EDITOR’S NOTE: Rhodes University’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccine policy is being challenged in the high court by a group of Rhodes University staff and students named Makhanda Against Mandates (MAM). The interdict will be argued in the high court on March 1.
The Rhodes University Council approved the vaccination mandate in October 2021. In an email earlier this month, the University’s Communication and Advancement Division stated that anyone who wished to access campus “should either provide proof of vaccination with a South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) approved vaccine, or an exemption from vaccination issued by the University”.
MAM wants to prevent the university from refusing to register unvaccinated students or placing unvaccinated staff on unpaid or annual leave. MAM believes the university’s vaccine exemption policy – which is based on medical or religious grounds – is too narrow, and that it is unreasonable to require exempted staff and students to take weekly Covid-19 tests at their own expense.
In November 2021, before MAM was founded, Rhodes University philosophy professor Francis Williamson wrote an open letter to the Rhodes University community in which he outlined scientific and moral objections to the vaccine mandate. In the interests of public debate, the letter is reprinted here.
An open letter to the Rhodes University community
By FRANCIS WILLIAMSON, Department of Philosophy, Rhodes University
Dear Members of the Rhodes University Community,
Last year, following the recommendation of the Senate, the Rhodes University Council decided to impose a vaccine mandate on the entire university, beginning in 2022.
This is a terrible decision, in my opinion. Not only is it immoral, but it also has no scientific/medical rationale and will likely do far more harm than good. It presents impossible choices for many in our community and will impose needless hardships on many more. Rather than demonstrating that this is a place where leaders learn, this decision will likely be remembered as loudly declaring the very opposite: this is a place where we mindlessly and fearfully follow the panicked herd.
What’s more, and far worse, this is an authoritarian and illiberal decision that blatantly and shamelessly tramples the rights of individuals without proper regard for either science or morality. Our university should not go down this path. The vaccine mandate arrogates to the university the supposed right to coerce and threaten staff and students to have an experimental serum injected into their bodies that they may neither want nor need. On the face of it, such a draconian intervention is morally objectionable in itself. Individuals surely have the unmistakable right to decide for themselves what goes into their bodies. That right can arguably be mitigated, if at all, only in the most extreme and dire of circumstances, such as when doing so is directly required as the only way to protect public order and the common good of the institution or society.
This is a primary point of morality and respect for individual freedoms. The rights of individuals to determine what goes into their bodies and which medical interventions they accept can only be abrogated in the most extreme of situations. Furthermore, this fundamental right is given clear expression in Article 1 of the Nuremberg Code governing permissible medical experimentation, which enshrines the absolute need for free, uncoerced and informed consent.
The crucial question is whether we are in such an extreme situation right now, which would warrant a curtailing of individual rights in this regard. This is a prudential judgement about a matter of fact, and in the nature of the case, we should expect some disagreement and uncertainty. But the moral seriousness of what is being proposed by the vaccine mandate requires that we be as sure as we possibly can about this. And it is here that I think the university itself has not done its due intellectual diligence but is operating from a sense of fear and panic. Please permit me to explain the reasoning.
There are two pertinent questions we need to address to get a proper fix on this:
(a) is the public order and common good of our institution so directly and massively threatened by the Covid crisis that ordinary rights can be suspended, and (b) is it true that requiring that ALL get vaccinated is the only solution to the alleged crisis?
Despite the endless scaremongering and media hype about this, the short answer to both questions is a clear negative. No, absolutely not! We are, in fact, very far from it. The Covid crisis does not represent an extreme existential threat to the university, nor would complete compliance with a vaccine mandate address the problem. There is, therefore, no moral or scientific warrant for overriding individual rights and introducing a vaccine mandate.
Consider the following:
More or less 99% of people will readily survive getting Covid and develop robust and durable
immunity without the vaccine. (See, for example, the report developed by Prof John Ioannidis for the WHO. Also, see here for evidence that natural immunity is equal or superior to vaccine immunity.)
The vaccine can neither be guaranteed to prevent anyone from getting Covid nor prevent the
transmission of the Sars Cov2 virus? (Vaccinated and unvaccinated people have more or less the same infection and transmission rates. The idea that the present legacy rather than delta-specific vaccines will protect people from Covid and make the work environment transmission-free is scientific hokum. It probably won’t do either of those things. We now know this based on many studies detailing the experience, especially in Israel and the UK. See, for example, this recently published study from The Lancet. The Bloomberg report on this summarised it as follows: “People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots.” See also this University of Wisconsin study.)
The vaccine is nowhere near as safe as we might have hoped and expected and is also positively
unsafe for many? Many people are more at risk of the vaccination than at risk from Covid. This is especially true of teenagers and those younger, but it can readily and plausibly be applied to our main student cohort, most of whom are below age. (See, for instance, this report from The Guardian. The Covid vaccines have seen a dramatic increase in the number of adverse effects, orders of magnitude larger than all the vaccines combined for the last 30 years. Nobody at this stage knows what the long-term consequences of this experimental gene therapy will be, but there are good grounds for supposing that they may well be disastrous. More than a few epidemiologists predict precisely this, including Nobel-winner for Medicine Luc Montagnier. See here.)
There is no scientifically verified correlation between increased vaccine distribution in a population
and decreased infection rates. The evidence seems to better confirm the very opposite. (See here for instance.) Many cities, counties and countries are now showing rates of Covid hospitalisation and death among the vaccinated in excess of their vaccination rate. This means that vaccines are not working as intended in keeping people out of hospitals. This is admittedly not the most scientific reference for this claim, but the raw data can be accessed from this site.
The present mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines work by getting your body to produce vast amounts of the Sars Cov2 virus spike protein (the part of the virus whereby it opens a cell to infect it), which then triggers an immune response to that spike protein rendering the virus itself noneffective. But these vaccines were developed on the false and scientifically mistaken assumption that the spike protein itself is harmless and biologically inactive? It is, in fact, pathogenic, a toxin, and is probably responsible for the huge numbers of vaccine injuries we have seen. We now know that the spike protein itself is a pathogen and can produce most of the symptoms of Covid all by itself and is the likely cause of the uptick in adverse vaccine incidents of myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis and vascular disease, etc. The Salk Institute reported early warning signs of this in March of 2021. It has since been repeatedly confirmed in other studies. See here for the initial worry.
The list of indicators can go on. They all show either that we do not have the grave existential crisis the mandate presupposes, or they show that the vaccine is not the universal panacea commonly supposed.
The point is that it simply beggars belief that a scientifically literate institution such as this can blithely ignore the evidence as though the facts don’t matter when it is the very facts themselves that determine the moral validity of what is being proposed. How on earth can a vaccine mandate make sense when it is readily ascertainable that Covid is neither the dreaded disease the hype supposes nor is the vaccine the only effective and safe solution we all might have wanted it to be? The extreme situation that could warrant a mandate has just not materialised. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the clamour favouring the mandate derives more from fear, ignorance and wishful thinking than informed scientific thinking. This is most certainly not an adequate basis for disregarding the rights of others.
Consider that even if 100% of Rhodes students and staff are vaccinated, the chances are that this by itself will likely not prevent infection and transmission at our university. The vaccine neither protects you from infection nor prevents you from transmitting the virus to others, even though the evidence seems to suggest that it does protect you somewhat from serious disease and death. But insisting that the person next to you gets vaccinated does nothing to keep you safe. Even worse, the vaccine is probably unsafe for a good many in our community as well, especially our students. Why then insist on everyone getting the shot? How on earth is mandatory vaccination of the entire Rhodes community to help us defeat the disease? It can’t. And it won’t. Sadly, it won’t even prevent hospitalisation and death for those most at risk. This we now know. The proposed measure of compulsory vaccination is irrational and unscientific and an instance of head-in-the-sand wishful thinking. It might give us a feeling of safety, but emotions cannot usurp the place of sound scientific and moral thinking. The idea that a vaccine mandate is the only way to secure the safety and health of the students and staff of the university from the threat of Covid 19 is fundamentally baseless and misguided.
And being baseless, it simply cannot provide the required moral justification for disregarding the basic rights of others to choose what medical treatments they prefer and what goes into their bodies. There is no moral basis for such a draconian diktat. Sadly, it seems, this is a prime example of an institution merely following the mainstream narrative (the herd) rather than courageously following the actual science and leading the way in developing alternate and more evidence-based strategies.
We try to teach our students to speak truth to power and to question the narrative, especially the mainstream narrative, but then we spectacularly fail to do this ourselves when it comes to challenging the highly curated and fear-driven narrative surrounding the Covid crisis.
What is the alternative to a compulsory vaccine? This is a matter of science and is completely outside my field of expertise. I don’t quite know. But it surely is not hard to notice that early treatment therapies the world over have had remarkable success if one would but look and see. (Many leading medical practitioners in South Africa and abroad have developed impressively successful techniques/therapies for dealing with Covid, some with close to 100% effectiveness. The regime developed by the American Front Line Covid Critical Care Alliance has had some spectacular successes. See here. Or see here for more on evidence-based approaches to early Covid treatment.
Supporting both natural immunity (for those previously infected) and early out-patient treatments might well turn out to be part of a better comprehensive strategy, as many medical specialists are urging. See, for instance, Dr Peter McCullough on early treatment versus vaccines here.
It would take scientific courage to buck the lazy mainstream narrative that the vaccine is our only hope. It is not. These are failed or very limited vaccines. That is what science points to. So not only is the vaccine mandate scientifically baseless, but it is also morally objectionable. Coercing people into choosing between an unwanted vaccine and their jobs/livelihood/place at the university when there is no grave, and imminent threat is draconian, insensitive and just plain wrong. It is not who we are or want to be.
Regardless of your personal choice to take a vaccine or not, our institutional failure to revisit our basic assumptions about the efficacy and safety of the current crop of vaccines will impose profoundly onerous hardships on many individuals. We have no right to do this. While doing the right thing here is certainly not easy, we should all recognise that both intellectual honesty and sound morality require that we go down that more difficult route if we must. Ignoring the evidence is not an option. We have an obligation to seriously consider various early treatment therapies and support these for our staff and students rather than threaten them with impossible choices.
One last matter: does the university know how many people will be negatively affected by the mandate? How many people will prefer to lose their jobs rather than be bullied into taking a vaccine they do not want? Might there be many members of staff and students who would rather lose their place at the university than compromise their right to choose and not have someone else dictate what medical treatments they should have? Has a survey been done? Might it be the case that rather than doing good and protecting our institution, we, in fact, are bringing more harm to our community by prematurely and needlessly adopting this strategy? Is the university prepared to pay for every instance of vaccine harm caused at its direction, as seems to be legally required?
I do not know the answers to these questions, but I recognise them as important. Failure to adequately address them is not only an intellectual failure, but it is also a moral failure.
We should exercise a lot more caution before going down the path of mandatory vaccines. We should reject that option entirely. There is another way that is morally preferable, scientifically more respectable, and far more in keeping with our stated ethos of leading the way.
Yours sincerely,
Francis Williamson
(These views are my own and do not in any way reflect those of the Philosophy Department or Rhodes University.)
