YESTERDAY The Conservative Woman highlighted the government’s proposal for ‘Covid Status Certification’ and the invitation to comment on it. Two readers who responded have shared their emails with us.
This is the first:
I am an individual involved with music teaching, accompanying and also supporting elderly, vulnerable people in my community.
I am writing about the proposed ‘Covid Status Certification’. In my view as far as clinical and medical considerations go, we are not dealing with an outbreak of Ebola or the Bubonic Plague at the moment. If we were I would be more inclined to view our current situation as an emergency. However we are not.
In terms of legal considerations, my view is that this move is tantamount to treason. What is proposed, in my understanding, is not first and foremost about dealing with Covid, but about implementing the Great Reset. This is TREASON.
In terms of ethics it’s the thin edge of a most unacceptable wedge. In terms of equality it’s absolute nonsense.
In terms of privacy it’s an absolute no-go.
I am not a Covid denier, nor an anti-vaxer. However I for one will not be following this ‘carrot’ any longer.
The second is from Michael Hegarty:
I am writing to urge the Government not to implement vaccine passports in the UK, and moreover, to consider explicit legislation to prevent private businesses from implementing their own. While there are a number of political expediencies involved in this issue that might seem tempting to the improvident or inexperienced statesman, by far the greatest portion of ethical, political, and scientific sense is entirely and undeniably on the other side. I will disregard for the time being the self-evidently correct claims that vaccine certification must inevitably be discriminatory as this seems so obvious as to lack any need for further elaboration.
First, the ethical question is not one of absolute human rights or a question of what ‘man’ ought not to do in general, but of what any particular man or woman ought to be able to decide on behalf of another. The rights of man are in each case singular; they speak to his (or her) dignity, and arise from that dignity, from the way in which subjects conceive of themselves. Laws do not create dignity, they reflect it. And so, there can be no human right to refuse medical treatment if we conceive of that right as being ‘inalienable’ in the secular sense; however, that does not mean that we cannot understand a policy as being ‘inhuman’ or ‘dehumanising’. For what is now being considered? Anyone who refuses a specific medical procedure should find themselves cut off, isolated, a pariah from civilised discourse!
Such a policy can never be contained to a singular instance, but must create a precedent; it would allow the state to take upon itself the power to ostracise those members of the public who will not conform, who not only have the temerity to disagree but the gall to act in accordance with their beliefs. It may be that certain matters of public safety can override individual conscience, but if we allow vaccine passports in this case, how low do we set the bar? It is not simply the indisputable fact that this ‘pandemic’ is not markedly worse than those which would ordinarily be expected, it is that there are few pandemics, by the old criteria, that are less deadly than this one. Indeed, we have moved so far from anything unprecedented that it appears to have become a seasonal occurrence. If that is so, then by definition, any ‘emergency’ policies now must be permanent. They are structural changes to our way of life, not contingencies. As such, the policy represents a fundamental change in what we are as humans, a loss of part of our humanity; the right to decline medical treatment is not suspended by the change, but abolished, or at the very least transformed beyond recognition.
Why should we care about this right to refuse medical treatment? One hardly need focus on the practical historical examples. But there is another reason. The mind, the seat of reason, does not exist in a vacuum; it exists in the body. The origin of the word ‘sane’, sanus, refers to ‘health’, not mental health, but health in general. It can mean either body or mind, or, more likely, both. The point here is that the body is not a vehicle for the true person, the person is the whole. No one who cannot be fully human without conceding their right to decide what procedures can be performed on their body can be considered free in any meaningful sense.
Second, to enact this dangerous precedent has at least two distinct political disadvantages. The one is the discontinuity of Governments; freedom is reciprocal, and what you (as government) can do to others, today others can do to you tomorrow. Only the truly unwise would enact policies for temporary gains now, that can be used later, in ways originally unintended, on them, their loved ones, and their political allies. The other is that such Draconian actions will fundamentally alter the relationship, ever peaceful in this country, between governor and governed. Force begets force; violence violence. If you proceed on your current path, you will place into a state of perpetual antagonism those who have never had a quarrel with our system of government, or those personally in whose hands lies the increasingly unenviable task of executing its responsibilities.
Although our form of government might increasingly resemble the Chinese way of doing things, we can never be like China. In China, there is no memory of freedom; here, that memory will gnaw at the very bedrock of our parliamentary system like the sea against coastal defences.
Finally, the scientific case for any form of compulsion, however indirect or decentralised, simply does not stack up. The danger from Covid-19 has been severely exaggerated. It does not remotely compare to the oft mentioned ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918. Where that virus had a mortality of around 2 per cent and primarily affected the young, this one has a mortality of between 0.1 per cent and 1 per cent and an average age of death of eighty-two. Average life expectancy is lower. Furthermore, a significant portion of the deaths occurred when medical staff were still inexperienced in treating the disease; there now exist a number of therapies and better procedures for dealing with complications. Given this, the responsibility for any Draconian measures now introduced must rest solely in the hands of him who enacts them and cannot be blamed on any extraneous threat.
Mandatory vaccines either by direct order, or by default, would be a crime against the noble history of freedom in this country, a crime against reason, even a crime against humanity! The bill will come due, one day.
Comments on the proposal will be accepted until Monday, March 29.
