Human rights and the discrimination of the unvaccinated
Pinpointing the unacceptable views of the majority during the COVID pandemic
It’s official: the unvaccinated were discriminated against. Nature, one of the world’s leading scholarly journals published a peer-reviewed original research article (not a commentary or letter or preprint, nor a meta analysis!) titled “Discriminatory Attitudes Against the Unvaccinated During a Global Pandemic”. The authors note:
Across three conjoint experimental studies (N=15,233), we demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards the unvaccinated, as high as the discriminatory attitudes suffered by common targets like immigrant and minority populations.
The “as high as” appears to be an understatement of the shocking findings, as the authors also report that (my emphasis):
Exclusionary attitudes towards the unvaccinated among vaccinated people (13%) is two and a half times larger than exclusionary attitudes towards Middle Eastern immigrants (5%).
The unvaccinated, meanwhile, are more tolerant:
…unvaccinated respondents (N = 10,386) exhibit negligible exclusionary attitudes towards vaccinated individuals.
In the second, more detailed study based on participants from only six countries, it gets worse:
Our data shows that the vaccinated feel antipathy towards the unvaccinated, even in a neutral evaluation task without any indication that participants would physically meet the fictitious targets.
A third study limited to the US adds the punitive to the prejudicial element (shortened):
Vaccinated Americans not only feel greater antipathy towards unvaccinated Americans by 16%, they are also 28% less likely to respect their freedom of movement, 10% less likely to respect their freedom of residence, 8% less likely to support their application for citizenship, and 7% less likely both to respect their freedom of speech and to support their applications for welfare benefits.
There is more to this paper, but to keep it short, by combining these findings with the manifold anecdotal evidence from 2021 and 2022, we now have unquestionable proof that the discrimination of the unvaccinated was systematic. Suspending and dismissing unvaccinated employees, denying their earned unemployment and health benefits, deprioritizing their treatment, and “letting them die” was alternatively practiced or at least envisioned by politicians, organizations, and fellow citizens. Archiving this injustice and prosecuting its worst excesses is an important and urgent task.
On his blog “The New Normal”, attorney and author Michael P. Senger ventures “A Look Back at the Demonization of the Unvaccinated”. The examples from public signage and media headlines range from “no shot - no entry” retail business policies to denying the unvaccinated access to public health care and suggestions to entirely segregate them from society and public life. With reference to the limitations and risks of the mRNA injections and the practicalities of mass vaccination campaigns, Senger concludes “Like so much of the response to Covid, these vaccine passes and the illiberal fad of stigmatizing the unvaccinated were unscientific, unprecedented, ineffective, totalitarian, brutal, and dumb.”
Similarly, Koen Swinkels wrote “A History of the Persecution of the Unvaccinated in Covid Era Canada” on Medium. The several-times updated article, which has grown to a 100-minute read, provides numerous examples of discrimination and outright hate against unvaccinated Canadians, including media poll results that illustrate the alarming extent of these unsavory tendencies among our fellow citizens. The responsibility of newspaper editorial boards and broadcast commentators in stoking irrational fears and prejudice, and in particular the sorry role of the Toronto Star, must have consequences. Swinkels concludes on a rather pessimistic note based on how quickly society has shifted into mass formation and cult-like compliance with pandemic rules; the fact that restrictions have only ended due to the coincidence of several fortunate circumstances; and a comprehensive, unbiased public inquiry and reconciliation has not begun.
Over here in Germany, where I had not been allowed (sic!) to travel for the last two years due to my vaccination status, Marcus Klöckner’s and Jens Wernicke’s book on the corona injustices and their perpetrators made the bestseller lists right upon its publication in early November. The volume is titled by a quote representing these injustices: “May the entire republic point their fingers at them” (available in German only). In line with what I wrote about the Canadian context above, this quote is from a newsmedia columnist, Nikolaus Blome, published by the venerable, formerly left-leaning political magazine Der Spiegel. Leading up to the sentence, Blome “explicitly request[s] societal disadvantages for those who voluntarily choose not to get vaccinated.” The book title is one of 100 quotes selected by the authors from the crowd-sourced online archive for corona injustices, “Ich habe mitgemacht” [“I participated”]. I provided the link to the list of quotes by date, which shows that the discrimination continues to this day.
How could it come to this deep division in our western democratic societies? How could progressive, anti-discrimination Canada persecute a bunch of ordinary people for an inconsequential medical choice? As many an unvaccinated Canadian assumed that his/her bodily autonomy was protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we had a rude awakening. The Charter and other human rights codes were all too easily overwritten by “reasonable limits” and by a shockingly narrow, simplistic definition of human rights. For example, most human rights-based exemption requests under workplace vaccination policies were rejected with reference to provincial human rights codes that only include a fixed list of non-discrimination factors (e.g. race, sex, religion).
Looking at the United Nations’ “global issues” web page on human rights is hugely informative. I will quote their definition of “What Are Human Rights?”, only with the three sentences reordered and emphases added to reflect my understanding:
Human rights include the right to life and liberty, …, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination. Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.
It seems clear that the “regardless…” factors are only given as examples of historic grounds for systematic discrimination of population groups, but that the human rights apply to everyone under any circumstances. In other words, discrimination (i.e. differential granting of fundamental rights) is unacceptable on the basis of any criterion, including those that arise from an individual choice. Obviously, there will have to be some weighing of one person’s or group’s rights against another’s if they conflict, though the extent of that conflict (and the scope of the “choice”) have not been firmly established in the context of the COVID-19 injections.
However, the third sentence in my re-quote is placed first in the UN original. I can’t help but think that progressive collectivists — be they decision-makers, administrators, journalists, or judges — are over-interpreting the “grounds” aspect of human rights and ignoring the comprehensive scope of the rights. Every differential treatment of unvaccinated people should have been tested, in a truly unbiased fashion, against any applicable restrictions. Every case needed to be examined on its merit rather than taking “judicial notice” of contested scientific knowledge. Assessing “the existence and transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19” among “facts so notorious or generally accepted as not to be the subject of debate among reasonable persons”, at the same level as the “time of sunset in the summer” or the “location of Canada-U.S. border”, is laughable.
The authors of the Nature article are just the latest example. They accept the simplistic, if not false, “safe & effective” narrative around the shots and thus explain their results through the view of unvaccinated individuals as “free-riders”, in combination with other stereotypes (trustworthiness, competence) and cultural factors (social norms, cooperativeness). Their own attitude is one of trusting the narrative issued by government authorities, yet their results prove beyond a doubt that we need accountability for the injustices committed in the name of those authorities.
The Nature article underlying my post was under review for over nine months. Early this year, it was made available to the public as a preprint and unbeknownst to me, Dr. Joshua Guetzkow already commented on it at the time. Check out Josh's post, "The Demonization of the Unvaccinated is Nothing New", https://jackanapes.substack.com/p/the-ugly-demonization-of-the-unvaccinated!