You might remember Dr. Julie Ponesse. She is a professor of ethics in Canada who had a viral video last fall. She was forced out of her job of 20 years by the vaccine mandate imposed by Huron University in Ontario.
I was dismissed for doing exactly what I had been hired to do. I was a professor of ethics questioning what I take to be an unethical demand. You don’t have to look very hard to see the irony.
Someone recently sent me her remarks at an event for the Democracy Fund (shared at Bronwstone.org) and they are worth our attention.
“The right to determine what shall or shall not be done with one’s own body, and to be free from non-consensual medical treatment, is a right deeply rooted in our common law.” These aren’t my words; they are the words of Justice Sydney Robins of the Ontario Court of Appeal.
With very few exceptions, each person’s body is considered inviolate in Canadian law, and this is the underlying ethos of the Nuremberg Code, a promise to humanity that we would never again endorse uninformed, non-voluntary medical decision-making, even for the patient’s own good, even for the sake of the public good.
By definition, vaccine mandates are coercive immunization strategies: in the absence of coercion — the threat of a loss of employment, for example — people would not voluntarily agree to do what the mandate is trying to achieve!
Employers are holding our careers hostage, and removing our participation in the economy and in public life. Their justification is that “we are in a pandemic,” and we must therefore relinquish autonomy over our bodies for the sake of the public good.
Here’s a bit more from further along in her remarks.
As a wise colleague recently said “This is a war about the role of government. It is about our freedom to think and ask questions, and about whether individual autonomy can be downgraded to a conditional privilege or whether it remains a right. It is a war about whether you are to remain a citizen or become a subject. It is about who owns you… you or the state.”
It is about where we draw the line.
This isn’t about liberals and conservatives, pro-and anti-vaxxers, experts and lay people. Everyone should care about truth, everyone should care about the scientific and democratic processes, everyone should care about each another.
There is, I would argue, little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our freedom to debate, to criticize, to demand evidence for what our government asks of us does not survive with it.
Wait! One more.
The dismissive, well-rehearsed messaging of our public health officials has created a highly efficient machine that does not publish its evidence or engage in debate, but only issues orders that we obligingly follow. With the help of the media, its mistakes are hidden, its policies unquestioned, its dissenters silenced.
You can read the full transcript here. The speech is about 18 minutes long.
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