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
Follow-up Email to the Australian Human Rights Commission (18.01.2023)
ATTN: Communication Unit
I did not receive any response from the Commissioner to my email dated 17 Aug 2022.
Could you please advice whether this non-response was intentional or just an oversight?
Regarding another matter for the attention of the Commission, I noticed the following statement on your website at https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/human-rights-considerations-vaccine-passports-and-certificates:
“Vaccines are effective in saving lives, and the right to life is a human right.”
In the context of vaccine mandates this statement is misleading, since the opposite is also true: vaccines are known to kill a small percentage of people. Vaccination mandates, by applying significant economic and social-opportunity coercion to vaccinate, are expected to cause a percentage of vaccine-related deaths, thereby extinguishing some lives, and the right to life is a human right.
For the sake of fair characterisation of the impact of vaccine mandates on human rights, I suggest informing the reader of the likelihood that the right to life may also be violated by mandatory vaccination policies.
Regards,
Michael Kowalik
https://philpeople.org/profiles/michael-kowalik
Normal people believe, correctly, that consent is necessarily Free consent, without any coercion. The authorities believe that when you are not pinned down and forcibly injected but only partially/economically coerced, this still leaves room for valid consent, so this ambiguity in the meaning of “consent” needs to be addressed, made explicit and resolved. Partial consent is practically meaningless, because only free, non-coerced consent can protect you from crimes against humanity, from abuse. Any crack in the scope of consent can be exploited against you.