DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - Bill Gates, the World Health Organization (WHO) and various national governments may be teaming up to create a worldwide system that will make vaccinations mandatory in order to travel from one country to another.
As researchers and pharmaceutical companies race to create a COVID-19 vaccine, moral and constitutional questions linger, including whether plans are afoot to narrow the freedom to reject vaccines in the name of the common good.
Life News reports that billionaire Bill Gates is engaged in a plan that will make vaccines available — and perhaps mandatory — for all. Indications are that the plan has been in the works since before the Wuhan virus outbreak, but the pandemic has given the scheme new life.
Without citizen pushback, some observers warn the well-funded plan may succeed in enacting a global vaccine surveillance system. Included in the plan is a five-year design and implementation program, updated in March 2019, which includes sweeping European travel restrictions. Provisions include:
Currently, China is ratcheting up a "social credit score" surveillance system, which will track multiple things like the number of steps a person walks each day, every location visited, which grocery items are purchased at the store, every online search and key written words that may be deemed "unacceptable."
Buying alcohol may lower one's score, for example, whereas engaging in whatever conduct the state deems valuable at the time will raise one's score. One's score will dictate the social "privileges" he has earned, which will dictate things like the quality of medical treatment he receives and the neighborhood he can live in. According to ABC correspondent Matthew Carney, roughly 10 million Chinese citizens were punished during a trial period of this surveillance system.
As the American Left pushes the country closer to socialism, conservative political observers fear that a system similar to China's may one day be implemented in the United States, with vaccines being top priority.
Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, a famed attorney and civil liberties advocate, recently issued public statements supporting the government's "right" to mandate behaviors and vaccinations for all citizens.
"Let me put it very clearly," said Dershowitz. "You have no constitutional right to endanger the public and spread the disease, even if you disagree. You have no right not to be vaccinated; you have no right not to wear a mask; you have no right to open up your business."
Dershowitz differentiated between contagious and non-contagious diseases like cancer, suggesting that with the latter, one should be able to refuse treatment and/or vaccination. He continued:
[But] if you refuse to be vaccinated [for a contagious disease], the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and plunge a needle into your arm. … You have no right to refuse to be vaccinated against a contagious disease. That's what a democracy is about. If the majority of the people agree … you have to be vaccinated. The alternative is to … never ever leave your home or live in a bubble. ... The Constitution doesn't give you the right to spread your illness to other people.
Dershowitz has gone as far as to write an op-ed for the New York Daily News titled "There Is No Religious Right to Refuse Vaccination," wherein he praises New York state for eliminating all religious exemptions for the mandatory measles vaccination. Currently, 34 states allow for "medical or religious exemptions" for vaccination.
The vaccine wars are not new. The movement to avoid some or all vaccines has been raging for decades. Alleged vaccination hazards such as birth defects, autism, foreign bodies and mercury (among others) have been debated in the public square, while the scientific community continuously defends vaccinations as the best alternative.
Big questions remain, however, about obligatory vaccinations and the freedom of families and individuals to abstain. There is no official Catholic doctrine regarding vaccination in general, but faithful Catholics are concerned about vaccines being unethically made from cell lines of aborted babies.