“I fear that many Americans will resist getting vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus,” Dr. Lauren S. Grossman writes at Stat. “To put this scourge behind us, I believe that our nation should, for the first time ever, require all Americans — or at least schoolchildren and workers in direct-contact jobs — to be vaccinated against this coronavirus.”

Grossman’s prescription flies in the face of the World Medical Association’s International Code of Medical Ethics: “A Physician shall respect a competent patient’s right to accept or refuse treatment.”

It would also violate the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics. For example,  “Informed consent to medical treatment is fundamental in both ethics and law” (Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 2.1.1) and  “[r]espect for patient autonomy is central to professional ethics …” (Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 2.1.2).

And canons of medical ethics aside, it’s just plain wrong.

If you’re muttering under your breath that I’m an “anti-vaxxer,” you’re wrong. I’m pro-vaccine. I’m glad I didn’t face the risks of measles, mumps, polio, etc. that previous generations (and my older siblings) faced. I get my flu shot every year.  I’ve had my pneumonia vaccine. I’ll be getting my shingles vaccine Real Soon Now (I had chickenpox before THAT vaccine became available). If there’s a reasonably safe and effective vaccine for something I’m vulnerable to, I want it.

In fact, I’ve probably had more vaccinations than you, if for no other reason than that my shot record got lost between overseas military deployments and I had to get a bunch of them an extra time.

I even got an anthrax vaccine right out of a tube marked EXPERIMENTAL: DO NOT USE ON HUMANS in Saudi Arabia in 1991. I objected to that one. I “consented” to the shot only after being threatened with court-martial if I didn’t.

Which brings me to my point:

Forcing a needle or a pill into someone’s body without that person’s consent is no different in principle than forcing a penis into someone’s body without that person’s consent.

It doesn’t matter how much more you think you know than the person whose consent you require, or how much more important you think your goals and priorities are than the goals and priorities of the person whose consent you require.

If you don’t have consent, you’re committing assault. And the medical version of assault should trigger the same social, civil, and legal penalties as the sexual version.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On two days in May fifty years ago, American police and National Guard troops fired their weapons into crowds of anti-Vietnam-War protesters, killing six American students at two American state universities.

On May 4, 1970 Ohio National Guard troops fatally wounded Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder at Kent State University.

On May 15, officers of the Jackson, Mississippi Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol killed Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green at historically black Jackson State.

The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest appointed by Richard Nixon to investigate the incidents concluded that “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of [Kent State] students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable” and that “the 28-second barrage of lethal gunfire [at Jackson State] was completely unwarranted and unjustified.”

In laying the theory for the modern nation-state as a bulwark against civil disorder, Thomas Hobbes insisted that its subjects retained “the liberty to disobey” orders “not to resist those that assault” them.

Yet while the 1970s would bring reductions in state power, with the cessation of the Vietnam War and its associated draft, such a right was never conceded in principle; the Commission recommended that “possession or use of weapons on campus by students should be strongly condemned” with no exceptions for self-defense. What the Commission called “the confidence of white officers that if they fire weapons during a black campus disturbance they will face neither stern departmental discipline nor criminal prosecution or conviction” was borne out.

While the Commission noted the discontent of those in higher education who “seek a community of companions and scholars, but find an impersonal multiversity,” it recommended increasing the role of state funding, which would effectively shift the leverage of power further away from the participants. As David Friedman noted at the time, “the lack of student power which the New Left deplores is a direct result of the success of one of the pet schemes of the old left, heavily subsidized schooling.”

The events of half a century ago serve as a reminder, as Voltairine de Cleyre observed a full century ago, that “the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.” Remembering our unvarnished history can revive such candor long before 2070.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Kent State, Jackson State, and The State,” by Joel Schlosberg, River Cities’ Reader [Davenport, Iowa], 05/13/20
• “Kent State, Jackson State, and the State,” by Joel Schlosberg. Antiwar.com, 05/15/20
• “Kent State, Jackson State, and the State,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 05/19/20

One laudable side effect of the COVID-19 panic is a nationwide effort to promote “vote by mail” as a universal alternative to standing in line at polling places. One reason that effort is laudable is that it would likely decrease vote fraud.

Yes, I said “decrease.” And Republicans were saying the same thing until recently.

In 2017, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp mailed out nearly 400,00 voter address confirmation notices. Voters who didn’t respond within 30 days were declared “inactive” and risked being dropped from the rolls entirely if they didn’t become “active” again within four years.

In 2019, a conservative public interest law firm, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, sued on behalf of three plaintiffs to force that state’s election commission to purge from the rolls voters who had not, you guessed it, responded by mail to address inquiries delivered by mail.

To put it a different way, in both of those cases (and in others), and until just weeks ago, Republicans argued that  mail is not just a reliable, but an indispensable, way to ensure that voters are who they say they are and live where they say they live.

But now, all of a sudden, John Fund of National Review wants us to know that “Mail-In Ballots Are a Recipe for Confusion, Coercion, and Fraud … So, naturally, Democrats are pushing to have them sent to every voter — or ‘voter.'”

What changed? It’s simple. Republicans and Democrats both seem to believe that when more people vote, Democrats win. Are they right? Who knows? But by their fruit you will recognize their true belief:

Previous Republican claims that mail is a trustworthy and verifiable voter identification mechanism were made for the specific purpose of reducing the number of people (especially people of color) who are allowed to vote.

Current Democratic claims that mail is a trustworthy and verifiable voting mechanism are made for the specific purpose of making it easier for people who are allowed to vote to, um, VOTE.

It seems to me that Republicans had it right the first time. Sending something — whether it’s an address confirmation or an actual ballot — to a registered voter’s registered address is a much more reliable way of identifying that voter than just trusting whoever shows up at a polling place vaguely resembling a bad photo.

It’s the 21st century, folks. Let’s update our voting technology to at least the 19th.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY