The Liberty website states that Liberty is an organisation that challenges injustice, defends freedom, and campaigns to make sure everyone is treated fairly. It says
“We are campaigners, lawyers and policy experts who work together to protect rights and hold the powerful to account”.
As a member, for several years, I believe that it does an excellent job. However, my support is somewhat muted because of a blind spot it seems to have about mandatory drugging. Let me explain why.
Liberty outlines our human rights that they set out to defend on this webpage. The are as follows:
The right to liberty
The right to a fair trial, and not to be punished without a fair trial
The right to respect for my family and private life
The right to freedom of thought
The right to express myself freely
The right to protest
The right to choose who I marry
The right not to be discriminated against
The right to respect for my property
The right to Education
The right to vote
Yet nowhere on their website is there any mention of our right to choose our medical treatment, and to protect us from mandated or forced medical treatments.
Over the last few years I have written to Liberty several times to point out this important omission in its mission.
Mandatory Vaccination
In the UK people were put under immense and unrelenting pressure to get vaccinated during the Covid-19 Pandemic fiasco of 2020-2022. The powerful Conventional Medical Establishment (CME), in cohorts with government and the mainstream legacy, produced and promoted what has been called the Covid-19 “Narrative” (basically, the Covid virus was deadly: only vaccines could save us: and it was everyone’s duty to get vaccinated, etc).
I know many people who eventually accepted and capitulated to this “Narrative, several who were previously committed to staying “vaccine free”. They felt obliged to get vaccinated, not just for themselves, but (as they were told) for the good of other people, and to ‘protect’ the NHS (National Health Service), which as usual had no effective treatment for the virus, and as usual was on its knees, unable to cope with patient demand.
For British citizens working in the care sector, and the NHS, the situation was even more serious. The government proposed vaccine mandates. And other employers were allowed/encouraged/urged to impose a “no jab, no job” policy.
So people felt pressured to get the vaccine. Such was the impact of the incessant “Narrative” even those who did not face losing their job took the vaccine even though they did not want to do so. They were not ill, yet they felt obliged to conform to the wishes of the government even though everyone was (or should have been) aware that the Covid vaccines had not been properly tested, and were approved only for ‘emergency’ use. Most people who took the vaccine were not in an emergency!
The essential question is this. Is being forced by government (at the behest of the powerful but incompetent pharmaceutical industry) into taking a vaccine against our wishes any more or less a deprivation of our personal liberty than a fair trial, or respect for family life, or freedom of thought and expression, or freedom to protest, et al?
Apparently Liberty did not think so. It did not speak out against forced vaccination. As a member of Liberty I was extremely disappointed. To have an unwanted foreign substance forcibly injected into our bloodstream was, and is, a gross affront to personal liberty, and our right to choose our own medical treatment.
Arguably, removing patient choice from decisions about their health is worse than many of the primary campaigns that Liberty puts at the forefront of its campaigning.
Yet the response of Liberty was at best weak, limp, and vacillating. During 2021, when the mass vaccination campaign began, it produced 4 statements on mandatory vaccines, (i) for Care Workers, (ii) for Care Home Workers, (iii) for NHS staff, and (iv) a statement questioning whether anyone could be forced to take a vaccine. Each response was similar, taking the government line that vaccines safeguarded public health and protected people from the Covid vaccine.
“Gracie Bradley, Liberty Director, was quoted: “We all want to know that our loved ones are safe – and it is vital that Government safeguards public health and protects people from COVID. However, a coercive approach to vaccination will be felt most keenly by some of the very communities who have borne the brunt of the pandemic – and those healthcare workers who have been on the frontline throughout.
“Research suggests these proposals could also be counterproductive from a public health perspective, and will damage trust between employers, patients and key workers.
“The Government must continue to ensure wide access to vaccinations and education to support informed consent, rather than pressure and punishment.”
This was posted by Liberty on 3rd November 2021 when it was already becoming clear that the Covid-19 vaccines (i) did not prevent people contracting the virus, and (ii) did not prevent its transmission to others.
Moreover, it was at the time when the AstraZeneca vaccine (which was given to most UK citizens up to that point) was withdrawn because of the patient harm (mainly, but not exclusively, blood-clotting) it was known to cause. It was quietly replaced by the Pfizer vaccine which has subsequently proven to be equally, if not even more harmful.
Liberty must have known this. It certainly should have known it before agreeing to the government’s “coercive approach to vaccination”. To agree to coercion was at best negligent. Compulsory vaccination violates basic human rights, the freedom of patients to choose what happens to their body. It forces on people substances that are injected into the bloodstream, and so can pass to any part of the body. Even the freedoms identified by Liberty, listed above, do not have such potential long-term consequences for the individual. Forcing citizens into coercive inoculation does more than “damage trust between employers, patients and key workers”. It is contrary to the basic libertarian principles on which Liberty purports to be based.
Lockdown Policy
Liberty’s feeble stance against enforced vaccination was in contrast to the more robust stance it took on the government’s ‘Lockdown’ policy. On this Liberty was clearer and more decisive, as can be seen in the article, “End the Lockdown of our Civil Liberties”, (3rd July 2020).
“Liberty is calling for the Coronavirus Act 2020 to be scrapped, highlighting that it contains sweeping powers that continue to threaten basic civil rights – and which Parliament can choose to renew indefinitely. …… Liberty is highlighting that the stranglehold on civil liberties is far from over. It’s now calling for the Act to be scrapped entirely and for Government to focus on a response to the pandemic which protects human rights and leaves civil liberties intact”.
So why did Liberty heavily oppose Lockdown so strongly whilst defending forced vaccination on the grounds of ‘public health’? Was the main difference that lockdown was political whilst mandated vaccines was medical. Historically there has been an assumption, not an unreasonable one, that the main threat to our liberty comes from government. If so, Liberty needs to get up-to-date about where power resides in today’s world.
Vaccine Passports
Liberty also recognised that Vaccine Passports were a potential danger to our liberties. Again, these passports appears to represent government policy, and not something that the pharmaceutical lobby was pressing for. Yet even in its article, “Vaccine Passport Plans a Dangerous Distraction” (8th December 2021), Liberty left open the need for “education to support and empower people to keep one another safe”.
“Vaccine passports are a distraction from the mess that the Government has found itself in, but also from its long-running failure to provide the support needed to protect everyone. Politicians across the UK should be ensuring wide access to vaccines and providing better education to support and empower people to keep one another safe.”
So vaccine passports were acceptable to Liberty - as long as we were better educated about the ‘value’ of vaccines! This kept them in line with the Covid-19 “Narrative”. But it forgot that these so-called passports could lead to serious human rights transgressions.
No up-to-date passport, no access to resources?
No vaccine, no social rights, no job?
The capacity to violate our liberty is not solely in the possession of government. In the modern world Liberty needs to recognise that government policy arises as much from Corporate lobbying as political policy. Not least the Pharmaceutical lobby.
Medical Threats to Liberty - Patient Choice and Health Freedom
The threat to our liberty today does not come solely from government. It is now possible for large corporations to deprive us of our freedom too. Indeed, they have sufficient influence and power to take control of government policy, as well to determine what information the mainstream media is allowed to publish. No more is this the case than with medicine.
It is clear from their statements that Liberty believed in the propaganda that underlay and drove the “Narrative”. It was certainly fronted by government, but on its own admission, the government were informed and led by conventional medical science. It was a medical “Narrative”. Unfortunately medical science had nothing to offer, it did not know what to do, and so the medical establishment that controlled the NHS had little or no treatment to offer. It was clue-less, treatment-less. It was the blind leading the blind. They were as afraid of the virus, so they utilised their ability to scare us in order to persuade us to take the vaccine, and for us to agree that they could trample over patient choice, and our health freedom.
Liberty believed, at face value, the medical argument that vaccines keep people safe, that it was part of a ‘public health’ policy, and that therefore some mandating of vaccines might be justified, and that as a result we must be prepared to sacrifice our health freedom.
Liberty failed to recognise that the “Narrative” was an abuse of health freedom. They did not recognise that people’s rights can be destroyed by Corporate interests as well as by government.
In some of its statements, Liberty pointed to ‘education’ as a solution. Perhaps we should have a right to protest only against anything on which we have been educated! Liberty failed to ask the question whether the “Narrative” was education or propaganda. It offered just one ‘solution’ to the problem, which was to endorse totally social distancing, lockdown, and vaccination. This clearly made it propaganda, not education! Liberty did not seem to know (or to take the time to find out) that there were key people within the field of medicine, and many ordinary citizens, who were strongly opposed to the policies of the “Narrative”.
And in any case resorting to ‘education’ to justify mandatory vaccination does not justify removing patient choice from those who, like myself, want to remain “vaccine free”.
Liberty, so aware of the power of government, was apparently unaware of the power of pharmaceutical lobby, and the control it was exerting over both government policy and mainstream media reporting. The Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment was the problem during the pandemic, not the government. Liberty failed to understand this when they sided with the “Narrative” - that is, with those people who wanted to force vaccination on everyone, and had the financial incentive to do so. Liberty did not examine the case of those of us who wished to remain vaccine free.
Liberty’s failings were compounded by their omissions too. Throughout the pandemic Liberty did little to draw attention to the failure of the “Narrative” and the patient harm that was being caused by lockdowns and vaccination. Nor did it ever (to my knowledge) speak out for those people who lost their jobs because they refused to take the Covid-19 vaccines. And it failed to draw attention to the fact that the AstraZeneca vaccine, used in the UK throughout 2021, was effectively withdrawn from the market, and replaced by Pfizer vaccine.
So Liberty was content not only with mandatory vaccination but with vaccines that were ‘experimental’, and that from the very start of the mass vaccination campaign (as I and many others predicted at the time) they caused serious patient harm.
So I will remain a supporter of Liberty. They campaign on important issues. But I do so with reservation and regret that the organisation continues to turn a blind eye to the important issues of patient choice, health freedom, and my (educated) wish to remain “vaccine free”. These are the very issues on which Liberty should be focusing its attention.
