To Die Fishing
By David Bell
Saving the Dreamers from the Sea
Acouple of decades ago in the state of Victoria, Australia, the public health fraternity considered the advisability of banning or regulating rock fishing. The authoritarian response to Covid-19 in the same place two decades later was not coincidental. Both stem from a fundamental human desire to control others – to force dictates on them for their own good. Within the current debates on ‘medical freedom’ and vaccination, this desire puts those calling for vaccine mandates and those calling for banning them on essentially the same side. The other side, the side of the public, is incompatible with the self-promotion and approbation that our definitions of success require, and will always remain so.
Rock fishing regulations were proposed for two reasons. Firstly, the specialty of ‘public health physician’ was relatively new and needed justification, in much the way that a pandemic industry must find ever-increasing pandemic risk or dentists decaying teeth. As numbers increase, any profession, guild, or class of workers must expand its scope to justify its existence. In public health, existential threats like boxing, community barbeques and rock fishing are staples.
Secondly, rock fishing has a low but real mortality, as it is tempting to stand right on the furthest rocks, where freak waves hit the hardest. Some people like catching fish, or spending hours trying to, and this is heightened for many by being on a rugged coastline with dramatic scenery and crashing surf. Some people, like me, are attracted to this, as others are to fires, waterfalls, or rock concerts. Each to their own, in our wonderfully diverse species.
I used to quote this rock fishing regulatory fetish as an obvious example of public health overreach; if someone wants to go rock fishing, they clearly should be free to do so (I thought). If someone warns them of the risk of unexpectedly big waves, warning signs are erected here and there, and perhaps schools provide some basic education on the strength of waves and the hardness of rock, all the better.
They may still die, or they may die in the car on the way there, or sitting in front of their TV watching a fishing show whilst eating pizza. At least while fishing – probably the least likely of these alternatives through which they will depart this life – they will see a decent spectacle on the way out.
On returning to post-Covid Victoria last year, I learned that rock fishing remained an issue. Victoria, people may recall, had been a center of global medical fascism for three or four years. Its capital, Melbourne, confined its people to more days of home detention than any other city on earth. For context, the videos of police in black body armor throwing people to the ground, arresting people on park benches or grabbing them by the throat, and firing rubber bullets at those protesting against such novel public health approaches, were taken in Melbourne’s streets.
In general conversation, the need for rock fishing regulations surfaced, but Covid-related police violence did not. A large part of the Australian population still believes their governments saved them from chaos. In the Australian mind the role of governments, of experts, is to keep people safe from themselves. The role of the people is to comply with such obviously good ideas. Most Australians have never been invaded, enslaved, or had their land stolen, so they just trust their government. Under this utopian illusion, such an authoritarian approach almost looks rational. Surely the people in charge always mean well?
Banning mRNA to Impose a Purer Form of Freedom
This is where this whole story gets awkward. Many people who bravely opposed the lockdowns, forced face coverings, coerced vaccination, the banning of potentially useful drugs, and the sometimes-brutal authoritarianism that accompanied them have now made ‘medical freedom’ a prominent cause. Not ‘freedom,’ but medical freedom, which looks increasingly like an inferior but more manageable version of freedom itself.
Medical freedom, in this context, is about protecting people from bad others (e.g. Pharma), by banning bad things that the ill-intentioned others foist on them. This requires imposing their own ‘expertise’ in the place of those they oppose. Many such people are accusing the new US administration of betrayal for not banning mRNA Covid vaccines rapidly enough. They have all the same reasons that are piled against rock fishing; there is little hard evidence of benefit, and plenty of evidence of harm.
Nearly all people survive rock fishing just as they nearly all survive Covid vaccines (even mRNA ones). If I told someone that the sea around Victoria is always flat, waves never vary by more than 6 inches, and they are always assured of catching good, omega-3-rich fish, then I would be lying to them. I would have lied about the risks they face, and (sadly) lied about the benefits. If I convince them to go fishing on this basis, and they die after a freak wave, I will be morally liable.
Similarly, a public health physician could tell the same person to take a new pharmaceutical on the basis that it is likely to save them from severe illness or death, and tell them it has been extensively tested and major side effects are extremely rare (e.g., it is “safe and effective”). If they knew that others had had significant adverse outcomes, or that these were theoretically likely and not tested for (e.g., as in the use of mRNA vaccines in healthy humans), they would be similarly responsible for bad outcomes. In their position of influence as a professional ‘expert,’ they would be far more at fault than a random person misinforming regarding rock fishing.
The duty of the health professions, clearly, is to inform people about health and health interventions as fully as they can, to the extent that people are interested in hearing. They have a duty (and are paid) to investigate potential interventions and ensure that their advice is accurate and reasonably up to date. Informed consent, the basis of modern medical ethics, requires this.
However, the hardest thing for a public health physician, or scientist investigating pharmaceutical harms, or lawyer litigating them, is to stop there. We think we know better than most people, and on the technical aspects of this subject, we should. However, we don’t know best what each person prefers, just what we think they should prefer. That is a difference that is very hard for many people to swallow, including many in the ”medical freedom movement.”
We are all born with the freedom to make stupid choices, or different choices, whether they involve rock fishing on a Saturday afternoon with a strong Easterly forecast, or taking a 10th booster brought to us by Pfizer. Despite its history of fraud, we all have the freedom to trust Pfizer should we wish. If Pfizer misleads us and presents false or deliberately misleading evidence – or anyone else in the chain of profit does – then we have laws to address potential fraud or malpractice. If those laws are failing, we need to fix them.
We also have brains that, if faced with overwhelming evidence of risk outweighing benefit, will influence market forces to make the product unviable. If it remains viable, that is because free people will have decided that, for them in their place, they like the idea of an antibody boost. I don’t; I think much of what we have been told on that equates to superstition, but it’s their call to interpret differently. They may also go base jumping tomorrow, and I think I never will.
Life Is Complicated, but We Just Need to Deal with It
There are a lot of arguments against this primacy of individual freedom. There is undeniable evidence of misdirection (e.g., vaccine stops transmission) and persuasive evidence of outright fraud and suppression of data involved in the regulatory submissions for Covid mRNA vaccines. If this is sufficient to invalidate the approvals and no new evidence mitigates this, then approvals should be withdrawn and the process undertaken properly.
This is not a ban – we commonly use drugs off-label – but it allows the public to know that evidence for benefit over harm is poor. This is essential for informed consent, and so something absolutely fundamental to the role of regulatory agencies. It’s not a ban – it is a withdrawal of official approval.
Young fit children and young adults are at near-zero risk for severe Covid. Therefore knowingly reprogramming the dividing cells of a fetus to produce a toxic protein, such as by injecting Covid mRNA vaccines into pregnant women, would require overwhelming evidence of safety before even being considered. As evidence indicates that the mRNA concentrates in the ovaries of young girls (and presumably unborn ones), and that in the very limited pregnant animal studies the vaccinated group had far more fetal abnormalities than the control group, the evidence is clearly in the other direction.
Pfizer avoided follow-up of women who became pregnant during their trial. However, the use of any pharmaceutical should take into account the status of the patient or subject, so these issues can again be addressed by following normal practice. Giving a substance to someone where the evidence is clearly against benefit and in favor of harm carries penalties for medical negligence. While these may have been abrogated during Covid, the answer is not to restrict the public, but to fix corruption of the process.
Finally, no rational approach can include freedom from liability for the manufacturers who are actively pushing and advertising these products. Such an approach is clearly ludicrous, irrespective of the fact that it exists. The fact that some of the main beneficiaries, such as Pfizer and Merck, have specific histories of fraud and sacrificing lives for profit just underlines how unjustifiable, but important to these companies, such a liability-free regime is. For informed consent to work, drug companies need to be incentivized to tell the truth, not to withhold it.
While such problems can be fixed, the process will still be imperfect (because we are humans). Professionals cannot keep up with every fact and study and will sometimes be wrong. However, ignoring obvious facts and not bothering to learn are outside of acceptable conduct. We have rules on this. It is also why we have institutions like the CDC to provide guidance.
As they are guiding vast numbers of prescribers, their responsibility is all the greater. Claiming without evidence that, for instance, injection with a new pharmaceutical (such as an mRNA vaccine) will protect others or is safe in pregnancy would clearly cross the line of acceptable conduct. When this happens, we need to address the institution and those leading it, not penalize the public.
Wanting to ban the public from free choice for their own good is not unlike supporting bans on incorrect speech in order to save democracy. Such arguments only stand if the opinion of a proclaimed ‘expert’ or ‘authority’ is more important than the free choice of a member of the public. They only work in an intrinsically unequal society. Unequal societies are, in the end, feudal rather than free. If people are truly equal, then each has the final say over their own bodies. The freedom of others is the hardest thing to accept, but also the thing most worth fighting for.
We Need to Die Fishing
So, banning Covid vaccines is, broadly, in the same category of societal endeavors as banning rock fishing, Ivermectin, and base jumping. It’s not primarily about safety or efficacy, but about whether we are all born equal and free. Many health practitioners have disgraced their professions over recent years by misleading the public on the efficacy and safety of vaccines, and the risk of the diseases they purport to address. That is no reason to join them. But it is a reason to support the efforts of those now scrambling to catch up with data and get accurate information out.
Democracy depends on our willingness to allow others to say what we consider deeply wrong. Bodily autonomy has the same basis. If someone wants to make a choice regarding their health, whether it’s raising the probability of a shorter life by overeating carbohydrates or having the next Moderna shot, they may do so if they find a provider who, in good faith after sufficiently assessing the substance and their context, considers it appropriate. The clinic and the fast-food outlet have more in common than money generation.
I reserve the right to go rock fishing, and for my children to do so. It is on me to ensure we are careful – but like driving to the library, I know it will not be entirely risk-free. Medical freedom means granting others the same right, not a set of rules that we, their self-proclaimed betters, dictate. Rather die on a rock than enslaved to another’s expert definition of freedom.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
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