My Email to Senator Rennick, Dated 23 NOV 2021
By Michael Kowalik
Dear Senator,
I am a philosopher of ethics with my current research focus on vaccine mandates. I have recently published an academic paper on this topic: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/25/medethics-2020-107026.
I have contacted several regulatory agencies (SIRA, Australian Government Department of Health, Mr Gavrielatos at SafeWork NSW, Australian Medical Association, and today Safe Work Australia) with some basic, ethically, and legally relevant questions about a possible conflict between Covid-19 vaccine mandates and workplace safety. I have received only generic responses; not one agency or person contacted has explicitly answered my two questions, which were formulated as follows:
1. Do you acknowledge that Covid vaccination occasionally causes the death of healthy people, even if the overall outcome benefits most people?
2. If yes, do you acknowledge that when an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is in effect required to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die as a result of their mandatory participation?
I find it extremely concerning that the agencies responsible for workplace safety and the health of the Australian people are tacitly refusing to answer such fundamental and legally critical questions about workplace safety. Would you be willing to apply some pressure to get these questions explicitly addressed by the Commonwealth government?
Can you assist in this matter?
I also want to take this opportunity to share with you a summary of the key ethical issues associated with vaccine mandates in general.
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race.
2. Covid vaccines are known to occasionally cause the deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is being economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of their mandatory participation. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that Covid-19 also kills people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the alleged benefit of the majority.
3. Medical consent must be free – not coerced – in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion.
I also object to the assertion made by several state premiers and other politicians that the people who are discriminated against are “unvaccinated by choice”. Apart from the fact that social and economic opportunity coercion removes our free choice in this matter, being unvaccinated is fundamentally not a choice; we were born that way. The premise of being “unvaccinated by choice” is as absurd as “having two hands by choice”. The right to preserve our innate characteristics without being discriminated against is paramount.
Regards,
Michael Kowalik
