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I am not, nor have I ever been anti-vax, although I do have a few friends who are. I have been vaccinated against COVID-19, so this is not part of some personal crusade or conspiracy theory against the use of vaccines. I was actually scheduled to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine just a few days before the Australian government advised otherwise and I received the Pfizer vaccine instead. Which I then proceeded to freely receive.

What follows below is a timely reminder that no one should be pressured or coerced into taking a medical procedure. And the fact that so many mainstream media outlets are silent regarding this announcement should also be of significant concern.

Because just last month, the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care announced that as of 20 March 2023, AstraZeneca will no longer be an approved vaccine in Australia. The Canberra Weekly reports that:

The Department of Health says that the Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax vaccines were preferred over AstraZeneca for people aged under 60 due to its “higher risk and observed severity of a rare side effect called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) in people aged under 60 compared with people aged 60 years or older.” Despite the rare risk of TTS, the AstraZeneca vaccine was still used as a booster in people aged 18 and over.

While the Department of Health maintains that “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and save lives”, they also list several side effects from the jabs. Along with TTS, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart) are also listed as rare complications from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Myocarditis and pericarditis are also listed as rare side effects for the Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax vaccines.

The article goes on to state:

According to the latest safety report from the Therapeutic Goods of Australia (TGA), “to March 19 2023, just under 14 million doses of Vaxzervria (AstraZeneca) have been administered in Australia.”

The safety report also states that there have been 48,721 adverse event reports from the AstraZeneca jab out of a total of 137,970. The Pfizer shot has 81,298 adverse event reports from over 44 million doses. The Moderna vaccine has 7,477 adverse events from more than five million doses. The Novavax jab has 990 adverse events from 247,000 doses.

I still believe that the various COVID-19 vaccines did a tremendous amount of good. While the evidence is anecdotal, senior hospital staff I know have told me that the majority of people in ICU suffering from severe COVID-19 are those who are unvaccinated. I don’t know what their co-morbidities or anything like that are, but clearly, the vaccine would’ve been of help to them.

But that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have personal freedom and individual agency over their own health choices. And they should be especially free from government coercion to do so. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that freedom is hard fought but easily lost.

Significantly, this is an issue that Reformed theologians have wrestled with before. All the way back in 1880, the Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper, argued that compulsory vaccination against diseases such as small pox[1] ‘should be out of the question’. This is because:

Our physicians may be mistaken and government may never stamp a particular medical opinion as orthodox and therefore binding. Moreover, compulsion can never be justified until the illness manifests itself and may therefore never be prescribed as preventative. A third reason is that government should keep its hands of our bodies. Fourthly, government must respect conscientious objections. In the fifth place, it is one or the other: either it does not itself believe in vaccination, or if it does, it will do redundant work by proceeding to protect once more those already safeguarded against an evil that will no longer have a hold on them anyway.

The fifth reason Kuyper gives might at first seem somewhat obscure or hard to understand. His argument could be rephrased as follows: If the government doesn’t think vaccines are effective, then why make them mandatory? Alternatively, if they are effective then why should the vaccinated be afraid of the unvaccinated since they supposedly work in protecting one against the disease? Hence, it is wrong to legislate compulsory vaccination. As Kuyper rightly concludes:

Vaccination certificates will therefore have to go… The form of tyranny hidden in these vaccination certificates is just as real a threat to the nation’s spiritual resources as a smallpox epidemic itself.

[1] Significantly, small pox was a lot deadlier than COVID-19. During the 18th century alone, the disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning monarchs, and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Between 20 and 60% of all those infected – and over 80% of infected children – died from the disease.

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