COVID-19: a conscientious objector’s view
Government and authorities, make clear to us whether you are our servants or whether you think you are our masters.
“War is over if you want it.” That was the slogan of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971, in response to the Vietnam War. If people decided war was over, it was. People could stop serving in the military, agreeing to fight, supplying weapons and voting for politicians who supported war, thereby curtailing war through withdrawal of co-operation.
“COVID measures are over if you want it.” The ineffectiveness, massive cost, state interference, economic uncertainty, personal anxiety and destruction of trust in authority (government, health services, scientific advisers, mass media and social media) comes not from the COVID-19 virus but governmental (and NGO) responses to COVID-19. The restrictions could end tomorrow, if we wanted.
The rise of the apparently mild omicron variant should be a final stage in a respiratory virus becoming endemic. We would have to learn to live with COVID-19, alongside tuberculosis, influenza and other viruses. Not, however, in the UK. By December, the British government had already bought millions of treatment injections (enough for two years), had invested in bio-security infrastructure and signed future contracts worth £200M with advertising agencies; it had to sustain a pandemic to justify its financial commitments. So, the forever pandemic enters high gear once more, just as risk drops. After all, the decals and masks had been manufactured and had to be used up. With no parliamentary dissent and no solid front of popular opposition to authoritarianism, the British government had a free hand and a blank cheque.
The facts that treatment injections do not prevent transmission of COVID-19, and that mask-wearing and social-distancing in public are both ineffective, suggest that dropping (or ignoring) many measures would not impair public health. Isolation does work, by reducing transmission, but it is cruel and unsustainable; it merely delays transmission. The massive negative impact of COVID-19 measures on rates of depression, mental disequilibrium, suicide, surgical procedures, medical screening and disease treatment, causes more suffering and death than the measures prevent.
The ethical case for conscientious objection is formidable. It includes resisting persecution of dissenters who do not pose a greater risk than anyone else to the health of fellow citizens. It also includes objecting to state interference in personal and family life, rejecting the establishment of a bio-security state, fighting censorship and undermining the fear calculated by behavioural scientists. The crippling burden of inflation and national debt will outlive even the healthiest of us. Worse still, it may instigate abolition of Pound Sterling as a physical and electronic national currency and the institution of Britcoin, a national digital currency, which would open up a plethora of possibilities for the intrusive authoritarian state. Such a state could monitor and control the most personal of transactions.
By the time we reached such a position, we would be literally helpless to resist. The only means of avoiding that point is telling the government now that we reserve the right to make decisions about our daily lives, health (and the health of our families), livelihood and freedom of speech. By refusing to enforce and comply, the bio-security state would cease to function and we could negotiate our own standards, according to our inclinations and needs.
I sat through history classes and, like the other pupils, I sighed and rolled my eyes at tales of encroachment of tyranny in this or that era. We were confident that we would have resisted injustice and taken a stand, our wits alert to tendrils of control slithering into public life. We lived in a parliamentary democracy, where such things did not happen. Content in our complacency, we understood we would never actually face such challenges. Yet, in the space of the last year, I have seen on social media my fellow pupils (now grown adults, with children of their own) endorse the destruction of historical artefacts by mobs motivated by political zealotry, cancellation (to the point of impoverishment and suicide) of individuals without trial and imposition of mandatory politico-medical documentation that restricts people from accessing public goods and services. By simply cleaving to values of public order, free speech and medical privacy – watchwords of civil society until 2020, however hollow – I have been separated from the very fabric of my own past.
This is my statement: “I have not and will not wear a mask. I have not and will not social distance. I have not and will not accept a not fully proven medical treatment. I have not and will not observe lockdown guidance. I have not and will not support the use of medical apartheid measures, including “health passports”. I have not and will not prevent anyone from observing (or not observing) these measures, according to his or her conscience.”
Either government is by consensus or it is not. Government and authorities, make clear to us whether you are our servants or whether you think you are our masters. Allow us bodily autonomy and freedom of conscience. If you do not, you forfeit your authority to act on representative democratic principles and you reveal to us your true nature.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
