STIRLING: Recalling when freedoms were decided by what's in your blood

There is an upcoming town hall in Calgary on June 17, 2024, called “An Injection of Truth,” organized by the constituency association of Calgary-Lougheed MLA Eric Bouchard. Premier Danielle Smith has spoken in support of hearing dissenting voices related to the discrimination against the unvaccinated during COVID mandates. But, recent media reports like that of Global News of May 19, 2023, cite various legal and health professionals who see this town hall as a dangerous platform because there is an alleged consensus on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.Is there?The BBC reported on May 08 2024, that AstraZeneca was withdrawing its COVID vaccine from the market after more than three billion doses, claiming it was a commercial decision as the market demand had shifted. The company noted in passing there was also a rare side effect of blood clots. But the issues at stake are about more than ‘just’ the vaccines. Fundamentally, the issues are about medical ethics.On Nov 03, 2022, ethics professor Mazen Maurice Guirguis of Kwantlen Polytechnic University wrote an op-ed in the Calgary Herald about Premier Danielle Smith’s remarks on the discrimination faced by the unvaccinated. In my opinion, his words showed a lack of critical thinking and lack of historical knowledge of health ethics, a topic he teaches.In any case, Prof. Guirguis claimed, “During the pandemic, the notion of sovereignty over self was never threatened here in Canada, for there has not been a case where a person was accosted by authorities and forcibly injected with a coronavirus vaccine.”As outlined in Evelyne Shuster’s paper “Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code,” published in 1997 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), under the Nuremberg Code (1947), forcible injection is not the principle for violation. The participation of an individual in any medical experiment begins with voluntary consent.Prof. Guirguis fails to recognize that the various COVID-19 vaccines were allowed under an “Emergency Authorization.” The clinical trials were not slated to be completed until about June 2023. As Shuster writes in the NEJM: “The Nuremberg Code not only requires that physician-researchers protect the best interests of their subjects (principles 2 through 8 and 10) but also proclaims that subjects can actively protect themselves as well (principles 1 and 9).”Prof. Guirguis claim of no forcible vaccination is thus moot when principle 1 of the Nuremberg code states: “This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion;…”What did people face? Those who declined to consent to being vaccinated with something that had not yet passed clinical trials, faced job loss, exclusion from society, threats and fines, imprisonment, forcible quarantine, denial of access to ‘universal’ medical services, denial of EI and pensions, non-stop denigration by mainstream media and many political ‘leaders.’ Some people were even subjected to police investigation thanks to social ‘snitching’ by family or neighbours — this is the force and duress that the unvaccinated faced.As per the Nuremberg Code 1, the individual “should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion.” But, every form of coercion and constraint were applied.Now we learn that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign has been one of deceit. A Pfizer executive testified to the EU parliament that their COVID-19 vaccine was never tested for prevention of transmission. Guirguis rested his argument on a claim that being vaccinated would protect others.If the long-standing principle of immunity via vaccination is true, then those vaccinated would never have been at risk from an unvaccinated person.Now the evidence reveals that people who are vaccinated can be infected time and again by COVID-19. Obviously it is questionable to claim that the vaccine provided protection against contracting the bug.Likewise, thousands of vaccinated people have been harmed; some seriously, some have died.I dispute Guirguis’ claim that no one was forcibly vaccinated against their will. There are numerous statements from people with families in long-term care where all residents were vaccinated, often against their will or that of their loved ones. People with dementia or who were physically disabled or bed-ridden could not voluntarily consent.Again, as per the Nuremberg code, physical force is not the bar for violation.Guirguis’ claim that “Vaccines and masks were never forced upon anyone” is a strange rewriting of history by one who teaches formal logic, health care and business ethics. At the time of his op-ed in the Herald, his own university’s banner read “Mask wearing is now a matter of personal preference at KPU…” Obviously it was obligatory in the past.Our society was thus effectively split by blood purity, a principle uncomfortably analagous of an earlier time in Germany when the Nuremberg Race Laws decided an individual’s rights by government diktat about their blood purity, in the contemporary case by one’s compliance under duress, and freedoms were limited according to your vax status — that is, what's in your blood.The Nuremberg Code was published in 1947 at the end of the Nazi Doctors’ Trials, wherein their torturous and monstrous experiments were revealed.Have we learned anything from history? So many lives were destroyed by mandates and lockdowns; so many people ostracized; families torn apart because of the imposition of mandates, not because of the virus.Should we not look, with a critical eye, at what we have done?

STIRLING: Recalling when freedoms were decided by what's in your blood

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