I am concerned by the increasing reach of mandating vaccination for people who have very strong objections to it. There is an important aspect to the right of the individual to choose.
However, in certain settings, the risk to others is sufficiently great that vaccination as a prerequisite is - quite simply - necessary for anyone who is in those settings, in contact with people who are particularly vulnerable.
I do support vaccinations, and regard the authorised vaccines for COVID-19 as extraordinary achievements.
What worries me about people who refuse to be vaccinated is if they do so on the basis of misinformation. If these people are being lied to, have been given wrong information, have been swayed by a purposeful campaign of disinformation, that is indefensible behaviour. I can and do forgive the passing on of misinformation by people who are themselves fooled (even though it is very frustrating). It's not the same case when disinformation is disseminated (or facilitated) by people who have an underlying agenda.
I believe that there is an underlying agenda based upon the behaviour and words of those behind these anti-vaccination anti-mask anti-social-distancing anti-COVID-is-real movements. These agitators seem to me to be contacting and infiltrating groups of people with different sorts of hesitations or concerns about the vaccines and individual freedoms. Some of those hesitations and concerns are legitimate and certainly worth consideration. I have nothing but respect for many of the issues raised originally... but once infiltrated, something evil entered into the picture. A violent "here we stand" line being drawn by people who have really been conned into this... who have been fed pseudo-sympathetic material by pseudo-sympathetic individuals who apparently respect the cause or stances of various very different groups. It's like twisting and then weaponising individual views, rather than addressing them and giving them due weight.
This is not - in my view - exclusively a far-right sort of movement. It's more an extremist movement (perhaps more than one, and perhaps they have very different agendas) capitalising upon any view or concern or perspective that they can manipulate. Nothing has really come to light - at least publicly - about extreme-left involvement, but I'm sceptical about the insidious nature of these manipulations and frankly don't think that left or right matters. The fact is that disinformation is being produced, and it's being spread through any means or group that will propagate it, with the same wording being used, the same non-existent or incorrect data being referred to, the same figures being hailed, and people from various and very different walks being used to spread it.
For example: Dr Pierre Kory's perspective seems to be that he wasn't permitted the autonomy to use patients as guinea pigs. He is not Dr Gregory House and life is not a television series with dramatic breakthroughs each episode. I put forward the notion that his ego, his sense of hubris, is being appealed to, and that he is thoroughly enjoying being a poster boy of the whole "Only we can save the world, and all of the others in the medical profession are minions of huge corporations and the media."
Ditto for Dr Paul Marik, who has a lot on the line as he seeks to prove that a treatment protocol devised by him, which doesn't work as he hoped it would against sepsis, is the cure-all for COVID-19. Ego and hubris again.
Dr Peter McCullough, ditto. It's all about government controls over just steaming ahead with any treatment or medical interventions without responsibility, without testing, without clinical trials, just blind intuition and no accountability in the event of being wrong.
In the case of "sovereign citizens", the emphasis is upon "my body, my choice" and "they don't have the right to force me to wear a mask", etc.
It goes on in that way - using whatever a group or individual may personally believe, so that that becomes the platform on which misinformation is placed, like so many straws in a game where the whole edifice could come tumbling down if sufficient care is taken.
It's quite complicated, and I am very wary of the twin issues between autonomy of choice and the responsibility of the individual as part of a family, group, society, community. This is an INFECTIOUS disease, which means there are wider considerations than the individual declaring his/her right to be at risk if they so choose. And yet... forcing individuals is something with which I am deeply uncomfortable.
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