Austria Imposing Mandatory Vaccination Regime Violates International Law

Robert Bridge

While vaccines can play a major role in fighting against the current pandemic, to enforce this medical intervention on anyone violates every aspect of human liberty and freedom, which many generations of men and women have fought to ensure.

Western media has been shockingly nonchalant about Austria announcing it would become "the first European country" to make vaccines against Covid 19 mandatory, with possible prison sentences for non-compliance. Can we get a second opinion?

Amid a surge in new Covid cases, Austria has  ordered a 10-day lockdown of its entire population - including those who have received inoculations - starting on November 22. On top of that, the government said it was preparing legislation for a mandatory vaccine regime to be rolled out on February 1st, the chancellor, Alexander Schallenberg, has announced.

"We haven't been able to convince enough people to vaccinate," Schallenberg said in an effort to rationalize the draconian decision. "For too long, I and others have assumed that you can convince people to get vaccinated."

Incidentally, Schallenberg, who descends from a long line of blue-blooded Austro-Hungarian nobles, was hand chosen to replace Sebastian Kurz as chancellor last month as the latter became embroiled in a testy corruption probe. Immediately following Schallenberg's appointment, wily Covid-19, perhaps seeing a golden opportunity for a power play amid the chaos, surged in the country.

What the new Austrian chancellor seems to have forgotten, however, in his desire to play medical dictator is that people have a right to self-autonomy over their bodies. Strongly encouraging civilians to receive a vaccination is one thing; forcing it upon them by coercion - on pain of financial penalties and even imprisonment in the event they cannot pay - is crossing the humanitarian red line. That much, at least, has been determined by the United Nations.

In October 2005, some 190 UNESCO Member States adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which committed the signatories and the international community to "respect and apply fundamental ethical principles related to medicine, the life sciences and associated technologies."

Article 6, Section 3  reads:

"In appropriate cases of research carried out on a group of persons or a community, additional agreement of the legal representatives of the group or community concerned may be sought. In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual's informed consent."

Speaking on the need for the Declaration, Pierre Sané, former UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences (2001-2010), discussed a meningitis pandemic that swept through the Nigerian city of Kano in 1996. Pfizer, in what it described as a "humanitarian gesture," offered to help by making available a new antibiotic drug called Trovan, which could be administered orally to children. Pfizer failed to acknowledge, however, that Trovan had never been tested in a disease outbreak, nor was it ever given to children orally. Nevertheless, six weeks after the outbreak had occurred, 200 children participated in Pfizer's clinical trial.

Sané  explained what eventually happened: "A governmental committee of medical experts investigated the Trovan trial and concluded that it was illegal and unethical. The desperation of the parents and the emergency situation made it easy to enroll patients in the trial, suggesting free treatment for a serious disease. Parents with infected children were often not aware that they were included in a clinical trial; they were afraid for their children and did not ask many questions...

"In many cases no permission was requested to test the drug. Pfizer argued that informed consent could not be obtained from parents because they were illiterate. In this impoverished part of the country, few parents indeed could speak or write English," Sané added.

Shocking as it was, the 2001 report by the Nigerian medical authorities was never released to the public. Not until May 2006 did the Washington Post (thanks to the intervention of a whistleblower) report that Pfizer had conducted an illegal trial of an unregistered drug. The revelations showed a clear case of exploitation, in violation of international law, where impoverished, illiterate and uninformed people unwittingly stood in for guinea pigs. It also appeared that the medical trial had never been approved by an ethics committee, although Pfizer produced a letter of approval, dated March 1996. There was no ethics committee in existence in Kano at that time.

In addition to Pfizer's apparent criminal record, the recipients of their vaccines have no legal recourse in the event they are injured or worse. And although it is rarely discussed in the mainstream media, people are suffering severe injury, even death, as a result of these unproven inoculations. The CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has  recorded 4,694 deaths, 5,413 "life-threatening" reactions to Pfizer's vaccine, and 23,867 hospitalizations as a result of the inoculation in the U.S. to date (critics contend, however, that the numbers of injuries have been drastically  underreported). Yet, the pharmaceutical companies enjoy full indemnity from any legal action, which should be of concern considering these vaccines, issued in accordance with an 'Emergency Use Authorization,' were developed in - to quote former U.S. President Donald Trump - "warp speed." Just a non-professional hunch, but 'warp', 'speed' and 'vaccine' are three words that should never appear in the same sentence.

Incidentally, should anyone be interested in educating themselves on the details of the Pfizer vaccine before they submit to the jab, they will have to wait until the year 2076 when the 329,000 pages of data can be released in its entirety (or, as a judge recently ruled, 500 pages per day).

"It took the FDA precisely 108 days from when Pfizer started producing the records for licensure (on May 7, 2021) to when the FDA licensed the Pfizer vaccine (on August 23, 2021),"  argued Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on behalf of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which submitted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FDA. "While [the FDA] can conduct that intense review of Pfizer's documents in 108 days, it now asks for over 20,000 days to make these documents available to the public."

Despite what must be considered a shadowy record at best, Austria just committed itself to the astonishingly draconian demand that its people either take one of these jabs (from either Pfizer, or another brand) or be ostracized from polite society, and possibly even sent to prison.

Chancellor Schallenberg may wish to inform himself that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights took a heavy cue from the Nuremberg Code (1947), which issued from the Nuremberg trials of medical researchers (known as the 'Doctors' Trial') who were convicted of committing horrific crimes against humanity in the name of medical research.

The first recommendation of that Code concerns the issue of informed consent, which acknowledges respect for personal autonomy in medicine, as well as recognizing that physicians should avoid actions that injure human patients.

It reads as follows: "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment."

The Austrian government is glaringly ignoring the very first line of the Code that reads: "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential." This is a gross denial of history, a notoriously grim history, which condemned millions of innocent people to a humanitarian nightmare. While vaccines can play a major role in fighting against the current pandemic, to enforce this medical intervention on anyone violates every aspect of human liberty and freedom, which many generations of men and women have fought to ensure. It's time to stop the segregation of society, a creeping global apartheid, which will ultimately lead to far more death and injury than any virus.

 strategic-culture.org