In a nutshell pic.twitter.com/iyYImbUb03
— Andy D’Alessio2 #WTF 🤷♂️ (@andydalessio21) November 23, 2021
His name is Lee Jones, professor of Political Economy and International Relations and author of the 2021 book, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia.
Selfishness is okay when it comes to medical interventions. You have something called the Nuremberg Code, which grew out of the war crimes trials at the end of the Second World War and it established the principle of free, prior, and informed consent for all medical interventions or experiments. It means that if you’re going to take a medicine or have some kind of procedure or participate in a trial, you must give your free, prior, and informed consent. You can’t be coerced. So you’re allowed to be selfish when you decide what goes into your body. That is the principle of bodily autonomy. So that’s a really important principle I think we have to maintain. Beyond that, when it comes to the specifics of the COVID vaccine, we have to remember that this [the SARS-CoV-2] is a disease that mostly affects older people. The younger you are, and if you’re free of co-morbidities—other diseases that make the disease worse—the less benefit that you get from the vaccine anyway. And there are quite severe, essentially life-threatening side effects. They’re rare, but so is it rare to die of COVID, for example, if you’re under the age of fifty. So people may have good reasons to be hesitant. The other thing to bear in mind, I think is that the vaccines do not prevent you from getting the disease or spreading it. Public Health England data clearly show that between the vaccination and the vaccinated groups, case rate doesn’t change. And recent UK study published in the Lancet just last week showed that it’s just as transmissible. The main benefit that you get is that you don’t have the same disease burden, meaning that you suffer less. So you’re less likely to suffer a serious disease and be hospitalized. And obviously if you are in the age range or the health categories where you are vulnerable to the disease, you therefore are strongly encouraged to get the vaccination. But to my mind, there is no case for coercion, no case for vaccine mandates, and these people should not be losing their jobs just because they want to exercise their right of bodily autonomy.
Citing the Nuremberg Code makes for a powerful argument, but it doesn't seem to do much to move the federal or state courts to action against the criminal vaccine manufacturers as it applies to the current damages, injuries, and deaths caused by the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. There are other international agencies that protect informed consent:
It is important to note that the Nuremberg Code is not the only set of ethical guidelines for human experimentation. For example, social media users could have drawn on the more recent Declaration of Helsinki (adopted in 1964, last updated 2013), UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005) or the International Ethical Guidelines for Health-Related Research Involving Humans (fourth version published 2016) to make similar (albeit also incorrect) claims.
But they, along with the Nuremberg Code, appear to be quite helpless. Which agency enforces the law?
Here is a worthwhile podcast:
Dr. Lee Jones is a Professor of Political Economy & International Relations at the Queen Mary University of London. Dr. Jones and I had a great conversation about China, covid policy, and making the best of Brexit. I've become increasingly concerned that a lot of people in society are unable to move on from the loss of Brexit to find ways to make the best of it--it is not the situation I wanted to be in, I wrote an entire book about it, but I believe there are opportunities to make this work for the British people (though we probably need to ditch the Tories to have any chance of that). It turns out that Dr. Jones has similar views to me on the vaccine passports and he believes that the seemingly strange response to COVID has been building in our society for a long long time.
