By Claire Chretien
A coronavirus vaccine should be mandatory, and tax penalties, higher insurance premiums, and denial of many government and private services ought to be considered for those refusing the shot, two doctors and an attorney argued in USA Today on Thursday.
“[W]hile the measures that will be necessary to defeat the coronavirus will seem draconian, even anti-American to some, we believe that there is no alternative. Simply put, getting vaccinated is going to be our patriotic duty,” wrote Dr. Michael Lederman, Dr. Stuart Youngner, and Maxwell J. Mehlman.
There is no “alternative to vaccine-induced herd immunity in a pandemic,” they argued. “Broad induction of immunity in the population by immunization will be necessary to end this pandemic.”
The USA Today article, published August 6, is titled “Defeat COVID-19 by requiring vaccination for all. It's not un-American, it's patriotic.” Its original subhead (see screenshot below) read, “Make vaccines free, don't allow religious or personal objections, and punish those who won't be vaccinated. They are threatening the lives of others.” It has since been changed to “Make vaccines free, don't allow religious or personal objections, and create disincentives for those who refuse vaccines shown to be safe and effective.”
“When a vaccine is ready,” the doctors wrote, it must be free and exemptions must only be made for people with “medical contraindications to immunization.”
But “medical conditions that prohibit all COVID-19 vaccines will be rare,” they claimed. No religious or personal objections to receiving the shot or shots should be honored, they wrote, and harsh penalties should be adopted by important sectors of society to pressure the populace to comply.
The physicians proposed, “Private businesses could refuse to employ or serve unvaccinated individuals. Schools could refuse to allow unimmunized children to attend classes. Public and commercial transit companies — airlines, trains and buses — could exclude refusers. Public and private auditoriums could require evidence of immunization for entry.”
They then outlined how a “registry of immunization will be needed with names entered after immunization is completed.” People who receive the vaccine should be issued “certification cards” with expiration dates (“the durability of protection by different vaccines may vary and may require periodic booster immunizations”).
The concept of “immunization cards” or digital vaccine records was floated shortly before the coronavirus outbreak and since the virus has spread.
A December 2019 article in Scientific American described the vision of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers for embedding vaccine records “directly into the skin” of children.
“Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.”
The development of this idea, which the article proudly noted avoids using “iris scans” that might violate privacy, was “funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” It “came about because of a direct request from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates himself, who has been supporting efforts to wipe out diseases such as polio and measles across the world.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of Trump’s top pandemic advisers, said in April that he thought it was “possible” that one day Americans may have to carry certificates showing they are immune to the coronavirus.
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