II. MANDATORY COVID
VACCINATION HAS NO BASIS IN ETHICS AND LAW
Photo:
COVID Vaccines clearly labelled as having only Emergency Use Authorization.
1. The vaccines are EXPERIMENTAL and have not received
due Approval for regular use
It is unfortunate that even at this late hour,
many are not aware that the injections being mandated have received only
Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the world’s major regulatory Agencies, and
a corresponding Emergency Use Listing (EUL) by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO describes the EUL procedure as “a risk-based procedure for assessing and
listing UNLICENSED vaccines, … with the ultimate aim of expediting (their)
availability ... to people affected by a public health emergency” (emphasis
added). Contrary to the laws
setting up our NAFDAC (Nigeria Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and
Control), all that the Agency now does is rubber-stamp whatever pronouncement is made by these
foreign/global Agencies. The important point here is that products with only
EUA have ethical and legal restraints attached to their use. Top of these is that they cannot be made mandatory for human beings.
We repeat, for emphasis, that while there might be a few COVID vaccines
with full approval for regular non-experimental use (e.g Pfizer’s Cominarty –
approved in the US and Canada; and Moderna’s Spikevax - approved only in Canada but not yet in the US), NONE of these
approved products are available in Nigeria.
All the products being administered here, shipped under either the
international COVAX arrangement or the AVAT arrangement of the African Union, have only Emergency Use Authorizations
and by law, CANNOT be mandated. Doing so translates to forcing
people to take part in a medical experiment which is expressly forbidden by the
Nuremberg Code, to which Nigeria is a signatory.
In the same vein, the Nigeria Patients Bill of Rights (PBoR) launched by the present administration in 2018 duly recognizes
the rights of Nigerians to refuse ANY medical product they are not comfortable
with. In its opening page, the PBoR is described as “an
aggregation of patients’ rights that exist in other instruments including, The
Constitution, Consumer Protection Act, Child Rights Act, Freedom of Information
Act, National Health Act, the Hippocratic Oath, other professional ethical
codes and sundry regulations.” Mandatory COVID vaccination violently
infringes on all these provisions!
This important point is playing out rather vividly with recent stories of insurance
companies in Europe refusing to pay compensations in the cases of deaths caused
by COVID-19 experimental vaccines. The
quite sound ground being that general life insurance contracts do not cover
deaths arising from voluntary participation in risky medical experiments –
which is the case when one receives a vaccine clearly listed (and so-labelled) for Emergency or Experimental
Use only.
Good counsel: before rolling up your sleeves for a jab, ask to read the
label on the bottle!
2. The critical requirement for Informed Consent is being flouted with
impunity.
Even for approved medical products, it is expected that would-be recipients
would be adequately informed by the prescribing physicians, of both benefits
and risks associated with the product.
The contraindications should be made clear, and alternatives should be
presented and made available. When in
doubts, second professional opinions are encouraged. All these are the basic elements of getting the patient adequately “informed.” Article 6(1) of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Bioethics and
Human Rights (2006) clearly states that “Any
preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be
carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned,
based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be
express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any
reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”
In the case of unapproved, unlicensed products, the use is clearly
experimental. There will always be need
for brave and altruistic people to volunteer to receive experimental products,
to save lives of others as well as expand the frontiers of knowledge. But such human subjects must not only be able
to choose whether or not to participate in the studies, they should also be
free to exit them without any threat, harassment, shaming, or penalty. The UK’s Green
Book published in June
2021 specifically addresses Consent for vaccination in its Chapter two, where
it states that “For consent to immunisation to be valid, it must be given
freely, voluntarily and without coercion by an appropriately informed person
who has the mental capacity to consent to the administration of the vaccines in
question”.
Mandatory vaccination, and that of an unapproved product in particular, shamelessly
violates all these sacrosanct norms of
modern science. For instance, as highlighted in Section III.3
of this Report, the vaccine Fact Sheets themselves specifically require that would-be recipients be informed of
some contents of the vaccine that could be fatal to certain categories of
people, for example people allergic to polyethylene glycol (PEG). The simple fact is that most Nigerians are
not aware of their allergy status with respect to such chemicals! The presumed “consent” of Nigerians who
receive these vaccines is certainly far from being “informed”.
3. Government has plainly absolved itself, and every other Authority, of
All Liabilities in the event of any Adverse Effect arising from the Vaccines
It is
particularly odious and unconscionable that people should be compelled to
receive products which Government has openly washed its hand off whatever adverse situation
should arise! Normally, manufacturers are not liable for adverse effects
arising from experimental products which have only EUA, and the pharmaceutical
companies producing the vaccines (e.g. Pfizer) have clearly indicated they would not supply
their COVID jabs (either experimental or fully approved) to any jurisdiction that
would not first issue them a license of indemnity.
Though health minister Dr Osagie Ehanire
conceded on national TV that government has indeed signed such an agreement of
indemnity, the Contract Document is not available for public scrutiny. In the case of the European Union, after a
protracted legal battle by some radical members of the European Parliament, the
pharmaceutical companies finally agreed that the contract document could be
released in a “redacted” form. And that turns out to mean, simply blotting out
entire pages on and on! This charade is shown in the video clip seen here
It is plain immoral to mandate such products for citizens of this great country.
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