We’re publishing a guest post today by David Martin Jones and Michael Rainsborough, two professors at King’s College London, disputing the claim, often made by libertarian lockdown enthusiasts, that J.S. Mill would have supported mandatory Covid vaccinations.
In a comment piece in the Telegraph on December 22nd, John Harris makes the moral case for mandatory vaccination in the public interest. Harris might have supported his argument by reference to a number of political and moral theorists who, like Harris, have endorsed forcing people to do things against their will in the name the greater good. Kant springs to mind. So too does Jean Jacques Rousseau who thought that securing the ‘General Will’ might require the recalcitrant to be “forced to be free”.
Curiously, however, Harris co-opts John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) to support state mandated Covid vaccines. Harris writes: “It is difficult, in view of the urgency of the global Covid pandemic and the immense death toll and burden of the disease, not to conclude that, in Mill’s famous and uncompromising words, the anti-vaxxers are ‘such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act’.”
What Harris seems to mean is that by refusing to get vaccinated, the vaccine refusenik acts in a way to “do harm to others” and consequently such actions must be controlled “by the active interference of mankind”. But would Mill have construed a refusal to get vaccinated an action directly harming others?
Clearly not. In the introduction to his essay, from which Harris quotes selectively, Mill warns against the potentially despotic power the people may exercise in a modern democracy. This tyranny of the majority operates “chiefly through public authorities”. But it can also operate through society collectively acting upon the “separate individuals who compose it”. “Society can and does execute its own mandates” and when it does so in areas “where it ought not to meddle it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression”.
The rational and autonomous individual, Mill maintained, needs protection against “the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose… its own ideas and practises as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them” to fetter and prevent any “development not in harmony with its ways”. One could call this the tyranny of the medical-socialist state.
To guard against this evolving modern despotism, Mill proposed one very simple principle to govern the dealings of government and society with the individual “in the way of compulsion and control”. That simple principle is that the only end for which a government can legitimately interfere “with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self- protection”.
This, then, is the harm principle that Harris seeks to manipulate for collectivist ends. It in fact recognises that the reasonable individual’s own good, either physical or moral, is “not a sufficient warrant for intervention”. The individual “cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so” or because “to do so would be wise, or even right”.
To be sure, such reasons may be good for remonstrating, reasoning, persuading or entreating with the recalcitrant “but not for compelling him”. To justify compulsion “the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else”. In that part which merely concerns him or herself, the anti-vaxxer’s “independence is, of right, absolute”. On this point Mill insists: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” He continues: “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way… each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual”.
Harris’s case for compulsory Covid vaccination rests on a highly questionable interpretation of the harm principle: namely, minimising societal distress by seeking to reduce avoidable death, hospitalisations and excessive pressure on the NHS. However, with an infection fatality rate of a little over 0.2% and an average age of death from Covid above the age of 80, the case seems hardly compelling, since the social risk does not deviate all that significantly from most winter flu seasons. The fact that vaccinations do not prevent infection or transmission further reduces the force of the argument.
All individuals, when they step out into the world risk bringing unintentional harm – to themselves and others – whether driving a car, going for a walk, or meeting with friends. Everyday life involves all manner of potential hazards. The point is, though, that an individual’s engagement in the routines of daily life is in, the vast majority of instances, not “calculated to produce evil to someone else”.
Thus, enlisting Mill on the side of compulsion because vaccine refusal might indirectly harm others, on the grounds it places undue pressure on the NHS, conceptually stretches and ultimately undermines Mill’s ‘simple principle’. Mill was a utilitarian and a moral consequentialist. He also lived in a laissez faire age. There was no NHS in Mill’s day. If there had been, he would quite possibly have argued that if a responsible adult refused the vaccination the NHS offered to prevent an infectious disease, the individual would either forego any right to NHS treatment or be required to pay the cost of his care. Actions, after all, have consequences.
As numerous libertarian commentators on Mill have pointed out, the distinction between self-regarding and other regarding actions is paramount. Simplifying the distinction, Karl Popper, whom Harris quotes, observed “my freedom to swing my arm stops at your nose”. The point, of course, is that it is my arm and I have a sovereign right over whether I choose to have it vaccinated or not. After all: “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” To conflate a purely self-regarding act with an other regarding one is not merely perverse but politically dangerous, as Mill would no doubt have recognised.
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So when the Fascist pigs want to terrify their own people, each scariant is deadlier than the last, including the Kentiscariant. But when Macron wants to score a point against Britain (how very novel for a French leader!), our Fascists suddenly find that the Kentiscariant is a tame lapdog.
Well well.
I am not giving Macron a ‘pass’ here, he should have resisted the enormous pressure from his ‘experts’ that sometimes make SAGE look like poodles. But in his speech he was careful not to phrase reference to the Kent ‘variant’ as if it was a ‘britsh/brexit’ issue, which is how most of the UK MSM and this article are painting it. This doesn’t help anyone.
I agree that the almost linear rise in ‘cases’ is more a function of increase tests than anything else, but its also reflected in numbers of hospitalisations and ICU admissions, again in a linear increase.
This is highly unusual behaviour for a virus. There is no explanation I have seen for this.
I suspect some of the numbers are very suspect, and are part of an attempt to convince at least part of the 50% of the French population that are saying no to vaccination.
If people will need a booster jab in September that’s billions more in profit for big pharma and another reason to reintroduce restrictions if there is a seasonal rise in cases before everyone has their booster. I wonder who is lobbying who to push the largely nonexistant dangers of all these variants.
Since viruses continously mutate, and presumably have done for hundreds of millions of years it seems obvious that the immune system would evolve to be able to fight variants of a virus as well as the strain that is currently circulating. Any organism that was immune against new variants and not just the old one would have a competative advantage and be more likely to pass on the genes for developing this immunity. This is another reason why it would’ve been better to allow the virus to spread among people at low risk of serious illness. Natural herd immunity is likely to be better than vaccine induced immunity. Sadly this is one more basic principle of biology/virology that the “experts” seem to have ignored, for reasons only they can know.
Not yet.
A few months ago someone leaked the contract. They can choose to make a profit from July, if I recall correctly
It depends on who gets to call the end of the emergency at which point
1. AstraZeneca can start charging market rates.
2. Authorisation for use under ’emegency’ provisions must surely be called into question ?
… which gives the rationale for continually upping the ante in terms of new Scary Fairies, and continuing the suppression of possible cheap prophylactics like Ivermectin.
They are experimenting on millions of subjects for free, whilst getting lots of coverage, that’s a nice win-win
Your link to the PHE study is hilariously, embarrassingly wrong.
It is actually the link to a BMJ study (March 10) concluding that the Kent variant is indeed much more deadly.
Please provide the correct link.
Yes – even in the report written by the “Swiss Doctor” there is only a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph. The study seems not to have been published (or peer reviewed) yet, and its existence is only known due to a press conference at 10 Downing Street.
There could be an easy explanation for increased hospitalization rate not accompanied by higher mortality rate. The propensity to admit could have been increased compared to the first wave ie less sick cases admitted. The health care sytem did not collapse in the first wave might increase “overhospitalization” ie doctors admit more,knowing it would have less effect on the system. Really the excess mortality and the the true C-19 mortality is the only way to estimate if a variant really is more dangerous.
The Swizz doctor is a bit leaning to van den Bosche scenario saying if neutral antbodies are affected as above could be problematic although they allude to something called T-cells immunity. But another study published a few days ago,again showed that T cells have a broad immunity incl. against variant.
One would bet that natural acquired immunity ,is the most effective T cells response as known by everybody pre 2020 and that an artificial immunity like vaccine can never come up to that level. The article above is down here
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofab143/6189113#.YGTXD75sdDQ.twitter
CD8+ T cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals target conserved epitopes from multiple prominent SARS-CoV-2 circulating variants
This study examined whether CD8+ T-cell responses from COVID-19 convalescent individuals (n=30) potentially maintain recognition of the major SARS-CoV-2 variants suggesting that virtually all anti-SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T-cell responses should recognize these newly described variants.