A couple of decades ago in the state of Victoria, Australia, the public health fraternity considered the advisability of banning or regulating rock fishing. The authoritarian response to COVID-19 in the same place two decades later was not coincidental. Both stem from a fundamental human desire to control others – to force dictates on them for their own good. Within the current debates on ‘medical freedom’ and vaccination, this desire puts those calling for vaccine mandates and those calling for banning them on essentially the same side. The other side, the side of the public, is incompatible with the self-promotion and approbation that our definitions of success require and will always remain so.
Rock fishing regulations were proposed for two reasons. Firstly, the specialty of ‘public health physician’ was relatively new and needed justification, much in the way that a pandemic industry must find ever-increasing pandemic risks or dentists must find decaying teeth. As numbers increase, any profession, guild or class of workers must expand its scope to justify its existence. In public health, existential threats like boxing, community barbecues and rock fishing are staples.
Secondly, rock fishing has a low but real mortality, as it is tempting to stand right on the furthest rocks, where freak waves hit the hardest. Some people like catching fish or spending hours trying to, and this is heightened for many by being on a rugged coastline with dramatic scenery and crashing surf. Some people, like me, are attracted to this, as others are to fires, waterfalls or rock concerts. Each to their own in our wonderfully diverse species.
I used to quote this rock fishing regulatory fetish as an obvious example of public health overreach; if someone wants to go rock fishing, they clearly should be free to do so (I thought). If someone warns them of the risk of unexpectedly big waves, warning signs are erected here and there and perhaps schools provide some basic education on the strength of waves and the hardness of rocks, all the better. They may still die, or they may die in the car on the way there or sitting in front of their TV watching a fishing show whilst eating pizza. At least while fishing – probably the least likely of these alternatives through which they will depart this life – they will see a decent spectacle on the way out.
On returning to post-Covid Victoria last year, I learned that rock fishing remained an issue. Victoria, people may recall, had been a centre of global medical fascism for three or four years. Its capital, Melbourne, confined its people to more days of home detention than any other city on earth. For context, the videos of police in black body armour throwing people to the ground, arresting people on park benches or grabbing them by the throat, and firing rubber bullets at those protesting against such novel public health approaches, were taken in Melbourne’s streets.
In general conversation, the need for rock fishing regulations surfaced, but Covid-related police violence did not. A large part of the Australian population still believes their governments saved them from chaos. In the Australian mind, the role of governments, of experts, is to keep people safe from themselves. The role of the people is to comply with such obviously good ideas. Most Australians have never been invaded, enslaved or had their land stolen, so they just trust their government. Under this utopian illusion, such an authoritarian approach almost looks rational. Surely the people in charge always mean well?
Banning mRNA to impose a purer form of freedom
This is where this whole story gets awkward. Many people who bravely opposed the lockdowns, forced face coverings, coerced vaccination, the banning of potentially useful drugs and the sometimes brutal authoritarianism that accompanied them have now made ‘medical freedom’ a prominent cause. Not freedom, but medical freedom, which looks increasingly like an inferior but more manageable version of freedom itself.
Medical freedom, in this context, is about protecting people from bad others (e.g. Pharma) by banning bad things that the ill-intentioned others foist on them. This requires imposing their own ‘expertise’ in place of those they oppose. Many such people are accusing the new US administration of betrayal for not banning mRNA Covid vaccines rapidly enough. They have all the same reasons that are piled against rock fishing: there is little hard evidence of benefit, and plenty of evidence of harm.
Nearly all people survive rock fishing, just as they nearly all survive Covid vaccines (even mRNA ones). If I told someone that the sea around Victoria is always flat, waves never vary by more than six inches, and they are always assured of catching good, omega-3-rich fish, then I would be lying to them. I would have lied about the risks they face, and (sadly) lied about the benefits. If I convince them to go fishing on this basis and they die after a freak wave, I will be morally liable.
Similarly, a public health physician could tell the same person to take a new pharmaceutical on the basis that it is likely to save them from severe illness or death, and tell them it has been extensively tested and major side effects are extremely rare (e.g. it is “safe and effective”). If they knew that others had had significant adverse outcomes, or that these were theoretically likely and not tested for (e.g. as in the use of mRNA vaccines in healthy humans), they would be similarly responsible for bad outcomes. In their position of influence as a professional ‘expert’, they would be far more at fault than a random person misinforming regarding rock fishing.
The duty of the health professions, clearly, is to inform people about health and health interventions as fully as they can, to the extent that people are interested in hearing. They have a duty (and are paid) to investigate potential interventions and ensure that their advice is accurate and reasonably up to date. Informed consent, the basis of modern medical ethics, requires this.
However, the hardest thing for a public health physician, or scientist investigating pharmaceutical harms, or lawyer litigating them, is to stop there. We think we know better than most people – and on the technical aspects of this subject, we should. However, we don’t know best what each person prefers, just what we think they should prefer. That is a difference that is very hard for many people to swallow, including many in the ‘medical freedom movement’.
We are all born with the freedom to make stupid choices, or different choices, whether they involve rock fishing on a Saturday afternoon with a strong easterly forecast or taking a tenth booster brought to us by Pfizer. Despite its history of fraud, we all have the freedom to trust Pfizer should we wish. If Pfizer misleads us and presents false or deliberately misleading evidence – or anyone else in the chain of profit does – then we have laws to address potential fraud or malpractice. If those laws are failing, we need to fix them.
We also have brains that, if faced with overwhelming evidence of risk outweighing benefit, will influence market forces to make the product unviable. If it remains viable, that is because free people will have decided that, for them in their place, they like the idea of an antibody boost. I don’t; I think much of what we have been told on that equates to superstition, but it’s their call to interpret differently. They may also go base jumping tomorrow, and I think I never will.
Life is complicated, but we just need to deal with it
There are a lot of arguments against this primacy of individual freedom. There is undeniable evidence of misdirection (e.g. vaccine stops transmission) and persuasive evidence of outright fraud and suppression of data involved in the regulatory submissions for Covid mRNA vaccines. If this is sufficient to invalidate the approvals and no new evidence mitigates this, then approvals should be withdrawn and the process undertaken properly. This is not a ban – we commonly use drugs off-label – but it allows the public to know that evidence for benefit over harm is poor. This is essential for informed consent, and so something absolutely fundamental to the role of regulatory agencies. It’s not a ban – it is a withdrawal of official approval.
Young fit children and young adults are at near zero risk for severe Covid. Therefore, knowingly reprogramming the dividing cells of a foetus to produce a toxic protein, such as by injecting Covid mRNA vaccines into pregnant women, would require overwhelming evidence of safety before even being considered. As evidence indicates that the mRNA concentrates in the ovaries of young girls (and presumably unborn ones), and that in the very limited pregnant animal studies the vaccinated group had far more foetal abnormalities than the control group, the evidence is clearly in the other direction. Pfizer avoided follow-up of women who became pregnant during their trial. However, the use of any pharmaceutical should take into account the status of the patient or subject, so these issues can again be addressed by following normal practice. Giving a substance to someone where the evidence is clearly against benefit and in favour of harm carries penalties for medical negligence. While these may have been abrogated during Covid, the answer is not to restrict the public, but to fix corruption of the process.
Finally, no rational approach can include freedom from liability for the manufacturers who are actively pushing and advertising these products. Such an approach is clearly ludicrous, irrespective of the fact that it exists. The fact that some of the main beneficiaries, such as Pfizer and Merck, have specific histories of fraud and sacrificing lives for profit just underlines how unjustifiable – but important to these companies – such a liability-free regime is. For informed consent to work, drug companies need to be incentivised to tell the truth, not to withhold it.
While such problems can be fixed, the process will still be imperfect (because we are humans). Professionals cannot keep up with every fact and study and will sometimes be wrong. However, ignoring obvious facts and not bothering to learn are outside of acceptable conduct. We have rules on this. It is also why we have institutions like the CDC to provide guidance. As they are guiding vast numbers of prescribers, their responsibility is all the greater. Claiming without evidence that, for instance, injection with a new pharmaceutical (such as an mRNA vaccine) will protect others or is safe in pregnancy would clearly cross the line of acceptable conduct. When this happens, we need to address the institution and those leading it, not penalise the public.
Wanting to ban the public from free choice for their own good is not unlike supporting bans on incorrect speech in order to save democracy. Such arguments only stand if the opinion of a proclaimed ‘expert’ or ‘authority’ is more important than the free choice of a member of the public. They only work in an intrinsically unequal society. Unequal societies are, in the end, feudal rather than free. If people are truly equal, then each has the final say over their own bodies. The freedom of others is the hardest thing to accept, but also the thing most worth fighting for.
We need to die fishing
So, banning Covid vaccines is, broadly, in the same category of societal endeavours as banning rock fishing, ivermectin and base jumping. It’s not primarily about safety or efficacy, but about whether we are all born equal and free. Many health practitioners have disgraced their professions over recent years by misleading the public on the efficacy and safety of vaccines, and the risk of the diseases they purport to address. That is no reason to join them. But it is a reason to support the efforts of those now scrambling to catch up with data and get accurate information out.
Democracy depends on our willingness to allow others to say what we consider deeply wrong. Bodily autonomy has the same basis. If someone wants to make a choice regarding their health, whether it’s raising the probability of a shorter life by over-eating carbohydrates or having the next Moderna shot, they may do so if they find a provider who, in good faith, after sufficiently assessing the substance and their context, considers it appropriate. The clinic and the fast-food outlet have more in common than money generation.
I reserve the right to go rock fishing, and for my children to do so. It is on me to ensure we are careful – but like driving to the library, I know it will not be entirely risk-free. Medical freedom means granting others the same right, not a set of rules that we, their self-proclaimed betters, dictate. Rather die on a rock than be enslaved to another’s expert definition of freedom.
Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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I’m more than happy for Pfizer to produce whatever drugs it wants and try to sell them, and for people to buy them should they choose. Also more than happy for people to produce, buy and sell cocaine.
Just don’t give them immunity from prosecution or the stamp of approval from some fake regulatory quango, or provide these drugs free or with a subsidy using my money, or have doctors and nurses paid with my money push them on people.
It’s the pharma companies that sit there at the top of the financial food chain dictating health policy to everything downstream, like the regulators and health services. The MHRA don’t bite the hand that feeds… if Pfizer or AstraZeneca say jump they say “how high?”. The drugs they produce are only approved pending INTERNAL trials (probably no risk assessments) with no external regulation.
In the scenatrios you describe we also need a means of internalising to the suppliers and/or users the costs which would otherwise fall on the rest of us.
Why, for example, should the public at large bear the risks of serious injury or death from a cannabis user who has developed mental illness. Why should we have to pay the costs of treatment and care for such people (and also likely the cost of continued consumption because it would be treated as their right to continue to use even when in secure institutions).
That’s a fair point though I am not in favour of giving free drugs to prisoners- in fact I am not sure I’d want prisoners to use drugs or alcohol at all, even in the unlikely event they could pay market price.
I am now almost paranoid about anything that smells of socialism, but I think it’s a reasonable argument you are making. On the other hand lots of people use drugs and alcohol and do no particular harm to society.
I think you are presupposing that legislation would lead to a significant increase in use and that the increase would lead to more collateral damage.
Perhaps there is evidence for that, though from my experience getting hold of illegal drugs seems very easy and most people who want to are able and willing to do so.
Putting the cost partly onto the supplier is a possible approach though it socialises the cost across a user base many of whom may not cause societal problems.
I agree. Key point is that the tax payer is funding this.
Lots of medicines are not available for free because of failing the cost/benefit test (the job of NICE).
The problem with this approach is that the means by which these vaccines reached full authorisation was irregular to say the least, and PMS is hopelessly in denial about the possibility that sudden cardiac deaths, neuropathies and turbocancers could be vaccine related.
We can’t be in a situation that Pharma gets to put dangerous drugs out there and just let the public choose. We are watching the next health disaster unfolding now with weight loss drugs with this approach.
The only way to restore public trust now, as Bhattacharya has proposed, is the equivalent to a full Morbidity & Mortality conference on what has gone wrong. Only then can we move forward to a proper regulatory framework, shorn of all commercial influence.
A preventive medicine physician, employed at the FDA as Deputy Commissioner since 2019, recants at a recent “Make America Healthy Again” round table…
https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/top-fda-official-admits-she-refused
…One of the most powerful figures at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has admitted she refused the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine while pregnant—even as her agency promoted it as “safe and effective” for all pregnant women.
“Knowing what I knew—not only about nanotechnology, about medicine, about the medical countermeasures—but also having a very strong and firm grounding in bioethics… there were many things that were not right.”
Medical autonomy for me but not for thee.
Freedom Means Medical Autonomy
Carry on rock fishing as much as you like, is my opinion, but how about just leaving foetuses alone?
The idea that “knowingly reprogramming the dividing cells of a foetus to produce a toxic protein, such as by injecting Covid mRNA vaccines into pregnant women, would require overwhelming evidence of safety before even being considered” is totally repugnant, even leading aside the overwhelming evidence there was no ‘pandemic’. There is nothing to consider, in my opinion.
The Exposé recently published the article “Childhood vaccines cause autism, a review of 850 studies concludes” (https://expose-news.com/2025/05/27/childhood-vaccines-cause-autism/), admonishing the US recommended 76 vaccinations (the first being given one hour after birth).
How about reconsidering the whole idea of whether vaccination is ever a good thing?
Agreed. The medical fraternity has shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted.
Bodily autonomy is one of the CORE natural rights (these predate the often nonsensical concept of “human right” – such as, the right to family life. You fucking what?)
Without bodily autonomy, your body belongs to the state, they can do to it what they want, which means – you are a slave.
The author appears to have no idea of the real harm that these toxic mRNA injections have caused across the Western world. We are hopefully just beginning to get the people to understand that we have been subjected to an unprecedented crime against humanity. By March 2021 VAERS and Yellow Card data was screaming stop, but the regulators, bought and paid for by Pharma were silent and complicit, withholding data, obfuscating and lying where necessary to maintain the “safe and effective” mantra.
Medical ethics established over a hundred years ago were thrown out of the window. First do no harm was thrown into the waste paper bin, and informed consent and bodily autonomy sneered at.
Medical journals disgraced themselves and trashed their reputation. The media appeared to be in receipt of significant globalist elite donations in return for propaganda and silence. Coordinated instructions and control were peddled out in lock step across countries. We don’t need a Covid enquiry burning millions of taxpayers money. Nothing less than Nuremberg 2 is required and the total ruination of the Big pharmaceutical companies to pay for the £Bns in compensation. Fraud makes indemnity null and void.