Microchip ‘vaccine passports’, second thoughts on Cheadle-stan

AS ONE of the vaccinated, I am generally in favour of universal immunisation strategies. The majority of deaths during the Covid epidemic have come from the ranks of the unvaccinated. Vaccines save lives, I wrote, but ‘removing patient consent destroys the foundation of our democracy’. I have thus tended to promote informed consent, patient choice and persuasion rather than outright coercion — and favour to some extant, what is referred to in legal circles as ‘positive discrimination’ especially when it comes to certain categories of employment.

An opinion piece by Kevin Ritchie in the Star entitled “Vaccine hesitancy: Why it’s time to create no-vaxx, no-go areas however paints a grim future of a state in which all citizens are effectively microchipped, forced to carry electronic ‘vaccine passports’ — internal passports that act to either grant or restrict access to freedom of movement, or as Ritchie explains, “no jab, no pub, no shopping mall”.

All this is to be achieved on the basis of immediate and instantaneous third-party access to patient information. A feat which would necessitate the removal of rights already granted under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI), not to mention placing restrictions and limitations on fundamental freedoms — the right to privacy, freedom of movement and other rights enshrined in our Constitution.

I have already written how an antiquated dominionship and/or guardianship model of state power (the state acting as parent-of-the-people), and thus a model contrary to our human rights based system, is being rolled out as we speak by Cheadle, Karim and Grey et al, in the process negating the hard-won victories of our democracy.

Unlike members of PANDA, who are campaigning for individual privacy and rights when it comes to employment, I have no quibbles in disclosing my Covid vaccine status to all and sundry, but can’t help wondering how this plays out as we move forward and especially when it comes to other diseases, for example HIV?

Didn’t we all win a patient rights battle, fought during the late 90s and over the turn-of-the-millennium, for HIV patients to not be coerced into disclosure of status? And why is Covid being treated like a chronic illness, when all the evidence points to its eminent and impending seasonal nature?

As Helen Braswell writes in Statnews: “The truth of the matter is that pandemics always end. And to date vaccines have never played a significant role in ending them. “

Brasell who a former Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard, where she focused on polio eradication, argues that “there were no flu vaccines in 1918, when the world didn’t yet know that the great influenza was caused by a virus, H1N1. In 1957, when the H2N2 pandemic swept the world, flu vaccine was mainly a tool of the military. In the pandemic of 1968, which brought us H3N2, the United States produced nearly 22 million doses of vaccine, but by the time it was ready the worst of the pandemic had passed, and demand subsided.”

She writes: “That ‘too little and too late‘ phenomenon played out again in 2009, when the world finally had the capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses of H1N1 vaccine; some countries cancelled large portions of their orders because they ended up not needing them.”

The same may be said for a previous coronovirus pandemic thought to have occurred in 1889, and known in medical histories as “the Russian flu,” which “might actually have been caused by one of the human coronaviruses, OC43.”

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: