Mandate Mistakes?

Editor: According to Google, a vaccine is a preparation that provides artificial immunity to a particular disease. The safety of vaccines has been verified. They usually contain agents that resemble disease-causing organisms which stimulate the body’s immune system to destroy them and any future similar organisms that are encountered. People who have been infected with a disease and recovered will usually have natural immunity to that disease because their bodies would have developed the antibodies to that disease that are able to fight off any future infections.

The World Health Organization lists vaccines for twenty-five different preventable infections including smallpox, polio, measles and tetanus.

Experience has shown that vaccines take time to be produced because of the need to try them out and ascertain that they are sufficiently safe for use.

During the Covid -19 Pandemic however, this normal requirement was not met for some vaccines including Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, so emergency authorization was granted for its use.

That being the case, it means that I was unwittingly participating in an experiment when I took two doses of this vaccine. In cases where experiments are done involving human subjects, researchers must adhere to strict ethical guidelines to protect the participants’ well-being and rights. Not securing voluntary participation was a mistake.

Another mistake was ignoring natural immunity people gain when they contract a disease. Those already infected with the Covid-19 virus already had in their system antibodies that could fight off the disease and should have been exempted from having to take the vaccine which gives artificial immunity. Why was centuries old knowledge of natural immunity apparently discredited?

Discrediting medical practitioners, the right to prescribe the treatment they deemed best for their patients was a mistake.

Allowing persons who have no experience in science and medicine to lead in providing information about the Covid-19 pandemic was a big mistake. Their lack of knowledge and expertise in the area caused many misleading claims to be made and left many wondering what was the motivation behind it. When experts speak, we can hold them responsible for what they say.

It was a mistake to allow drug companies to make billions of dollars without assuming any of the risks of the consequences of adverse effects. A fraction of that money should have been set aside for the proportion who suffered and died as a consequence of the use of the vaccine. The drug company would say a very small amount, but was adequate documentation taken to verify this? It is reported that the University of Oxford made about EC $800 million from the AstraZeneca vaccine.

When all is said and done, the mistakes made would have shaken people’s confidence in medicine. Moreover, when the final judgement is handed down by the British Privy Counsel in favour of fired Vincentian workers, we would all say that it was a waste of resources for our government to fight against its own people. Then, would it be a myth that we can only obtain justice at the Privy Council?

Anthony Stewart (PhD)