Requiring Transplant Recipients to be Vaccinated is Indefensible and Objectively Evil Regardless of the Scientific Merits

Covid Vaccines are not remotely similar to other conditions that are typically required of or used to rank transplant patients.

Fox News @FoxNews

Teen denied kidney transplant because she's not vaccinated for COVID, say parents

fxn.wsTeen denied kidney transplant because she’s not vaccinated for COVID, say parentsA 14-year-old girl in North Carolina who needs a kidney transplant is not able to move forward because a hospital says she must be vaccinated against COVID-19, her parents shared on “Fox & Friends.”

One of the more pernicious and morally shocking developments surrounding the covid vaccines is hospitals forcing transplant recipients (and sometimes even their families) to be vaccinated with one of the covid vaccines.

I have heard a number of people defend this practice, who were genuinely convinced that there was nothing wrong with it. None of these individuals were “evil”, or anything close. Yet, they genuinely did not see a concern or dilemma that would disqualify the whole policy, or even one that would at least counsel a more thoughtful review before taking such a momentous and consequential step.

It is therefore worthwhile to present a clear explanation why, even assuming that transplant recipient vaccination is objectively beneficial as a purely scientific matter, mandating vaccination as a prerequisite for receiving a transplant is destructive to society and evil.

The following are a few of the more salient reasons why mandating recipient vaccination as a condition to remain eligible to receive a transplant, even assuming that transplant recipient vaccination are objectively beneficial as a purely scientific matter, is unjustifiable, destructive, and evil:

Breaks the Social Compact of Society:

• Discriminates on the basis of a controversial political/social issue

• Politicizes and undermines the trustworthiness of the medical community

• Weaponizes the medical community / medical institutions in the “culture wars”

• Drives the Balkanization of society

Is Intrinsically Immoral:

• Such a mandate inflicts tremendous psychological torment upon people who are already suffering the stress and physical torment of a life-threatening disease

• Erodes the ethics and character of medical professionals, so they regard some people as “inferior” and therefore undeserving of or not worth being treated

• This is a policy that cannot be plausibly portrayed as being “in the best interests of patients”

• Catch-all: Will cause considerable stress to the entire society

Broader context - the medical community no longer possesses the moral authority or credibility to make this sort of policy decision:

• The already heavily damaged reputation and image of the medical community due to covid policies so far

• A sizable minority today believes (if not outright majority) that hospitals and doctors are possibly complicit in the deaths of millions around the world and the unimaginable suffering of hundreds of millions more

Breaks the Social Compact of Society:

Discriminates on the basis of a controversial political/social issue

The reality of the current situation is that the covid vaccines are one of the preeminent issues at the forefront of the body politic in the country. This is therefore automatically a consideration when making policies on behalf of society, which any decisions regarding the prioritization scheme of transplant recipients are.

Decisions broadly affecting the whole of society that discriminate or persecute a faction/s of society break the social compact and erode or destroy the moral legitimacy of the major institutions through which political and social power and ideology are disseminated and enforced.

Specifically for this point, discriminating against a political or social minority - and surely where it is literally determining by proxy who lives and who dies - is by definition apartheid in both spirit and practice.

It goes without saying that apartheid policies are both harmful to a healthy and functioning society and evil.

Politicizes and undermines the trustworthiness of the medical community

Enacting a policy that is inextricably intertwined with a highly visible social or political controversy unavoidably conveys - regardless of whether it’s true - that the medical community is:

(A) a political actor that has a

(B) vested political interests and objectives - such that it will

(C) pursue using the resources at its disposal

(D) even if/when they are in conflict with the neutral practice of medicine.

The damage from such overt political overtones and imaging (to say the least) to the practice of medicine, and the implications for the physical and mental health of the broader society, is something that does not require elaboration.

Importantly, this is true even for many of the people who agree with vaccination, because they also perceive that the medical community is “allying” with them to promote a political cause. The worse the reputation of the medical community is tarnished with political entanglements, the more difficult it becomes to subsequently rehabilitate it, and perhaps this can reach a point where it becomes an imperative to “start over” altogether.

Weaponizes the medical community & medical institutions in the “culture wars”

The participation of the medical community to coerce political compliance at gunpoint transforms the medical community (more than it is already) from a shared societal institution to a partisan one that one side views as a hostile force or enemy and the other views as a means to achieve political or social objectives.

This is true not just regarding people’s perception, but regarding the medical community itself. Even if the medical community would be starting off as an objective and non-partisan actor, committing such an overtly political act affects how the medical community will view and think of itself going forward (and the truth is that the medical community is by no means starting off from a “non-partisan” disposition).

The obvious societal harms that flow from this are manifold (i.e. uncontroversial as factual observations regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the underlying position of either side here). Transforming the shared social institutions of science/medicine into a partisan weapon will cause the following negative consequences (among others; ‘shared’ is an increasingly tenuous proposition these days):

• undermines trust in the practice of science

• undermines the integrity of medical scientists by creating and incentivizing political objectives that take precedence over scientific integrity

• causes a sizeable portion of society to regard doctors and medical professionals as enemies. This is harmful both to patients who will not receive the same quality of medical care because of the direct and indirect consequences of the antagonistic, fraught and adversarial nature of doctor-patient relationships; and to doctors who will suffer constant harassment and demoralizing stresses from the same.

• encourages the propagation of propaganda as everyone is now incentivized to either deify or demonize medical practitioners and institutions regardless of the factual merits of any specific issue or incident

A society must have shared institutions that are not “playable characters” in the everyday social or political maelstroms that are the domain of politics if it is to function and survive as a political entity.

Drives the Balkanization of society

The most prominent consequence of the politicization and weaponization of the medical community and institutions is that it is a Balkanization of the society. Regardless of the factual or scientific merits, even the mere perception by one faction that another faction is trying to (and succeeding in) hijack and corrupt the medical establishment is the fraying of the society as an organized political and social unit. To actually go ahead and do so is more damaging by orders of magnitude. Medical care is possibly the most foundational institution in a society - consider that the most consequential apartheid policy (besides for outright economic slavery) is the proscription of medical care by political or social affiliation. Thus proscribing medical care for a highly visible and prominent social faction within society - even if it wouldn’t be an outright death sentence for the patients restricted from medical treatment as is the case here - is tantamount to a declaration of [civil] war against anyone politically affiliated with the group targeted by the mandates.

It should also go without saying that you can’t have a functional society if whether your life and your human rights can be legally and socially vindicated depends upon on your political affiliation or ideological coadunation. There is no rational universe where this is an acceptable tradeoff for the conjectured benefits of restricting transplants to vaccinated patients.

Transplant Vaccine Mandates Are Intrinsically Immoral:

Such a mandate inflicts tremendous psychological torment upon people who are already suffering the stress and physical torment of a life-threatening disease

Any policy decision must consider the entire picture, not just the virtues of the preferred course of action.

Transplant vaccine mandates are dealing with a population that is exclusively comprised of people who are already under extreme suffering that is hard to contemplate or understand for someone bereft of this sort of experience. Adding distress to people already so tormented would therefore be warranted only if there was an exceptionally pressing concern. Even if the covid vaccines are somewhat beneficial as a purely scientific matter to patients awaiting an organ transplant, the marginal benefit of vaccination is hardly something that is so massive that imposing a vaccine mandate - in the context of everything else articulated in this article - can even be plausibly entertained let alone imposed. (The marginal benefit is the absolute risk reduction in all-cause morbidity/mortality gained from vaccination, not the “relative” risk reduction which is not relevant to assessing the real-world value of vaccination.)

Erodes the ethics and character of medical professionals, and influences and/or habituates them to regard some people as “inferior” and therefore undeserving of or not worth being treated

A policy of ‘either you acquiesce to vaccination or you die’ conveys to medical practitioners a clear message that people who reject the covid vaccines are not worthy of medical treatment. This is true regardless of the scientific merits of a (theoretically) objective cost/benefit analysis. Contingency of life-or-death treatment upon a political behavior or choice internalizes to medical practitioners and laypeople alike that it is appropriate to proscribe treatment to people because of political affiliation, so much so that we will even consign them to death. Medical apartheid on the basis of political or social faction characteristics is quite literally in the mold of the ideology and policies implemented in Germany in the 1930’s. Such a comparison us sufficient to retire any further consideration by itself of transplant vaccine mandates.

Such a dynamic is also corrosive to compassion and empathy — two attributes that are already in short supply in healthcare settings these days. The deprivation of treatment, especially in circumstances that are exceptionally heartwrenching, forces practitioners at minimum to suppress their sense of compassion. For many, the internal dissonance between their sense of compassion and the cruelty being inflicted on defenseless patients (& the relegation of a political class to “2nd class citizens”) that some would be complicit in will lead them to zealously embrace rationalizing that the unvaccinated are less than fully human. This is precisely how otherwise civilized people can be indoctrinated into an ideology that if unchecked ultimately enables them to commit or be complicit in the commission of atrocities.

(Requiring adherence to personal behavior standards - such as not consuming alcohol or drugs - whose medical rationale is obvious and apparent to everyone and which have already been standard requirements for decades is an entirely separate matter that has nothing to do with this discussion, and is something that requires its own lengthy dissertation to properly explore and flesh out.)

Like every other enumerated argument here, this point is true regardless of the factual merits of vaccination for transplant patients.

This is a policy that cannot be plausibly portrayed as being “in the best interests of patients”

Medical ethics is organized around the proposition that all decisions or policies must be in the best interests of patients. It is hard to imagine more blatant disregard of patients’ welfare than compromising the integrity and viability of the entire edifice of healthcare provision in the country as millions of people are less able and/or willing to seek and receive medical care as a result of all of the other points articulated above and below (and it is also not in the patients’ best interests for medical treatment to be withheld without which the patient will perish).

Contumeliously discarding the millennia-old foundational ethical principium of medicine ominously portends the possibility of medicine and healthcare unanchored to an ethical North Star.

Catch-all: This will cause considerable stress to the entire society

Polls consistently reveal that people of all social and political affiliations are suffering considerable stress. Policies that antagonize or that are erosive to the body politic spur or inflame the already burdened and fraying psyche of the populace. Even those advantaged by politically prejudicial persecution cannot escape the stresses that beset even those that have the upper hand politically, such as the worry that someday you will become a victim to the same social or political forces, or the stresses of living in a society where the social fabric is frazzled and fragmented. Especially in light of the current mental health apocalypse presently afflicting the country, it surely behooves the medical community to avoid further exacerbating the already overwrought stressors in people’s lives.

The Broader Context that Informs how People View Such a Mandate - The Medical Community no longer possesses the moral authority or credibility to make this sort of policy decision:

The reputation and image of the medical community has already been brutally savaged by the performance of the medical establishment throughout the covid crisis, especially the govt health agencies which are the backbone of the medical community’s authority and credibility. Moreover, at least a sizeable minority of the country believes that hospitals and doctors are complicit in the deaths of millions around the world and the unimaginable suffering of hundreds of millions more through draconian isolation of psychologically/emotionally vulnerable patients, denial of covid treatment, society-wide lockdowns, and vaccine carnage.

As a result, the medical community has lost the moral legitimacy and expert authority that until now was taken for granted. This is a monumental shift that is hard to overstate. The medical community previously was accorded the considerable latitude and deference by society they needed to make life-and-death policy decisions that society wouldn’t reflexively view as illegitimate or political. Without unambiguous and widely conceded moral authority to make controversial life-and-death policy decisions, the medical community ceases to be trusted and neutral stewards whose decisions can determine who lives and dies. Instead, they are no better than any other partisan and unobjective actor with their own biases and agenda. Empowering what is rationally perceived by one half of society as a conflicted and dishonest political actor to determine who lives and dies on the basis of a political characteristic is inherently evil and lacks even a semblance of moral credibility.

This last point is worth restating: This is akin to having a republican decide that democrats are not eligible for transplants unless they switch party affiliation or vice versa. The disfavored group would rightly and accurately perceive that a government that proscribes them from receiving lifesaving treatment lacks legitimacy.

Caveats:

It is important to note that there are many heroic doctors and nurses who do not agree with these policies. In a similar vein, the impact of such a policy (and the other covid policies that are similarly evil or just plainly irrational) is not uniform on all healthcare practitioners - there is a wide range of resiliency and resistance to the mental and psychological influence of this sort of policy.

It is also important to note that there is already considerable damage along the lines of everything stipulated above, so for the most part transplant mandates are aggravating already belabored destructive social pathologies as opposed to initiating or creating new ones.

However, this does not detract from the intensity or imperative of the arguments raised. The fact of the already-widespread devastation underscores how critical it is to reverse these developments - meaning that exacerbating them is that much more unconscionable.

Conclusion

Medical institutions are integral to the translation of medical and scientific knowledge into practice in a manner that will be accepted by the various major factions of society (there are always going to be fringe lunatic groups or cults that repudiate any sort of governing political bodies no matter what). A society without a shared epistemology cannot survive, as there can be no agreement on how to determine factual truth. The medical establishment institutions are fiduciaries to the entire population, granted awesome powers over society, and therefore commensurately responsible for the broader social impact of their actions (something that the medical literature en masse freely embraces, one need only look at the hundreds of papers condemning the medical community for their role in promoting “health inequities” and systemic racism).

It is not just prudent but obligatory to consider the political climate when weighing a policy choice that implicates and will resonate through the exigent political and social realities on the ground such as they are. One would think it would be common sense to go to the farthest practical extreme to avoid even the hint of appearing partisan or political, never mind actually further inflaming the divisive and increasingly weaponized political tensions. This is by no means even remotely controversial. The typical standards that society holds critical non-partisan institutions is that they must avoid “even the appearance of” conflicts of interest, partisanship, etc. - recusals for these reasons are routine in the legal world for instance.

One would also be forgiven for thinking that the medical community would be embarrassed to be caught openly embracing the same fundamental political philosophy that animated the Nazi’s systematic denudement of the medical community back then of the ethical code synonymous with the practice of medicine.

Enacting a policy that in practice is political discrimination is irreconcilable with both basic medical ethics and the responsibility of the medical community to scrupulously avoid even the appearance of partisanship or other non-medical entanglements. There is no justification or defense for such an egregious lapse of judgement.