Cheadle-stan, a country where your medical practitioners may as well be the Taliban

HALTON CHEADLE claims to be an ’emeritus professor of law at UCT’. In reality the self-styled ‘drafter of the Labour Relations Act’ was pushed into early retirement following revelations of his business relationship with then Speaker of the House of Assembly, Max Sisulu, and Kagiso, a company in business with Media24.

In 2010, Cheadle handed down a labour decision gutting the TRC Report, inverting the facts of apartheid, and inter alia altering my religious affiliation.

It would come as no surprise that his own client, Media24 was given a free ride when it came to apartheid-era justifications for separate development, de facto newsroom segregation, race profiling and a set of alternative facts used to pillory the late jazz legend Robbie Jansen. At the same time this writer was falsely accused inter alia of ‘misleading the public’ by deploying the phrase, “Speaking from his home, Robbie Jansen said…”

I interviewed a Professor of Linguistics, not only is the above phrase covered by journalistic privilege, is referred to as common speech and a turn of phrase, but the writer is entirely absent.

When Cheadle isn’t inventing lies, gutting the country’s transitional justice arrangements, or rigging the LRA in his own favour, and thus engaged in corrupt activities, prescribed under the ‘Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act‘, he spends his time in Glencairn, Cape Town, declaiming upon our Constitution, a document for which some delusional citizens, including news subs, seem to want to give him a little credit.

The Constituent Assembly which convened from 1994-1996 was the only body which drafted the Constitution. Many MPs, including civil society procured attorneys to assist in the drafting process. But for anyone to claim Cheadle was orchestrating the content, or was somehow an MP at the time, is to grossly exaggerate his influence as a practitioner of law.

Having put the above matter to rest, I need to point out that the Cheadle is not only corrupt, but is also a regular cuckoo clock when it comes to legal matters. And my apologies at the outset for how this is going to play out when it comes to the MRC’s Glenda Grey.

Not even the Taliban

A piece published by the Daily Maverick, tackling the question “Can the government constitutionally require that everyone be vaccinated against Covid-19?” begins with what appear to be Cheadle and Gray’s summary answer regarding compulsory immunisation:

“The simple answer is it can,” the duo claim at the outset, (‘trust us, we can’), before pursuing an ill-advised motion for removing what remains of patient consent and human rights during the pandemic. These are hard won rights, gained from the struggle for freedom (see here).Vaccines save lives, removing consent destroys the foundation of our democracy.

As both a potential beneficiary and a party insider situated above the law, nothing more than polemic is provided in support by Cheadle — not a single citation from a person who claims to be an ‘academic’ supremely qualified to answer such questions.

Gray should know better than to rely upon a legal practitioner, whose past dealings and involvement with Kagiso, chart a course of investments spanning Aspen, a company responsible for local production of the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine. The Kagiso Domestic Balanced Fund showed a 2.5% investment in Aspen as at 2019.

There are certainly good reasons for universal immunisation, and yes ‘deaths are more likely to occur amongst the unvaccinated’, and ‘new mutations may emerge’ — but none of the reasons supplied by the pair demonstrate why these are foregone conclusions and why our rights should be forfeited in the process? Why are voluntary participation, incentivisation and the normal societal strictures failing if at all?

The bold assertions beg the question, why weren’t our rights similarly removed during earlier epidemics and vaccination programmes? Just about nobody encounters a legal writ forcing one to take a measles vaccine, and we have never possessed internal vaccine passports, nor any attempt to document patient histories with the self-same rigour. The resulting precedent opens us all needlessly, to mandatory annual shots for any manner of public health concerns. You need blood statins, well, you don’t have any choice over the matter, sir?

And thus what follows in part one of a three part series, isn’t a legal argument per se, nor a scholarly jurisprudence essay calling for the adoption of vaccine mandates, and citing local case precedent (mostly in favour of HIV rights), but rather two individual’s self-interested rhetoric placed in the public domain and deserving of our antipathy. As already noted in my earlier post, the only South African case law provided for this type of overly robust medical intervention refer to the plight of the already incarcerated, criminals and state patients.

The government’s steadfast refusal to embrace vaccine mandates is seen as no small obstacle:

“That it hasn’t is because it decided as a matter of policy not to do so. Presumably, because it was initially uncertain as to whether it had, or would have, sufficient vaccines for the whole population or because it considered that it would be more effective to use persuasion rather than legislation to secure universal vaccination. It may also have been fearful of violating the constitutional rights to bodily integrity and religious beliefs,” they both claim.

There may be compelling reasons for reinstating the death penalty, in the same way that sterilization and other methods of population control in the past all had reasons given by their respective advocates. The administering of Depo Provera being a case in point, and our population size does pose a problem regarding sustainability and livelihoods. The epidemiology of heart disease within large populations is itself sufficient to warrant the same attention regarding the burden of disease.

Public policy is always in the nature of our democratic order, and not the sole requisite of the courts nor government agency. Just because one is able to make a vaccine mandate argument does not mean it should automatically follow that it become public policy. In any event our country has a particular democratic character and history. The trains would probably run on time if we adopted Nazism or Fascism as public policy. Our economy would behave differently if we had a one party state. Human rights have always been seen as an impediment to medical progress, they should not be.

And while I accept that positive discrimination against the unvaccinated may be in order, I do not buy the totalitarian impulse which has been introduced by the Sinovirus and Cheadle, especially when chronic under-spending on health services more than amply explain our nation’s failings.

As Mandela said during 2001 interview with Oprah:“A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial and uninformed.” And a US politician: The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted.

It is incredibly disheartening to read both parties’ endorsement of so-called ‘limitation analysis’, a flawed and treacherous exercise which comes from seeing absolutely nothing as sacrosanct in our constitution, least of all its preamble calling for remembrance of the injustices of the past and the non-repetition of the cardinal sins of apartheid.

‘Compulsory vaccination would infringe rights’, admit these two authors readily, both of whom deserve to be placed on the far-right of the political spectrum: “Just as an individual is free to refuse to undergo medical treatment because of religious beliefs, compulsory vaccination would infringe upon that right. But no right is absolute – a right is always capable of being circumscribed if there is a compelling public interest in limiting it,”they claim.

It is a paragraph that has Cheadle’s fascist imprimatur all over it, a tone of argument which needs to be called out for the white supremacist BS it represents, in reality a call to abandon the founding principles of our democracy, based as it is upon consent of the individual, consent of the governed, and consent when it comes to our minds and bodies.

I have already outlined my retort to similar racist rubbish punted by Pierre de Vos and suggest readers visit my earlier piece to get acquainted with such arguments, in particular why these rights are non-derogable, not subject to retroactive legislation and to avoid unnecessary repetition.

To reiterate: Vaccines save lives, removing consent destroys the foundation of our democracy.

NOTE: For the record, the writer is a former steering committee member of People’s Heath Movement.

SEE: GROUNDUP, BHEKISISA, DAILY MAVERICK AND THE WAR ON TRUTH

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