From March 2021:
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Conditions on living in a post-vaccine world
"‘Edward Jenner who pioneered vaccination and could justifiably claim to have saved more lives than any other human being would never have got past a modern ethics committee. To prove his theories about smallpox, he cut open an eight year old boy's arm and rubbed in pus taken from a milkmaid’s blisters'...
‘Inequality can be justified or unjustified. And in the case of vaccine passports, it's justified inequality. As you mentioned in the introduction, the basis for restricting people's liberty is that that individual represents a threat to other people. And that's the justification the government has for the current lockdown. But if an individual no longer represents a threat, if they're not carrying a gun, then restricting their liberty is, is completely unethical. So that will create inequality but the inequality is based on people having a differential threat to others’...
‘As vaccines become sufficient in supply, there's no need for vaccination passports, because people can protect themselves by being vaccinated. But under conditions of scarcity, which is what we have at the moment, there's a continuing threat to others… we should be thinking creatively about giving people more liberty. So for example, we could consider hybrid strategies, where once the vulnerable are vaccinated the, the over 50 year olds by April, we could, we could release the under 50 year olds, because they are not a threat to the NHS by getting ill. And the vulnerable, those who are likely to become ill would be vaccinated. So that would be a way of promoting everybody's liberty’...
‘You are concerned that a vaccine passport would produce a divisive society. You're absolutely correct. A vaccine passport would divide society into places which are physically safe for people to go and places which are not physically safe. Now, it seems to me that you want to make, under the rubric of equality, all places equally unsafe. Isn't that carrying the principle of equality to really quite absurd and dangerous lengths?’
‘No, not at all. So again, there's no conclusive evidence yet about transmissibility. So the idea of vaccine-segregated spaces, makes little sense. And even so, we don't have mandatory vaccines in society. We've already accepted that there will be groups who either cannot or a minority of people who will not receive a vaccine who will still exist in our society. So the question is, what's the best way about going about this public health messaging? Is it to support people and include people and have positive messaging? Or is it to create a segregated checkpoint society and kind of banish these people? I think the answer to that is quite obvious.’
‘But you talk about a checkpoint society, you're conjuring up a kind of sort of pre fascist dystopia, but surely oppression is involuntary. The point about the vaccines is that no one forces, no one's going to force anybody to have the vaccine. People can choose not to be vaccinated and not to have the passport.Aa civil libertarian like yourself, I'm sure would choose not to be vaccinated and not to have the passport, that is you, entirely your right. But it is not your right, surely, then to proceed and say, I expect everybody else to put up with the fact that I may still be a lethal risk to their health, because I want to have it on my own way? That surely cannot be right.’
‘No, I think that's that's ridiculous. We can't start treating people as biohazards and as though, you know that-’
‘Why not? They are’
‘Well, yeah, okay, we can do. And then we do get into exactly the kind of society that you described. It's very totalitarian society, we start treating everyone as a potential threat.’
‘Oh come on. Why is it totalitarian, why is it totalitarian to understand and accept and acknowledge the blatantly, patently obvious fact that if people aren't vaccinated they are a possible risk to others by carrying this virus? For goodness sake, you're saying that statement of simple fact is totalitarian?’
‘What I'm suggesting that we have in this debate is a bit of balance. So you know, just as someone might have or carry coronavirus and by the way, that's when quarantine kicks in. If you're infectious, that's when you're at risk, not generally for existing as a human being. So what’s really important, that's why test and trace and quarantine is so important, but to treat everyone as permanently a possible infectious risk, as some kind of bio hazard, for coronavirus specifically, we've never had this attitude towards all kinds of other health problems or flus when they come around in the winter, we will completely distort the society that we knew and there is not a chance in hell that this will stop with coronavirus. These passes would be used for flu, MMR, everything else’...
‘As to the point about, you know, having to have the yellow fever vaccine to go to Ghana. You know, people choose to go there for holiday or work. This is about just basic, normal liberties, without which you can't work, if you're found to have evaded the vaccine for some reason, even if that's not the reality’...
‘I remember hearing those who are anti gay marriage saying, well, yes, everyone has the choice to get married, the condition is that you'll have to choose a partner of the opposite sex. And the point being that if the consequences aren't acceptable to the individual, there's effectively no choice at all.’...
'I think many of these issues about the individual versus the collective good, are ones which citizens themselves could very well make. And we probably be able to resolve issues like vaccine passports much better if it wasn't, you know, the hated politicians and officials and made the decisions but actually, government invited citizens themselves to consider these questions'"
Why do the people promoting vaccines show contempt for the science by having the exact opposite idea of how they work, while they exaggerate the risk of covid? Of course one excuse is that this episode was released in March 2021, which was before we knew the vaccines didn't reduce transmission - but that just brings home the point about imperfect knowledge and the problems with basing policy on that (to say nothing of how now all this is being memory holed and we are being told no one ever said they would reduce transmission).
If there're conditions of scarcity, that means that those who are unable to get vaccinated are unjustly excluded from society. But apparently that is not unjust because of vaxhole logic
Even the weaker claim that coercion to get vaccinated is justified because it prevents the health system from collapsing is flawed - since healthy young people don't have a high chance of being hospitalised in the first place (yet are the ones most targeted/affected by covid apartheid)
Ironically throughout history Jews have been subject to the sort of discrimination Melanie Phillips champions - because everyone "knew" they were threats to others, and almost always they had the chance to convert (so they had a 'choice' over being discriminated against)
