Were vaccine certificates a threat to liberty or the only option? Study considers if they should ever be used again

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They were contentious, unprecedented and among the policies that drove long-haul truckers from across Canada to overtake Ottawa’s downtown core for nearly a month.

Now a new paper explores under what conditions vaccine certificates should, or shouldn’t ever, be considered again.
“If you look at some of the language used even during the convoy, it was ethics language. It was informed consent; it was around freedom and liberty and coercion,” said co-author Maxwell Smith, director of Western University’s Centre for Bioethics.

“These are profoundly ethical ideas. We need to confront that these are the sorts of concerns that people have and motivate things like the convoy. We need to get ahead of them to actually ask: were these measures coercive? Do they infringe on freedom in a way that we think is unethical or unjust?”
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Future pandemic planning needs to go beyond stockpiling medicines and personal protective gear and building more ICU beds, said Smith. It’s also crucial to grapple with the fraught ethical conflicts COVID raised and ask, “What would we do differently?”

In their recently published paper, Smith and his colleagues propose that as three factors increase — pathogenicity, meaning the ability of the virus to harm the person infected, the prevalence of the virus itself and the protective effects of any vaccine — so, too, do the justifications for considering vaccine certificates.Lower levels, they said, diminish the justification. In addition, “we then need to determine when we, collectively, think a pathogen is ‘sufficiently’ severe, prevalent, etc to. justify the use of vaccine certificates,” Smith said. Higher scores for all three “will provide stronger justification for trade-offs with liberty,” Smith and his co-authors, the University of Ottawa’s Cecile Bensimon and Dr. Kumanan Wilson, wrote.
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Their proposed framework could “quickly and clearly” sweep away arguments for using vaccine certificates, they said. “In other cases, it may offer compelling reasons” to seriously consider their use.

“If we don’t try to answer those questions and maybe try to socialize those answers with the Canadian public, we’ll be facing the exact same protests or confusion or contention with a future threat that we faced during COVID,” Smith said.

Vaccine certificates were deployed during the early waves to enable partial or full reopenings “whilst protecting the public’s health amidst an ongoing pandemic — two important goals for any pandemic response,” the paper says.

They were also widely criticized for violating individual liberty and autonomy, creating a “me-them” environment and even splitting families apart. Critics have called them “scientifically questionable,” polarizing and stigmatizing — part of far-reaching policies that imposed “the largest infringement on civil rights and liberties in living memory.”

They were originally based on several objectives: prevent transmission and make dining indoors and other gatherings safer, and reduce the burden of illness, disease and death. While the shots reduce the risk of severe outcomes, it became clear they weren’t providing “sterilizing” immunity, meaning complete protection. Vaccinated people could still get infected, and infect others. Immunity wanes over months.

An absence of sterilizing immunity — a vaccine that completely interrupts transmission of the virus — weakens the case for vaccine certificates, the paper says. “But it’s not the case that (COVID shots) did absolutely nothing in terms of the reduction of infection or transmission or severe illness,” Smith said.
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Just itching to mandate shots and passports again.
 
Upvote 10
Higher scores for all three “will provide stronger justification for trade-offs with liberty"
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Trade-offs with liberty means authoritarianism. You either have bodily autonomy or you don't, it's not based on a set of arbitrary conditions (lets be honest, they will just lie to get what they want anyway)

Smith and his co-authors, the University of Ottawa’s Cecile Bensimon and Dr. Kumanan Wilson, wrote.
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University of Ottawa is bound to be filled to the brim with piece of shit reds.
 
And they want us purebloods to just let it go that they did this to us one time

What needs to happen is people that were vaxx pushers, vaxx hoaxers, and vaxx makers as well as those that made the passport system all need to be strung up in the trees by their necks till they expire like the milk in your fridge
 
It didn't even make sense. All of our lives we're told that when you are vaccinated, you're now immune, you can't catch it. So why would they care if I take the vaccine or not?


People just accepted that they changed the definition of vaccine.
 
"Ummm, my vaccination protects you, not me sweetie. And it can't protect you unless you have it as well"
 
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