Anonymous contributors
In a white paper rightly denouncing the scapegoat role assigned by a growing part of society, certain media and the political world to the non-vaccinated, a prominent Belgian political scientist concludes, as do many politicians, that the time to debate the vaccination obligation has come(1).
However, the author points out that « despite widespread belief, vaccinated persons can still contract and transmit covid-19. Vaccination only reduces this transmission, in proportions that have yet to be determined. The value of vaccines lies rather in their remarkable effectiveness in preventing severe forms of the disease. Now,
- if the anti-covid vaccination does not prevent viral transmission, there is no scientific basis for this vaccination obligation: what would be the use of it in terms of health?
- The coronavirus being a zoonosis, even the total vaccination of the human populations would not make it possible to eradicate the SARS-CoV‑2 and its current and future variants, which makes this vaccine obligation all the more unjustifiable (the eradication of the smallpox was possible because the virus affected only the humans)
- As for the « remarkable » effectiveness of vaccines in preventing severe forms, this is still being studied to determine the exact degree, and it does not concern young or healthy people who are not at risk of severe forms: why should they protect themselves from a risk they do not run?
- The author also seems unaware that no scientific study to date has actually done the work recommended by the WHO to control for confounding factors (covariates that may induce confounding bias), and it is troubling that many studies count people vaccinated 2 or 3 weeks earlier as unvaccinated. This is, in the opinion of specialists, a serious epidemiological error.
- Some people would rather take the risk of getting covid than be subjected to an experimental vaccine for which they do not wish to experience any serious side effects, and that is their right. Moreover, there is no risk of overcrowding the hospitals, since they are only a minority, since more than 80% of the population has been vaccinated and is, we are told, « protected from serious forms ».
The author adds that « these same politicians refuse to discuss mandatory vaccination. This would be a healthy way to approach the subject. In recent days, many politicians have clearly expressed their support for mandatory vaccination! Under the cover of a denunciation (quite relevant and legitimate) of the covid safe ticket, the author’s position is clearly in the direction of the government, which wishes to make vaccination compulsory, but is delaying its decree for the only reasons that it is looking for the legal means to do so and that it is slowly but surely preparing public opinion. As for the feasibility of monitoring this vaccination obligation, the author maintains that it would be no more difficult to implement than the monitoring of the covid safe ticket: « Let’s dare to make a suggestion: we could, for example, carry out a check of the vaccination status at each entrance to a café, a restaurant, a gym, a hospital, etc., which is precisely what the covid safe ticket provides in its extended version ». This is to pretend to forget that the covid safe ticket, as discriminatory and abject as it may be, still leaves a place in society (contrary to compulsory vaccination) for unvaccinated people tested negative or cured of covid (which is, we agree with the author, extremely perverse, because on the one hand nobody can afford a screening test every 48 or 72 hours, and on the other hand it is unlikely that a person cured of covid will be recontaminated six months later and will be able to extend his covid safe ticket). The author, forgetting the rules of medical deontology, also overlooks the private nature of the vaccination status covered by medical secrecy.
For an author who is part of a group of scientists and academics who rightly and brilliantly militate against vaccination of the youngest, the position expressed in this article is extremely ambiguous: why oppose vaccination of the youngest and then propose mandatory vaccination? Unless the author hopes that the outcome of this debate on mandatory vaccination will be the rejection of this option? Such a hope would be extremely naive given the current state of our « democracy », the lack of diversity in the cast of scientists authorized to advise the government, and the move towards mandatory vaccination underway in some countries, including in the heart of the EU.
The debate on compulsory vaccination is therefore not « healthy » at all: the obligation to inject an experimental vaccine into people who are not at risk, into young people and soon into babies is tantamount to ratifying the end of individual informed consent (set out in the Nuremberg and Helsinki Declarations), of the individual’s right over his or her own body (do we even have any idea of the implications of this, beyond this debate?) and of the total takeover of our bodies by the pharmaceutical companies and the State.