Americans may wonder how their Revolutionary nemesis across the pond is faring in the battle between COVID restrictions and civil liberties. Well, the world is being drowned in a rising tide of two-tier medical apartheid — and Britain is no longer exempt.
It began with retired doctor David Lloyd endorsing the United Kingdom following Austria, Germany, and Greece in imposing indefinite lockdowns and punitive fines on people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19. Then “Good Morning Britain”ran a Twitter poll asking viewers if the government should make vaccination mandatory. The poll registered 89 percent of 42,663 votes against and was deleted.
Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced at a press conference that vaccine passports would be introduced in response to the Omicron variant (which the U.K. reported its first death with this week). Despite promises that COVID certification will only apply to nightclubs, we’ve seen the scheme expanded to other venues in neighboring nations Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, across Europe, and in New York.
U.S. diners have been arrested for sitting in Applebee’s without New York’s mandated medical papers. The rising tide of vaccine apartheid policies drowning Europe and Democrat states shows no signs of retreating. Then, most shockingly of all, the prime minister stated a “national conversation” needed to be had about mandating vaccination.
Afterwards, academics, journalists, and Baroness Karen Brady appropriated the Soviet’s antisemitic term “refuseniks” to condemn those unwilling to take a COVID vaccine. The apparatuses of state, media, and academia moved in lockstep to normalize the punishment, ostracism, and confiscation of bodily autonomy from the unvaccinated.
As somebody who cannot take any of the offered booster jabs, it terrifies me that health-care workers — whom the British public venerated every Thursday evening during the pandemic — and so-called “libertarian” politicians now support making me a second-class citizen due to my medical condition.
My Need for a Medical Exemption
After one bite of walnut-laced carrot cake laid me out for hours, I was diagnosed with severe anaphylaxis at age nine, and have carried two EpiPens at all times for the last 14 years. When the lengthy waiting list for the U.K’s socialized health service cleared and I finally received my allergy test, my arms came up in more hives than a honey farm.
Ever since, I’ve had to awkwardly request waiters check the recipes at restaurants, examine every label in supermarkets, and skip out on eating most cakes and chocolate products, in case an embarrassing death lies behind the first bite. I’ve even inadvertently ruined flights with the announcement that a passenger aboard the plane is liable to die if someone is sold a Snickers, eliciting groans from hungry airline passengers.
But this Achilles Heel in my immune system taught me to be as resilient as I am vigilant. If catching a bus or train can be a threat because someone could’ve slathered traces of peanut butter on the stop button, should I hide behind my sofa and live a risk-free life? No, because that’s not living. It’s better to gamble with the world and spend time with those you love than to trap myself indoors for fear of death and forget to live at all.
This is why I was frustrated with lockdowns. The government took away my ability to assess the relative risk of the disease to myself, as a young and relatively healthy individual. When things reopened this July, I caught COVID on my first night out in London. I was largely asymptomatic (with a headache and hoarse throat so mild that I thought I was just hungover a day longer than usual). My virus was a light head-cold, and I tested negative two days after my initial positive.
But now, medical professionals and Europe’s politicians are arguing I should be banned from bars and nightclubs, locked in my home, and fined every day, for not taking a vaccine for a disease I’ve already had without any severe symptoms. How is that just?
If the presidents, prime ministers, and health-care professionals pushing these vaccine mandates truly cared about herd immunity, wouldn’t they accept my positive antibody test? Do they not care about natural immunity? Why, if a negative test is accepted with the vaccine passport scheme, is an antibody test not accepted instead of proof of vaccination?
I had COVID during the delta variant wave, and was largely asymptomatic. Why is my recent infection not enough to verify my inoculation against severe disease and death? Could it be because natural immunity is not profitable for pharmaceutical companies and their politician shareholders?
My medical exemption applies for the boosters today — but what if that is rescinded? The U.K. government recently removed the required post-vaccination observation period, intended to safeguard against anaphylactic reactions. What happens if officials decide their wish to only associate with the vaccinated supersedes the risk to my life from the vaccine?
Treating Normal People Like Bioweapons
Setting aside valid arguments about natural immunity, and objections to taxpayers endlessly subsidizing big pharma: I haven’t received a COVID vaccine because the Pfizer and Moderna jabs pose a threat to my health. Such mRNA vaccines can trigger an anaphylactic attack — meaning the side effects from a COVID jab are much more lethal to me specifically than catching COVID.
I can have the AstraZeneca vaccine, but I would never be “fully vaccinated” if I did because the only companies offering booster jabs are Pfizer and Moderna. As the definition of fully vaccinated shifts in Israel, Australia, the United States, and now the United Kingdom, my medical condition will leave me involuntarily banned from traveling, partying, and eventually participating in a society that mandates vaccination to belong to it.
It appears that fear has driven our leaders and institutions insane, and they are pursuing a zero-COVID utopia by forcing vaccines on those who don’t need it, and, potentially, eventually those who can’t have it.
My condition, and those like me who have medical exemptions to vaccination, also expose a fatal flaw in the vaccination commissars’ logic: that they make an exemption for the involuntary minority, but it does not make us any less susceptible to catching or spreading COVID than those who have chosen not to take the vaccine. Am I okay to be a bioweapon in their minds, because of my illness?
Never Let the Government Have Your Health Care
Stepping outside politics for a minute: the prospect of a doctor endorsing the denial of treatment for unvaccinated patients is terrifying. How can I trust that National Health Service staff won’t harbor politically or personally prejudicial views against me, and dismiss me as a potential burden on the healthcare system without any evidence? Will this policy be extended to drinkers, smokers, the obese, and so forth?
The Constitution is not a cause for complacency among Americans. With Democrat states seeking to circumvent God-given liberties and enforce federal employee and frontline worker vaccine mandates, defenders of individual freedom must continue to take their grievances to the courts, and the streets if and when necessary.
In the spirit of 1776: don’t follow Britain into the hell this great nation is descending into.
