disastrous experimental trials in Africa.

In 1996, an experimental trial took place in Nigeria. Under the cover of severe outbreaks of cholera, measles, and meningitis in northern Nigeria, Pfizer set up the secretive trials in Kano, the second largest city in Nigeria, to test its experimental antibiotic, Trovan (trovafloxacin). It tested the experimental drug on two hundred children. The children’s parents assumed that the children would receive the standard meningitis jab, but Pfizer staff instead set up two control groups. Half of the children were given the experimental Trovan, and the other hundred were given a reduced dosage of the leading meningitis equivalent. The lower dose was to help artificially skew the results in the favour of Trovan for marketing and competitive purposes.

In 2002, a group of Nigerian children and their legal guardians sued Pfizer in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In court documents, the plaintiffs alleged that five children who received Trovan and six children whom Pfizer had ‘low-dosed’ had died as a result, whilst others suffered paralysis, deafness and blindness. The alleged actual number of those who died due to their involvement in the trial, per Nigerian sources, is over fifty.

Pfizer was supposed to check the children’s blood samples five days into the trials to look for any abnormalities and then change their treatment to the full-strength leading meningitis drug if there were any problems. However, they failed to do so. Instead, the Pfizer team waited for the irreversible symptoms to manifest physically before switching the treatment for the study’s unwitting participants. After realising that they had just murdered and crippled these children, Pfizer, like any giant pharmaceutical corporation would, left the scene of the crime in a hurry, failing to do any further evaluation of the patients.

Pfizer spent the next ten years denying any responsibility for the disaster, eventually releasing a statement entitled ‘Trovan, Kano State Civil Case—Statement of Defense’, in which the pharmaceutical bigwig stated among other things ‘that mortality in the patients treated by Pfizer was lower than that observed historically in African meningitis epidemics, and that no unusual side effects, unrelated to meningitis, were observed after 4 weeks’.

Pfizer eventually settled the case for $75 million on condition that it would not be held responsible for its actions. The Guardian newspaper reported in 2011 that the first four settlements in the lengthy court battle had been given to the families of four of the children who were killed during the trial. In an unabashed attempt to make the court settlement of $175,000 harder for each of the surviving families to claim, the victims’ families were forced to provide DNA samples to prove they were actually related to the deceased. This tactic turned out to be very effective from the company’s perspective, as many of the families didn’t trust Pfizer, which led some to pull out and refuse the settlement because they thought the DNA samples were a ploy by Pfizer to commit further illegal secret experiments upon them, or worse.

The Nigerians were represented by two brave lawyers, a Nigerian lawyer named Etigwe Uwo and a Connecticut-based lawyer, Richard Altschuler. According to Altschuler, it was the story of Pfizer’s Kano coverup that prompted John le Carré to write the novel The Constant Gardener that was adapted in the feature film. Like the situation depicted in the movie, Pfizer used scare tactics and smear campaigns to try and hinder any investigation into the Kano incident.

In 2006, Pfizer cut its workforce by 20 percent, reducing the number of its US employees by 2,200 people. The Financial Times reported on 29 November 2020 that this was something that was happening in all of the major pharmaceutical firms stating, ‘Big pharma is rushing to restructure across its business from manufacturing to how it markets and sells its drugs’. But Pfizer was mainly concentrating on radical change to its drugs salesforce.

Pfizer was hit by further major scandals over the following year. One included the illegal premarketing of the HIV drug Maraviroc, which initially stalled the drug’s approval by the FDA. The scandal saw Pfizer publicly fire three of its top executives, including its assistant sales manager, Kelly Fitzgerald, (who returned to work for Pfizer and is currently their assistant sales director), HIV sales director, Art Rodriguez, now working for California’s Valued Trust, and the Mid-Atlantic director, Bob Mumford.

Get Your Facts Straight and Another Way Out

Whilst a DNA vaccine will change your DNA permanently, an mRNA vaccine will not permanently change your DNA. It takes one sentence to clear up that misunderstanding of the technology, and people should not be criminalised for such a simple misunderstanding. However, the mRNA vaccine does bind with part of your DNA to alter the proteins being produced. This is the very place where companies wish to trap opponents of their experimental vaccine campaigns. Just because someone doesn’t fully understand the process involved shouldn’t mean they should be demonised and forced into taking this experimental combination of nanoparticles. In fact, individuals should reject the vaccine until companies explain how it works and if there are any long-term side effects. You shouldn’t let anybody put anything into your body until they can tell you if any long-term consequences could occur. This is a basic principle of self-preservation that trumps any risk of a virus, especially a virus that has proven to be just a little bit more deadly than the common flu.

Our bodies should be the most important concern for us all. Fundamentally speaking, all our liberties and freedoms are of little concern if we’re dead or crippled. Don’t let them shame you into giving over your precious and delicate shell to medical scientific experimentation by companies that are incapable of taking accountability for their actions. This is the core argument that you need to keep at the forefront of any debate, rather than whether your DNA is permanently changed or whether its functions are just altered. If you’re going to get into the gutter to battle out the science then you must get your facts straight. They will use any potential misunderstanding you have to wipe your voice from the debate. It is they who bear the burden of articulating clearly why we should take the vaccine; it is your right to refuse.

However, there is something no one has mentioned so far about this new mRNA technology that could give those who oppose the vaccine another way out. Normally, to be effective, a vaccine must be given to as much of the population as possible. Mass vaccination has been used historically as a synthetic herd immunity to stop the spread of a virus to the vulnerable people in our society. But this technology is different, and its method of working means it is no longer necessary to use mass vaccination.

The whole point of why mRNA vaccines are more effective than our current vaccine technologies, per its proponents, is that it precisely targets the protein-production part of your DNA’s normal life cycle. This improves the response that an individual’s immune system will have when fighting a virus. It can be targeted socially in a similar way. If the majority of people who catch Covid-19 are asymptomatic, then it’s ridiculous to give them a vaccine. Because this vaccine protects individuals in their response, there is no good reason why everybody in our society should be forced to take it. It is used to increase specific protein production in someone who’s at severe risk—that’s how a medicine works normally. You don’t take HIV medication if you don’t have HIV. You shouldn’t be taking cancer drugs unless you have cancer. And you shouldn’t need to change your DNA’s production of specific proteins unless it’s personally necessary to do so.

The biggest lie being told to the people of the world is that everybody needs to take this vaccine. And ironically, the experimental mRNA technology that they’re desperate to use makes mass vaccination unnecessary.

 

From:

 https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/11/reports/pfizers-experimental-covid-19-vaccine-what-youre-not-being-told/