There is a brilliant freely accessible short story The Lottery written by Shirley Jackson in 1948. The Hunger Games is the contemporary version.

The moral of these stories is as follows:

‘We should not blindly follow traditional and/or popular paradigms without moral consideration of our conduct.’

Human sacrifice atrocities ‘for the good of society’ abound in history. Ultimately, for those forced to participate in such a lottery, the public interest is assigned a greater weight than individual liberties (essentially the right to live, work, and exist). Regardless of the objective or intention, these sorts of death lotteries are fundamentally immoral.

We find ourselves with a similar moral dilemma of an enforced ‘death/harm lottery’ in the form of vaccine mandates which are marketed ‘for the good of society’ or as ‘a civic duty’.

Morality has nothing to do with safety and efficacy.

We know that crimes such as murder and assault breach natural law. Sacrificing people to appease gods via the virgins-in-volcanoes approach was supposed to have disappeared centuries ago exactly because we recognised the moral calculus of human sacrifice as a death lottery – they were atrocities…

And yet with Covid vaccine mandates, we return to such primitive practices ‘for the greater good’. We have reached the point where vaccination, above all else, has become our paradigm.

But it is not just natural law that is breached by mandates. Mandates are patently illegal and prosecutions should proceed to restore the balance.

How so?

Effectively, a vaccine mandate (and the consequent societal segregation) creates a real ‘game’ of Russian roulette.

If I forced someone to play Russian roulette the traditional way, I would be criminally prosecuted.

Even though Covid vaccination carries with it a smaller risk of harm, it does not change the fact that within forced vaccination there are statistically some people who will die and many more who will be harmed. The percentage risk doesn’t matter. That the vaccines have serious side effects, including death, means they are, by definition, a death lottery.

Public health officers, elected representatives, and political leaders knew this (to some extent).

Efficacy and risk-benefit analysis are not part of the moral calculations of mandates. Risk-benefit is, however, critically relevant to informed consent, which can only be given in the absence of undue pressure, coercion, or manipulation. Informed consent is impossible for patients to give when considered in the context of government messaging and advertising campaigns on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.

A person should have the ability to decide if their risk from vaccination outweighs the risk of disease.

If a vaccine works and the benefit exceeds the risks, then choosing the vaccine is the winning choice. All that is needed is transparent education, providing people with sufficient information to make an informed choice. But it is still a choice.

A mandate precludes choice. Choice and mandates are mutually exclusive and present individuals with the dilemma of ‘choosing’ between two violent actions: financial and emotional ruin (through unemployment) versus the real potential for physical bodily harm.

The syllogism is simple. These sorts of lotteries are immoral and do not reflect ‘civic responsibility’. It does not help that the Covid vaccination campaign carries significantly more risk than any recent vaccine program.

Any mandatory vaccination is immoral. There should be no coercion of any kind for people to vaccinate, else those coercing others are morally guilty of participating in causing harm, wherever and whenever a death occurs. Anyone supporting mandates shamefully played a part in this coercion, including silent bystanders who now have a chance to speak up.

What can be done to stop this from happening again?

We could fix our state and federal Public Health Acts to preclude vaccine mandates and harmful lockdowns; fix our Biosecurity Act to preclude vaccine passports to participate in society; fix our Employment/Fair Work Act to ensure medical privacy is re-established and preclude discrimination on the basis of attributes (vaccination status); and finally, we could fix our regulatory bodies to ensure transparency and informed consent are paramount, and to prevent bullying – TGA, ATAGI, AHPRA.

Professor Brendan Vote (adapted from Coquin de Chien).