The Corona Virus

[sinkov]

Philip Johnston in the The Telegraph.

"Interestingly, however, the Public Health Act 1984 – the statute used to underpin the lockdowns – specifically states that any legislative protections “may not include provision requiring a person to undergo medical treatment”, which includes vaccinations. So a measure used (wrongly, in the view of some eminent jurists) to stop healthy people leaving their homes or visiting relatives cannot be the basis for compulsory vaccination. That would require another Act of Parliament and the Government does not want to go there.

Ministers prefer instead to rely upon information campaigns, peer pressure and general exhortation to overcome hesitancy. They shy away from stigmatising those who are refusing, possibly because many of them are in ethnic minority communities. However, people who have had the vaccine in order to help reopen society are growing increasingly censorious of those who haven’t.

Moreover, what is the aim of a vaccination in a pandemic? Is it simply to offer individual protection or is it part of the collective good? Some ethicists take the view that if people are able to have a vaccine then they have a moral obligation to contribute to the realisation of herd immunity by getting the jab. This, they maintain, strengthens the justification for coercive vaccination policies.

Such arguments often invoke J S Mill’s dictum that the state should not interfere in the lives of individuals unless their actions harm others. For instance, we accept the legal requirement to wear seat belts in a car not just because we face greater injury in a crash without them but because of the risk to others. Nor is compulsory medication unprecedented. Millions of people drink fluoridated water without having much choice in the matter and the Government is keen to expand the programme throughout the country to improve dental health.

The real reason we are even having this debate is not because there is a risk of people getting ill because, for whatever reason, they refuse the vaccine. They just have to take the consequences, as already happens with flu – and no one has suggested making the influenza jab compulsory.

It is the fear that – even though a great proportion of the most vulnerable people are now protected, and deaths overall are 20 per cent lower than normal – the Government is being spooked by predictions of another spike in the summer. The understandable anger of people like Lord Lloyd-Webber needs to be directed at ministers and the Sage modellers urging them to take disproportionate and unjustified decisions to extend the lockdown even in the face of a waning pandemic."

Just about sums it up for me.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Philip Johnston in the The Telegraph.

"Interestingly, however, the Public Health Act 1984 – the statute used to underpin the lockdowns – specifically states that any legislative protections “may not include provision requiring a person to undergo medical treatment”, which includes vaccinations. So a measure used (wrongly, in the view of some eminent jurists) to stop healthy people leaving their homes or visiting relatives cannot be the basis for compulsory vaccination. That would require another Act of Parliament and the Government does not want to go there.

Ministers prefer instead to rely upon information campaigns, peer pressure and general exhortation to overcome hesitancy. They shy away from stigmatising those who are refusing, possibly because many of them are in ethnic minority communities. However, people who have had the vaccine in order to help reopen society are growing increasingly censorious of those who haven’t.

Moreover, what is the aim of a vaccination in a pandemic? Is it simply to offer individual protection or is it part of the collective good? Some ethicists take the view that if people are able to have a vaccine then they have a moral obligation to contribute to the realisation of herd immunity by getting the jab. This, they maintain, strengthens the justification for coercive vaccination policies.

Such arguments often invoke J S Mill’s dictum that the state should not interfere in the lives of individuals unless their actions harm others. For instance, we accept the legal requirement to wear seat belts in a car not just because we face greater injury in a crash without them but because of the risk to others. Nor is compulsory medication unprecedented. Millions of people drink fluoridated water without having much choice in the matter and the Government is keen to expand the programme throughout the country to improve dental health.

The real reason we are even having this debate is not because there is a risk of people getting ill because, for whatever reason, they refuse the vaccine. They just have to take the consequences, as already happens with flu – and no one has suggested making the influenza jab compulsory.

It is the fear that – even though a great proportion of the most vulnerable people are now protected, and deaths overall are 20 per cent lower than normal – the Government is being spooked by predictions of another spike in the summer. The understandable anger of people like Lord Lloyd-Webber needs to be directed at ministers and the Sage modellers urging them to take disproportionate and unjustified decisions to extend the lockdown even in the face of a waning pandemic."

Just about sums it up for me.

And me.