The issue of who feels safe around whom in today’s world has hit families and friends, dividing them fiercely into a life-and death belief system that they will not budge from even if it means not associating with their loved ones anymore.
(To watch video, click on the image below the text)
So HOW do we mend these fences and reconnect?
Where do our personal rights end, when it comes to protecting others?
Today’s guest: Dr. Francisco Gil-White joins Tamar Yonah on Solomon’s Sword to cut to the truth about where we find ourselves today. Also, are the ‘ Canadian Truckers’ right to go to the streets?
Episode: 10 Solomon’s Sword 15FEB2022
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“The COVID-Vaccine Mandate Controversy: How to Talk About Covid, Vaccines & Truckers -Without Ruining the Family Dinner!”
By Francisco Gil-White
The Freedom Convoy in Canada, one of the most remarkable social developments of this 21st century, has brought thousands of truckers and their supporters to the capital city of Ottawa to protest the COVID-vaccine mandates and other coercive measures imposed by the Canadian government. And because such measures, to lesser or greater degree, have been imposed by many other governments in the democratic West, the Freedom Convoy has sparked an international solidarity movement of imitators and fans.
Buzzfeed reports as follows:
“The anti-mandate protest here entered its third week Saturday with a late-night concert in front of the Canadian Parliament, complete with a stage, sound system, light show, and port-a-potties. In the morning, people lounged in a hot tub. Children played on inflatable slides as volunteers handed out hamburgers and hot chocolate.”
Such scenes contrast with the representation that many in the media have made of the truckers and their numerous supporters as dangerous insurrectionists.
Organizer Tom Marazzo doesn’t sound dangerous. Mindful that a large force mobilization had begun around his people in Ottawa, he declared in a video: “If we are arrested we will be taken into custody peacefully. We will not resist.”
Marazzo further explained his movement’s purpose as follows:
“We have one mission, and that is to end the mandates and to stop this from happening again. We do not have any interest in meddling in political strife. We have no interest meddling in the mechanisms of government. We just want to end the COVID-19 vaccine passports, the masks, the mandates. We want the laws to be re-reaffirmed.
(…)
We’re highly motivated because we can’t go home. We cannot go home. We cannot abandon our families. We cannot abandon our communities. Everybody here in this convoy is here for their children.”
In just the first 6 hours, that video logged more than 300,000 views. Something is happening.
What is the issue?
The COVID-vaccine mandates, whether or not formally declared to be a ‘state of emergency,’ amount precisely to that. The great Western controversy over vaccine mandates is thus—implicitly or explicitly—on this question: Does COVID justify a state of emergency?
Many people—let us call them ‘the Resistance’—say no.
Some resisters worry that, given the legal possibility of a ‘state of emergency,’ a power-hungry elite in control of government may reach for total powers either by conjuring or exaggerating a crisis.
Other resisters worry that getting a vaccine might be riskier than getting COVID.
And some resisters worry about both.
Resisters are not coextensive with ‘anti-vaxxers.’ No doubt anti-vaxxers are resisters. But many resisters have no problem with vaccines as such; their problem is with the COVID vaccines in particular. And with the COVID-vaccine (and booster) mandates.
Resisters are also not coextensive with ‘the unvaccinated.’ Many resisters are unvaccinated. But some resisters did get their COVID shots; they simply disagree that anyone should force their fellow citizens to do the same or restrict their rights if they don’t.
(The Canadian truckers in the Freedom Convoy are a case in point. Almost all of them are vaccinated. But they don’t think the State should intervene in a free citizen’s personal health decisions.)
Resisters seem to despair that the whole world has gone insane. But the other side replies in kind. They look at the resisters and think: This is crazy! We should all be vaccinated. This is a catastrophe. Vaccines improve public health. The government is right to impose itself.
This controversy is dividing the West down to the family level: parent against child, brother against sister, husband against wife. I know cases of people who’ve divorced because they couldn’t agree on the question of whether or not to vaccinate their kids.
This rift in Western civilization, I argue, may decide our future. We need to figure it out.
We need, first, a minimum of empathy. Partisans of vaccine mandates need to understand how their fellow citizens, the resisters, feel. And resisters need to acknowledge that many have died, and that citizens in fear will naturally—and even reasonably—seek the protection of the State.
Then we must commit to reasonable conversations. Can we? Yes, if we can recognize each other as sharing the same core Western values. Because we do.
Those who wish to save lives with vaccine mandates, on the one hand, and those who worry that COVID vaccines, on the other, are worse than the disease, are defending the same core value: life and health are sacred. They just disagree about the facts and about the means.
And every Westerner also believes that liberty is sacred. We just disagree on whether a state of emergency, in this case, is justified.
We value the same things—we can talk.
To do so reasonably, we’ll need a framework—a theoretical, pre-evidence framework. That is, before we try to convince each other that COVID vaccine mandates are either absolutely necessary or completely unjustifiable, we need to agree, in the abstract, what the rules of the game are. What sorts of conditions would justify—in principle—putting COVID-vaccine mandates on the table?
I believe the needed framework—based on our shared values—is composed of four questions:
- Is the COVID public-health situation a catastrophic emergency?
- Can COVID vaccines reasonably control the spread of infection?
- Are the COVID vaccines safer than risking COVID?
- Do our institutions deserve our trust?
If the answer to the first question is ‘yes,’ there may be sufficient justification to declare a state of emergency. And if the answer to all three remaining questions is also ‘yes,’ then vaccine mandates, as a specific measure, may at least be considered.
But if the first question is answered ‘no,’ then no basis for a state of emergency exists. And if the first question is answered ‘yes’ but any of the remaining three questions is answered ‘no,’ then no basis exists for even considering a pause on the fundamental right to refuse a medical intervention.
My precipitating conditions for even considering a vaccine mandate are thus strongly asymmetrical. There are important philosophical and historical reasons for that, as I briefly discuss below.
Brief discussion to contextualize and justify the above framework
Life and liberty are both important. Without life, you can’t have anything, so it seems intuitive to many that life must be the more important value. This hierarchical relationship—with life (and safety) above liberty—underpins the logic by which a ‘state of emergency’ may be declared.
The Wikipedia page on this states:
“A state of emergency is a situation in which a government is empowered to be able to put through policies that it would normally not be permitted to do, for the safety and protection of its citizens. A government can declare such a state during a natural disaster, civil unrest, armed conflict, medical pandemic or epidemic or other biosecurity risk.
(…)
Under international law, rights and freedoms may be suspended during a state of emergency, depending on the severity of the emergency …”
The principle is identical to the one invoked by your friend when he throws you to the ground so that a passing bus won’t crush you. The government, your ‘friend,’ apologizes for violating you, trusting that, later, you’ll think of that as having been in your urgent best interests.
But is the government really your friend? Not if it’s a tyrannical State, which may be described as existing in a permanent state of emergency (without liberty or rights). Inhabitants of such States often take the view that liberty is more important than life. The reason for that is human, heroic, and simple: they don’t want their children to be slaves.
For example, those who fought for Greek independence in the 1820s against Ottoman rule thought life should be risked or even sacrificed to get liberty for coming generations: eleftheria i thanatos—‘liberty or death’—became their motto.
They are hardly alone. The entire modern West exists because our ancestors decided that life without liberty was not worth living, and they risked or gave their lives fighting to end millennia of slavery, bequeathing to us States with basic human, civil, constitutional, and democratic rights.
The fragility of that achievement was laid bare in the twentieth century, when the communists established a totalitarian beachhead in Russia from which they began spreading their influence. And then the Nazis launched a war of world domination to establish a totalitarian system meant to snuff modern democracy violently out of existence.
One of the most deeply offensive abuses of modern totalitarianism was exposed in the so-called doctors’ trial (USA v. Karl Brandt et al), one of the famous Nuremberg trials for those accused of Nazi war crimes. The public learned that Nazi doctors had been performing criminal medical experiments, torturing to death defenseless prisoners of war and civilians of Germany and occupied countries.
The unspeakable experimental atrocities of these criminal doctors—which included an especially gruesome chapter of the mass killing that Westerners call ‘the Holocaust’—helped focus the legal attention on the following principle: no doctor may treat a person like an animal or a thing. Every human being is within his or her sacred natural rights to refuse any medical intervention, whether presumed effective or ineffective.
This principle was enshrined in the first point of the famous Nuremberg Code of medical ethics, which emerged as a consequence of the ‘doctor’s trial.’ It says that, in any medical intervention, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
Somewhat amazingly, informed voluntary consent did not immediately become the accepted norm in the Western postwar medical establishment. What finally changed the culture was Maurice Henry Pappworth’s indefatigable criticisms of unethical medical practices, plus his relentless drive to train very large numbers of medical students (who spread his ideas). And then the Nuremberg Code became established.
People are not meat—this is now accepted (at least officially).
The Nuremberg Code is a straightforward consequence of the basic principle on which modern Western civilization was built: individual sovereignty. Meaning this: none of us are slaves.
Individual sovereignty begins and ends with your body. If you cannot make your own decisions about what happens to your body, you have no individual sovereignty; you are already a slave. (Like the concentration-camp victims on whom the Nazi doctors experimented on.)
Now, consider this question: How did the Nazis acquire the power to experiment on defenseless human beings? The Wiener Holocaust Library explains:
“On 28 February 1933, President Hindenburg signed the Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People. This decree suspended the democratic aspects of the Weimar Republic and declared a state of emergency.” (my emphasis)
Hindenburg was not the greatest fan of democracy. But he was not a Nazi. As president of the Weimar Republic (as the democratic German system was called) he was like a constitutional monarch with mostly ceremonial powers. But he did have the power to declare a state of emergency. Scared by the crisis then gripping Germany, Hindenburg, old and confused, was easily manipulated by allies of the Nazi Party to take this fateful step. For you see, it was the Nazis who had themselves created the crisis. They wanted the state of emergency.
This is how dictatorships arise out of established democracies.
It is this history that makes the resisters so nervous. That is why many have invoked a preoccupation with the Nazi precedent to justify their resistance.
Others charge that no comparison can be made between the two cases; to speak of COVID vaccine mandates and Nazi medical atrocities in the same breath is to disrespect the suffering of Holocaust victims. But I cannot follow such reasoning.
Yes, Nazi atrocities are a lot worse than COVID mandates. And pneumonia is a lot worse than a cold. In either case, there is no comparison. But is there no relevance?
Pneumonia, I submit, is relevant to colds. It’s what a cold becomes if you are not careful. Defer all worries ’til a ventilator is in your throat and you’ll be too late. Like you will be, if, to worry about totalitarian excess, you must first hear the sound of cattle cars, Auschwitz-bound, squeaking and rumbling into town, and need to see, hungry, excited, and swarming all around, the uniforms and the hounds.
Hindenburg issued an ‘Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People’ because that is the required etiquette when declaring a state of emergency: to allege ‘protection.’ Yet the first thing Hindenburg’s decree destroyed was the German People. There would soon be other casualties because the Nazis produced a world war (upwards of 70 million people died, and hundreds of millions more lost their rights and liberties).
What is the historical lesson? That, with jealous suspicion, citizens must always ask: Can our authorities be trusted when they claim that, due to an extraordinary situation, they must assume total powers ‘for our protection’?
It is this vigilance that respects and honors the victims of the Holocaust and other victims of the Nazis—that’s what they would want: for us to be vigilant, lest we be complicit in the destruction of our own rights and liberties. Because once those guarantees are suspended, as history shows, a world cataclysm may be next.
Here’s how to use the present framework to discuss COVID-vaccine mandates with your loved ones
I trust that Western democratic citizens of all stripes agree that health and liberty are both important, and hence that the four-question framework I am proposing here is appropriate. Our disagreements concern not the questions but the answers.
Some of us hold, whether implicitly or explicitly, that all four questions must be simultaneously answered ‘yes.’ Others of us hold, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the answer to one or more of these questions is ‘no.’
We’ll be more reasonable and compassionate with each other, I think, if we make this four-question framework explicit when we discuss our COVID disagreements. In any given conversation, I believe, we should be careful about which of the four questions we are addressing. And it is probably best if we stick to discussing evidence. What does the evidence say about this question?
As we do this, it is important to remember that we are, all of us, prone to certain biases:
Confirmation bias makes us consider only claims that match our preconceptions. If you got your COVID shots, that’s probably because you already thought the vaccines worked, so you are likely to accept claims—without skeptical examination—that match this belief. Conversely, if you’ve resisted the vaccine mandates, you’ll be quick to believe any claim—without skeptical examination—about vaccine ineffectiveness or even dangerousness.
Then there is the bias to avoid cognitive dissonance, which works to eliminate contradictions between your behaviors and your attitudes. We usually adjust our attitudes to our already expressed behaviors. So, if you initially had some doubts, but then decided to get your shots, you will tend henceforth to attach to the claim that the COVID vaccines do work (else, why did you get inoculated?). Conversely, if you refused to get inoculated, you may find yourself emotionally committed to the claim that the vaccines are ineffective and/or dangerous.
We must also watch out for prestige bias and authority bias. These biases will make you accept the claims of authorities if you already trust official institutions. Those who got their COVID shots trusted their authorities, who cheered the vaccines. Conversely, those who refused to get inoculated because they distrust authority may favor knee-jerk reactions that dispute—without checking—anything the distrusted authorities say.
None of these biases are fatal if we agree to talk to each other and commit to examining the evidence. I suggest you share this framework article with your family and friends. It may help jump start the needed conversations.
The four questions, once again, are the following:
- Is the COVID public-health situation a catastrophic emergency?
- Can COVID vaccines reasonably control the spread of infection?
- Are the COVID vaccines safer than risking COVID?
- Do our institutions deserve our trust?
