Medical Ethics and Vaccine Mandates

Vaccine mandates are nothing new. In fact, they have a very recent history tracing all the way back to the Enlightenment period. This was also the period when vaccinations first arrived as a science. In the history of Russia, the first ever to be vaccinated is believed to be Catherine the Great, who was inoculated against small pox in 1768[1]. The science of vaccination was new at the time and the process was highly dangerous, one had a stronger chance of dying from the inoculation process than one does now. But small pox outbreaks were also terrible. And the Empress Catherine had seen Countess Sheremeteva, whose fiancé, Count Nikita Panin, was her son's mentor. Because of this, Catherine had a great fear of small pox and was willing to do anything. She brought Thomas Dimsdale into her courts whose inoculation procedures were new at the time and had him administer the inoculation to her. She developed a small pox illness which was claimed to have been reduced significantly by the new vaccination method. Loving the new science, she declared as blockheads and wicked in a private letter to her friend Voltaire, any one who refused the treatment[2]. It is unclear if she ever mandated vaccinations though.

At a similar time period, small pox was infecting the Holy Roman Empire at its highest levels of authority. The Empress Maria Theresa became infected with small pox and small pox also claimed the lives of both the wives of the Emperor Joseph II, Isabella of Parma and Maria Josefa. Maria Theresa's daughter Josefa also died from small pox. Voltaire had warned that sixty our of one hundred people were infected with small pox in 1734. Fearing small pox, Maria Theresa began to implement the new biotechnology throughout the Empire, however, people lacked trust in the bureaucratic institutions of the Health Fund. How do you convince people to receive a new medicine when they cannot trust the authorities implementing the medicine? Maria Theresa, much like the Empress Catherine, criticized the peasants who preferred, out of the goodness of their heart, to listen to the wise counsel of God. In her efforts to convince the public, she decided to use orphans as her guinea pigs and mandated that approximately 20-30 orphans throughout the poorhouses in Graz be vaccinated.[3] Today, this would be considered close to a war crime and definitely a violation of children's rights.

In the Duchy of Parma, in the early 1830s, Maria Luigia began the most bureaucratically controlled vaccination campaign which established different incentives and would mete out punishments, such as government aid, refusal to be admitted to hospices, boarding schools, private and public schools. Once again, the process was not necessarily the safest but these had to be done according to the will of the bureaucracy because small pox was "too dangerous".

The inoculation fluid had to be preserved all the year round in the foundling hospice for infants, annexed to the maternity hospital. For fluid we have to intend not only the one preserved in tubes (minimal amount) but the one kept constantly in the hospice with regular grafts from one child to another. The children were the true deposit of the fluid, the small amount preserved in glass tubes was only a reserve in case of failure of engraftment of the vaccinations, thus interrupting the human chain. Today, such a method would certainly be considered unethical and a serious violation of human rights and of children in particular, but for those times was a normal and completely lawful thing.[4]

The process, was not necessarily the most ethical either. And this was not the last time a vaccine mandate would be ordered. We would reach all the way into the early 20th century with the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. A man named Henning Jacobson would refuse to pay a fine to the State of Massachusetts after being ordered to be inoculated with a small pox vaccine he had received when he was younger. He was a Swedish immigrant and had already received a small pox vaccine at a younger age. He did not want it. His case was taken all the way to Supreme Court where the Court ruled in favor of the State of Massachusetts thus establishing a precedent for quite some time that the government has authority over your medical choices. The case was used to justify sterilization. So it was more shocking when the Nuremburg trial of 1947 found the Nazi doctors guilty of medical experimentation on Holocaust victims. The Nuremburg trial essentially reversed the precedents that had been held since the Enlightenment.[6]

And in 1952, Pope Pius XII spoke to a group of medical researchers in a letter titled, "The Moral Limits of Medical Research and Treatment" which further challenged the ethical precedents established by that era of Enlightenment despotism. In it, Pope Pius XII calls into question such a top-down approach. Is a man's duty to the community or does the community exist for man? In the increasingly despotic state produced by the Hobbesian Leviathan, the bureaucratic faceless evil, man's duty is principally for the community. The great postwar trials brought to light a terrifying number of documents testifying to the sacrifice of the individual in the “medical interests of the community.”

25. In the minutes of these trials one finds testimony and reports showing how, with the consent and, at times, even under the formal order of public authority, certain research centers systematically demanded to be furnished with persons from concentration camps for their medical experiments. One finds how they were delivered to such centers, so many men, so many women, so many for one experiment, so many for another. There are reports on the conduct and the results of such experiments, of the subjective and objective symptoms observed during the different phases of the experiments. One cannot read these reports without feeling a profound compassion for the victims, many of whom went to their deaths, and without being frightened by such an aberration of the human mind and heart. But We can also add that those responsible for these atrocious deeds did no more than to reply in the affirmative to the question We have asked and to accept the practical consequences of their affirmation.[7]

But Pope Pius XII corrects this view that was so commonly held before the famous statement of the Nuremburg Code.

28. In the above mentioned cases, insofar as the moral justification of the experiments rests on the mandate of public authority, and therefore on the subordination of the individual to the community, of the individual’s welfare to the common welfare, it is based on an erroneous explanation of this principle. It must be noted that, in his personal being, man is not finally ordered to usefulness to society. On the contrary, the community exists for man.[8]

And thus, he concludes, that ultimately, in the case of administering medicine to man, the following needs consideration:

38. Without doubt, before giving moral authorization to the use of new methods, one cannot ask that any danger or any risk be excluded. That would exceed human possibilities, paralyze all serious scientific research and very frequently be to the detriment of the patient. In these cases the weighing of the danger must be left to the judgment of the tried and competent doctor. Nevertheless, as Our explanation has shown, there is a degree of danger that morality cannot allow. In doubtful cases, when means already known have failed, it may happen that a new method still insufficiently tried offers, together with very dangerous elements, appreciable chances of success. If the patient gives his consent, the use of the procedure in question is licit. But this way of acting cannot be upheld as a line of conduct in normal cases.[9]

A man must be warned of any potential dangers to himself. We are given numbers, not all of them honest, on the current wave of vaccines. Which ones are ethical, which ones are safe, which ones are effective, etc. Even further, we've truly shown ourselves heirs to the Beast of the Enlightenment Despotisms. And while the science on the Anthony Fauci disease and the science of the Anthony Fauci disease vaccines keeps changing, apparently, the Enlightenment science that vaccines eventually stop the spread of transmission or that herd immunity is only acquired through vaccination, or that all must be vaccinated to stop every illness, has been set in stone. This is the sacred science that cannot change under any circumstance. We have already made the conclusion that the vaccines accomplish this goal so there is no consideration, not even based on current numbers in Israel, that the vaccines might actually be failing to do what our leaders have been insisting they would do. We continue to quarantine "fully vaccinated" people who have been infected or reinfected with the Fauci and yet tell with a straight face to our fellow man that the vaccines will stop the spread of transmission. Do we really believe ourselves any more or are we beginning to set up a masquerade to justify how we have given into such power?

1. mos.ru. (2019, September 21). From Catherine the great to the Red hippo: History of vaccination in Russia / news / Moscow CITY web site. Moscow City Web Site. https://www.mos.ru/en/news/item/62002073/.

2. Foussianes, C. (2021, April 30). Catherine the Great, VACCINE QUEEN. Town & Country. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a35091190/catherine-the-great-vaccine-queen/.

3. Winkler, A. (n.d.). The battle against smallpox. Die Welt der Habsburger. https://www.habsburger.net/en/chapter/battle-against-smallpox.

4. Virdis, R. (2019, May 23). The beginning of smallpox vaccination in the Duchy of Parma. Acta bio-medica : Atenei Parmensis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6776211/#!po=1.00000.

5. Henning Jacobson loses his fight with the board of public health OVER VACCINATION. New England Historical Society. (2021, April 29). https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/henning-jacobson-loses-his-freedom-to-the-board-of-public-health/.

6. The Nuremberg Code. (n.d.). http://www.cirp.org/library/ethics/nuremberg/. .pdf

7. The moral limits of medical research and treatment. Papal Encyclicals. (2017, April 25). https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius12/p12psych.htm.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.