Letter to Australian Human Rights Commission (16.08.2022)

Subject: Vaccine mandates infringe on the right to life

Prof. Rosalind Croucher, President & Ms Lorraine Finlay, Human Rights Commissioner (Australian Human Rights Commission)

Dear President and Commissioner of AHRC,

I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (cited below). I submit that vaccine mandates, or any systemic discrimination against the unvaccinated, infringes on human rights, including the right to life. This conclusion is based on the following grounds:

1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights. This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240.

2. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of free medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right (including the right to life) can be subverted by medical coercion. Free medical consent is the most fundamental protection from crimes against humanity being committed under the guise of healthcare (several instances of such abuses have occurred in this century).

3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated amounts to a violation of the right to life by coercing people to undergo a medical procedure where a small percentage of otherwise healthy people are expected to die as a direct result of that procedure.

An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus

I suggest that we are facing a human rights emergency and the outlined issues call for immediate administrative action.

I am open to collaboration.

Sincerely,

Michael Kowalik