https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2021/09/when-science-becomes-a-truncheon/
I should like to make a personal confession that will probably disappoint some readers, and perhaps please others. I have now had both doses of AstraZenica. I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer’, nor a conspiracy theorist. But I also have good, intelligent, well-informed and rational friends who strongly oppose the vaccine and I do not like to see them punished by the infliction of civil disabilities or verbal abuse.
Some Christians and other religious people have grave reservations about vaccines as this letter to the PM from the Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox archbishops of Sydney clearly shows. Such qualms about abortion and the use foetal tissue in the vaccines’ development are perhaps not shared by most people, but they ought to be treated with respect in a civil society.
Whether to make use of research derived during WWII from experimentation on prisoners under conditions of terrible cruelty was once a grave moral question. To wish to avoid the use of vaccines that have been developed, even remotely, from aborted human ‘materials’ is a legitimate and understandable moral stance. Yet as one of our readers points out, it is virtually impossible to isolate oneself in this complex world from evil: if you pay taxes you support Medicare, and Medicare funds abortions.
I agree that COVID-19 has caused great suffering and many deaths. That is beyond dispute. But for more than a year and a half we have been bombarded by many health ‘orders’ that claim a scientific basis yet are clearly motivated less by science than by ease of law-enforcement. In particular, some absurd strictures about the use of masks in public and private places have been given the force of law. I am not a scientist, but I know enough to affirm that science is never ‘settled’ and that those who claim it is are usually not scientists. It is extremely hard for a non-scientist to extract reliable scientific information from the internet, but we must do our best to separate good science from false claims that pretend to a scientific basis but merely make it easier for governments to police the behaviour of their citizens.