This rather striking graph was taken from the most recent COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report from Public Health England. (09/09/21 – link to PDF. Graph is on page 18.) What this demonstrates quite clearly, and many of us have known anecdotally for several months now, is that being double vaccinated doesn’t stop you catching, and one would presume, transmitting the virus. If it doesn’t stop you catching and transmitting the virus, why are so many people supporting the erosion of the civil and human rights of those who have chosen not to take the vaccine? It makes no logical or rational sense from a health perspective. I oppose segregation in general, mainly because I am a scholar of racism and work on other forms of discrimination. But even if you don’t share a general moral and intellectual opposition to discrimination, how can you justify “health”-based apartheid on the basis of the available data?
I think that bodily integrity / autonomy is a human right. I think that I am the only person with the right to make a decision about my body and what happens to it, just as you are the only person who has the right to make decisions about your body. We each are our bodies, and no one should have supremacy over someone else. If bodily integrity is a human right, it is a right at all times and for all people, irrespective of whether you agree with, or approve of, them. Rights are hard lines that are not crossed. They either are, or they are not. If bodily integrity is a human right, then mandatory vaccinations are a violation of that right. If you support mandatory vaccinations outright, or by remaining silent, or by supporting coercive measures designed to take away the civil rights of unvaccinated people by disallowing them access
Who mainly works in care homes? Working class women who are often from the global majority or who are often migrants. Just because they are doing a job that you don’t want to, it doesn’t mean that you own their body. Mandatory vaccinations are a crime. The truth is that, when you made the decision to put your loved one in a care home, you made a decision to put your life first. If not, you would have decided to do the hard work of caring for your loved one yourself. Now, in the most splendid hypocrisy to date, you refuse the right of care workers to make the same decision. You refuse the right of a care worker to put themselves first for a change. The solution here is not to force someone to undergo a medical procedure they do not want, it’s to take your loved one out of
I am writing this because I don’t think there is any sensible, middle-ground opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine programme. Because ordinary people who simply choose not to have the vaccine have to speak in hushed whispers to one another for fear of being shouted down by angry pro-vaccine zealots, for fear of being quietly disowned by people they have known for years, or for fear of being associated with conspiracy theorists who think there are microchips in the vaccine. So I am writing this for you, friend. For the person who simply is reluctant to have the vaccine for their own sensible reasons. For me, that is because I intensely distrust the government, both local and national, because I know they do not have our best interests at heart. By “our”, I mean the proles, the workers, the people who are not rich, the people who are less than not rich,
The world is a shit show, capitalism is a ravaging devil, and in the absence of anything resembling democracy in this country – local or national, I remain convinced that the only way to effect change is non-participation. I haven’t quite figured out how to do that (yet), but in the interim, I reckon supporting small businesses is a decent enough bridge towards something better than the corrupt and unequal world we have. Maybe if we all stop working for the man and start working for ourselves, which means buying from each other, we can start making tiny fractures in the oppressive systems which make it hard for ordinary people to breathe. It is for this reason that I support Black Pound Day. Racism is an ever present evil that needs to be fought on multiple levels at every opportunity. Supporting black entrepreneurs is one way we can cut through the