The idea of vaccines becoming mandatory is gaining traction in the shifting sands of these COVID-19 times with the concept of vaccination passports being mooted in bureaucratic circles. The thinking behind this is not just limited to travel abroad, it could subsequently be applied to all sorts of entrance requirements from concert halls to pubs and restaurants and beyond, to terms of employment or to gain receipt of state benefits. The thin end of the wedge comes to mind.

Mandatory vaccination is already legislation in many American states, where unvaccinated children are prohibited from attending state schools. In California for example, the final refuse for the unvaccinated was taken away with the California Senate Bill 277 (SB277) which removed by law personal belief as a reason for an exemption from the vaccination requirements for school entry.

Similarly, in Australia there are restrictions placed on children who haven’t been vaccinated and parents who consciously object to vaccinating their children are denied a raft of childcare and welfare payments. Mandatory by the back door in other words, without which normal life becomes almost impossible.

Informed consent should only be regarding clinical considerations, not because you must accept a vaccine for social or other reasons. That would make it unethical and rooted in coercion.

We don’t yet have such draconian medical laws in this country. But if introduced, would vaccine passports be crossing a dangerous red line? For me it would be. I don’t believe it would stop there but would leak like a toxic chemical spill into so many other aspects of our lives. Vaccines should always remain a choice for each individual. Whenever a medical product or procedure carries a risk of harm, informed consent is vital. Mandatory vaccination is my line in the sand beyond which lies a point of no return; a limit past which we no longer have sovereignty over our bodies. If crossed, this could be the most dangerous line ever to be crossed in human history and set a dangerous precedent for the power of the pharmaceutical industry and all power is vulnerable to abuse.

Vaccines have known risks, just take some time to read the insert that comes with the product and find out for yourself, listed side effects include death. If you don’t take the time to grasp the full implications of what goes into your body via a needle, then you are not engaged in informed consent; what you are doing is giving away your autonomy to a stranger. Trusting another more than you trust your own judgment with a potentially life-changing medical procedure. Specifically, with the rushed to market experimental COVID-19 vaccines there are still many unanswered questions around safety, efficacy, and long-term health consequences. There is still so much we don’t know and neither do the manufacturers or those in government, the media and the medical profession encouraging you to take it.

There’s no going back from vaccine damage and a paltry one-off compensation payment of £120,000 for the vaccine damaged in Britain is both disrespectful and inadequate. Imagine living off that if you are paralysed for life or develop a chronic life-limiting condition.

It isn’t simply because vaccines have risks and that the taking of these risks should be a personal choice that mandatory vaccination is my line in the sand, it is a question of personal sovereignty. We should have authority over our own body. Sovereignty of the individual is the moral and natural right of a person, to have bodily integrity and to be exclusively in control of our own body and life. If we lose the individual right to decide what medical treatments we accept or decline, we lose control over our very life.  No one should get to make that decision for us.

My concerns around mandatory vaccination run deeper than simply being a medical treatment which may or may not have damaging side effects. Vaccines in themselves give a message of impotency to humanity. It gives us the message that we can’t protect ourselves, that we are helpless. We become afraid of disease and look outside of ourselves for help, waiting for a magic bullet. It’s a very disempowering place to be, to feel that we need help from outside of ourselves because we can’t do it ourselves. This breeds a dangerous dependency on medications and a pervading fear of disease.

To a large extent we have reached this place now with COVID-19, fear has paralysed so many people that they are too scared to go out and live normal lives until they’ve had their vaccine. Fearful of a disease with a 99.4% recovery rate. Fear however affects our thinking. We can’t think straight when in a fearful state. Fear is as much of an illness as the coronavirus pervading society. Many people have lost the ability to think straight and are accepting the reassurances of government and pharma that these new and experimental vaccines are safe. We don’t know that yet, no one does. The speed to market was accepted by governments under emergency regulations by-passing the prudence to wait for long-term studies. Think about that if you can. We have put more faith in the hands of pharmaceutical corporations whose business it is to profit from illness and who carry no liability if their vaccines cause us damage, than we have in our own ability to self-heal. We have lost faith in our innate immune systems.  We have given away our power to the bureaucrats and medicine makers, to the questionable locking down of society until a vaccine emerges to save us, over our natural ability to reach herd immunity.

Making one or more vaccines mandatory is a red line that I hope we never cross, giving our power away to outside of ourselves and losing connection to the incredible healing power within us.