The saints in white coats have spoken
A critical response to Réinfo Covid's open letter to the College of Physicians of Québec and the General Directorate of Public Health of Québec
Andreas Oehler highlighted that doctors from the Réinfo Covid collective in Québec wrote an open letter to the College of Physicians of Québec and the General Directorate of Public Health of Québec. In this letter, they ask for “a complete and immediate ban on the vaccination of children in Québec against COVID-19”:
While this is a praisable initiative overall, I’d like to share a more critical perspective.
Mass vaccination among children and adolescents, fuelled by coercive measures, has already taken place. The physical harms associated with severe vaccine side effects have already been caused, and are susceptible to worsen in the future due to immune dysregulation. The psychological harms associated with this mass vaccination campaign, such as the bullying of children refusing to get vaccinated on the part of authority figures, will be long-lasting. Children have been conditioned to blindly follow public health measures, obey restrictions imposed by authoritarian figures, and fear the invisible. Their submissive character has been moulded for the future. Writing a letter at this stage is simply too late to avoid most of the harms inflicted by this mass vaccination campaign. At best, it will prevent additional side effects among children, which is better than nothing.
Did the authors of this letter wait this long to speak out in fear of losing their medical licences? If the answer is yes, it is definitely preoccupying. They were willing to be complicit in the biggest and most ruthless medical experiment of our times in order to preserve their careers. Conversely, are they writing this letter right now because the political context finally seems favourable to it? The recent unfolding of events in the US and Europe, respectively towards expansion and restriction of mass vaccination among children suggests this. Are they truly motivated by saving children or by avoiding to look like fools at this stage given the accumulating evidence on the lack of safety of these vaccines?
The need for medical evidence raises an obvious epistemological issue. Public health policies usually need to be supported by evidence to be put in place. The issue we have all noticed since the onset of government restrictions is that they were presented as relying on some kind of evidence, even if the quality of this evidence was poor. While I understand the need for high-quality evidence, I really do not think that this is what should matter the most in policymaking. My provoking proposal is the following: why should we rely on evidence to claim the obvious, that is, that mRNA vaccines have not been thoroughly tested and there are unknowns about their effectiveness? It is not a debate on evidence. Rather, it is a common-sense claim that is undisputable. Putting forward sophisticated arguments about transmissibility, prevalence of cases, immune function mechanisms, etc., is mostly frivolous in my view.
The recourse to evidence – on the part of policymakers and of these doctors – gives the false impression that this debate is one of experts in medicine or public health. This is in line with the increasingly great value given to expert discourse in countering “disinformation” and fostering “scientific literacy”. This framing of the debate as such is disempowering for the ordinary citizen with an ounce of common sense.
I’m reading this letter as “the saints in white lab coats have spoken”. They will save us from the tyranny of our governments and save our children. Nothing is further from the truth. These doctors have been relatively silent in the last two years despite the follies, gaslighting, and discrimination we have endured.
Let’s not wait after some educated saviours to tell us what is right and wrong. I believe that common sense and elementary logic are our best weapons of resistance.
Ari, PhD candidate in medical ethics