SHEILA GUNN REID ｜ What impact will vaccine mandates have on the ethical and moral compasses of society going forward？
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Julie Panessi joins me from her home to discuss her experience with a vaccine mandate at the University of Western Ontario, and her new book, My Choice: The Ethical Case Against Co-Vaccine Mandating.
Transcript
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What impact will vaccine mandates have on the ethical and moral compasses
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of society going forward? I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
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My name is Julie Panessi and this message is about mandatory vaccinations.
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I am a professor of ethics at Huron College at the University of Western Ontario.
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It's one of the largest universities in Canada.
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Today I'm going to teach you a short lesson on the universally accepted ethics of coercing
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people into medical procedures. I'll be the example.
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My employer has just mandated that I must get a vaccine for COVID-19.
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If I want to keep working at my job as a professor, I have to take this vaccine.
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Here's my conundrum. My school employs me to be an authority on the subject of ethics.
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And I'm here to tell you it's ethically wrong to coerce someone to take a vaccine.
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If it happens to you, you don't have to do it. If you don't want a COVID vaccine, don't
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take one. End of discussion. It's your own business.
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But that is not the approach of the University of Western Ontario, which has suddenly required
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that I be vaccinated immediately or not report for work.
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So with the school year beginning in a few days, I am facing imminent dismissal after 20 years on the job.
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Because I will not submit to having an experimental vaccine injected into my body.
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Julie Panessi's video to her students. She recorded it right after she saw her career of more than 20
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years just disintegrate after she refused to comply with her university's COVID vaccine mandate.
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However, unlike most of us, bioethics is something that Dr.
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Julie had already given a lot of thought to. She's a master's in philosophy with a collaborative
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specialization in bioethics from the University of Toronto and a diploma in ethics from the
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Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. She's a bit of an expert here.
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She stood on her conscience and careful consideration, and she would not allow herself to be coerced.
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However, she paid a high price for that moral stand. Now she finds herself as the pandemic ethics
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scholar at the registered Canadian charity, the Democracy Fund, wherein she educates the public
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on civil liberties. And she has discussions on lockdowns that the lockdown enforcers and vaccine
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mandators don't want us to have with each other. And she joins me tonight in an interview we recorded
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before the Christmas break, wherein we discuss how she found herself at the center of a bioethics
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controversy and why she wrote her brand new bestseller, My Choice, the ethical case against
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Joining me now from her home is Dr. Julie Panessi. Dr. Julie, for those of you who don't know
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about you, and I don't at this point know how you couldn't, but why don't you tell us a little
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bit about yourself professionally and, and I guess sort of how you found yourself in the position you are
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today. That's a very good question. I know, big question.
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Nobody ever asked me that particular question. Professionally, so I've been in academia for,
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for quite a long time. I have a PhD in ethics and ancient philosophy, and I've taught at universities
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in Canada and the US for a long time. And then the vaccine mandate came on the horizon at Western in
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August, I guess it was, and I chose not to comply with it and was pretty quickly, efficiently terminated
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with cause. And life's just been kind of a roller coaster since then. And the irony to that, that still
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sort of haunts me and impresses itself upon me every day is that I was fired quickly, expediently,
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seemingly unreflectively for doing exactly the kind of thing that as a person trained in ethics is
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supposed to do. You know, you're supposed to evaluate evidence, especially when we're talking
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about harms, you know, great, not just physical harms, but the kinds of, you know, moral injury that
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we can do to other people. And at the very least, I mean, even if we don't have answers to how to resolve
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those problems, trying to identify where the harms are happening and asking questions about them and
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opening up debate so that we're really sure that we're on the right path here and that we don't do
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more harm than we might otherwise do. You know, and so I work at that every day. And honestly,
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most days I probably fail, maybe every day I fail, but I've got to think that there's some value in the
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trying and hopefully that in the end we will, you know, help people and that truth will come to
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light. And, um, so it keeps you going every day. Yeah. I think that's the nature of being human is
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that we're just really not good at it. And, uh, the, the point is we're supposed to keep trying. Um,
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now I wanted to ask a question because I don't think I've ever heard this answer from you, or maybe it
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hasn't been posed to you. What did you think at the beginning of COVID? Did you, what did you think
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about this emerging disease? Did you have any sort of inclination that this would be a massive civil
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liberties violation? What, what were your first thoughts on COVID as the pandemic sort of
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flowed into North America? Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a good question. I, um, interestingly,
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in my own personal case, I was about eight months pregnant when I first heard of it. And so it was,
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you know, distracted by other things and, um, uh, you know, limitations were being imposed in the
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hospital and there were worries about what delivery was going to look like. So, you know, it was quite
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focused on those things, uh, in terms of civil liberties. Nope. As someone born in the seventies in
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Canada, I honestly, perhaps naively never thought we would have a civil liberties crisis again.
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I thought we've learned from history. I thought we were morally mature as a group of people. Not
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that we wouldn't make missteps, but I would never have imagined if someone asked me if what we're
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going through now was possible, I would have very confidently denied it. Just goes to show how smart I am.
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Well, you know, you don't want to think of your government as this benign creature, but, uh, I
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mean, it, it, it's, um, you know, or rather you don't want to think of your government as this malignant
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creature. And it's more just sort of this benign thing that does its thing over there. It doesn't
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really bother you, um, until such time as a lot of people ignore it until they end up mugged by
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reality. Um, which takes me to my next question. What was the one thing that really changed the
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pandemic for you that sort of opened your eyes? Was it when you were being laid off or was it
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sometime sooner? And what was it much sooner? I mean, back in March of this year, I started working
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with the Canadian COVID care Alliance because I knew something was off and I knew they were a group of
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scientists and physicians and other professionals who are trying to provide a more balanced, you know,
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approach to, to this narrative that has just picked up steam, like a, like a locomotive, you know? Um,
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I think the thing that first kind of got my radar twinging a little bit is when you, um, I mean,
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I've done some work in, in medical ethics and sat on research ethics boards and things like that.
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And one of the things that you notice, if you notice nothing else is just how painfully slow
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everything moves because there's an extreme amount of caution. And, and as you might know, um, you know,
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medical education has operated on this evidence-based, uh, model, uh, for a long time, decades now.
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And so, um, there's been an extreme amount of attention paid to how things play out in the
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clinical setting and then, um, um, you know, a feedback loop to policy. So here's an idea,
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let's implement this policy, but then let's also see how it works in the clinical setting. Let's see
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what health outcomes look like. Let's see if there are other adverse, you know, effects from this
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particular policy. Let's make sure we uptake that information and make sure the policies we make it
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we're making actually, you know, fit that, that evidence that we're seeing. And I started to notice
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that none of that was happening. Right. That from the beginning, um, you know, any questions that are
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raised about how case numbers are arrived at, um, how the PCR test works, whether or not it's the best
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assessment of, of, of, of viral load, um, whether or not there are other ways to, how can I say, uh,
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you know, establish immunity, looking at natural immunity. Um, the fact that all of these things are
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disregarded and we don't even need to talk about, uh, you know, vaccine adverse events, but the fact that
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none of these things are part of a conversation to ensure that we've identified all of the benefits and
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risks on both sides of the issue, that was just a red flag right away. And of course, looking into
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things more, it's become clear that we have no openness. We have no debate in my view, within
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science, within politics, within journalism, and we are very egregiously and very negligently, uh,
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ruining people's lives irreversibly. You know, that's a really great point because not only are
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the people who are supposed to be asking these sorts of questions, are they not asking the
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questions, but if somebody else tries to ask the questions, you are completely shut up. And it's not
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just, you know, medical associations enforcing this sort of hard sense. It's used to be soft.
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It used to be soft censorship. Now it's hard censorship when you can lose your job as a doctor. If you simply
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say, you know what, let's just pump the brakes and ask this question. If you're a journalist,
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you are censored, you're othered, uh, big tech is enforcing the censorship. We see, uh,
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the government now pressuring the big tech people who aren't doing the censorship to continue to
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censor it. Uh, I guess for me, and I'll ask you to look in your crystal ball, but I think you've got
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a bit of a crystal mind on this issue too. Um, what do you think this means for the state of society?
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When we aren't allowed to ask these questions, what does it mean for medical advancement? What
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does it mean for the enlightenment of people? What happens to society when all the questions
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I think with that quest, that one question you're asking, you know, what does it mean for society
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to me is both, uh, retrospective and prospective because there's a question there about, you know,
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what does it mean in terms of where we've come from and how we got here? And I think the situation
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we're in is showing us that we've been on this track for a long time, decades, probably. Um, I think
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post-modernism and academia is part of the problem. I think this cancel culture, which in ethical
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literature we call like a culture of silence, right? So anytime you're privileging silence over, um,
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asking questions and dissenting and trying to get to the truth and things like that, right? And that I
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think is fueled by, um, social media and it's fueled by, uh, media now. But then the other part of
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your question is, well, well, where are we going? How do we work our way out of this? And I think we
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can't do that until we understand how we got here. And until we fix, nevermind COVID like COVID is,
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if it wasn't COVID, it was going to be something else that is eroding our liberties right now.
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So we need to understand what we, each one of us, we don't get to blame Trudeau every day.
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We don't get to blame Ford every day. We don't get to blame the star every day,
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though they are leading the moral harms in my view that, that we're going through now.
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We have to blame ourselves every single day for having gotten ourselves into this position.
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Some of us have done better than others. Some of us have been more negligent in our ignorance than
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others, but every single Canadian who, you know, if you're getting, and Sheila, can I say this to your
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viewers? If you're getting ready to enjoy a lovely Christmas where you're excluding your family because
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of a personal medical choice you've made, you are fueling the fire of this horrible situation that
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we are in. And until we bring that to light, until we can talk about that on shows like yours, in the
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media, with our friends, with people in the coffee line, our democracy is sick and it's never going to
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recover. You know, that's a great point. There are a lot of people who think that they would be
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the conscientious objectors until such time as they're given the opportunity to be a conscientious
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objector. And then they choose the path of least resistance. And we see this all the time with the
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vaccine passport system where people say, well, you know, I want to go out for supper. So I'm going to
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show my vaccine passport. Well, you just validified the system. You validated the system of segregation
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and you took an opportunity to exercise your medical privilege over other people. You didn't
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earn it. You just got it. And now you're part of the system. Whether you, you see that, or whether
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you want to admit that to yourself or not, you are propping up a system of segregation. What, I guess,
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what is it going to take for people to realize that, you know, when, when you engage in the system,
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you are part of the reason the system stays together. Yeah. You know, I think part of that
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narrative structure that you're mentioning, because I hear this a lot lately is this idea that if I just
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give a little, I'll get back all. Yeah. And I've heard this a lot in particular contexts,
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most specifically talking with someone who runs an exercise facility lately. And they said,
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we hate imposing these passports, but if we just do it a little bit now, January will be better.
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And I think we need, until we understand part of our problem, honestly, and I've been saying this over
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and over again. And, you know, in the book, I just finished part of the, like the last couple of
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chapters are about this. We, we are not good historians. We've forgotten, you know, the political
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ideals of the past. We have forgotten how to read good literature. And by good literature,
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I don't mean it has to be like highfalutin stuff that's, you know, it's not that. It's literature
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that where there's a transparency and an honesty of ideas. And I think we, we forget that historically,
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these tiny little creeps have led to the greatest harms and that complicity, right? So complicity is this
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idea that you are partly responsible for some harm without being solely responsible. Complicity is
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not morally neutral. You don't get a, get out of jail free card because you say, well, I only did a
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little bit of harm or I only helped this, you know, I only helped the government to squash our liberties
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a tiny little bit. So I'm not that bad. Right. It's so interesting to me, Sheila, that I've talked to a
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few people who, you know, they have vaccine passports, but are unwilling to use them. I find that
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so interesting and that's a, such a sign of maturity in, in citizenship to me because they've made the
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medical choice that they feel is best for them. And I can't do anything other than respect that
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fully. But they've made a political choice that they feel is best for everyone. And if you want
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to talk about collectivism and being in it together, those are the people who are, you know, carrying that
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flag, not the people who are bullying and pressuring people into making a choice that they do not
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believe is right for themselves. I wanted to ask you, did you ever see, did you foresee the idea
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of vaccine passports and mandatory vaccination for someone like you to do your job? You don't work
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in medicine. I suppose there could be arguments made for people who work in medicine, not ethical ones,
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but, but there are arguments to be made there. But for someone like you, did you ever even foresee
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that this would be on the horizon? You know, it, the question is prompted by you just saying,
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you know, this, the slow creep of civil liberties violations and to give a, give a little, to get a
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lot back. You know, we've gone through 21 months of this, of giving in, giving in, giving in, and
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people are still giving in, but did you ever foresee that this would come to your doorstep,
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these vaccine passports? Yeah. Sorry, you just cut out there a little bit for me, but
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no, I had no, I would not have guessed. This is all, this came out of the blue for me. There is a saying
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that I quite like in the moral context and it's, you know, where there is risk, there ought to be
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choice. And again, charitably, if you want to understand our situation is one according to which
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we face this lethal, you know, and I'm going to qualify this and say, I think there are problems
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at each step of this narrative. But if we want to say that we face a potentially lethal virus,
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we have a potential treatment for it. But there are risks on both sides, then the idea of mandating
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and quite possibly, I mean, I think we're being primed by our government and mainstream media
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to, to enforce a national mandate. I have no doubt about that. Um, so people who feel that
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we'll get worse off scot-free. I mean, I see on social media, people celebrating Christmas and New
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Year's, like this pandemic situation is behind us. And, uh, if only the other 10% will get vaccinated,
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will be, you know, will be free. Well, that's not going to happen, you know? Um, and I think we need
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to, you know, again, we, we just, we, we need to look to history and see how this has unfolded in
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the past. And the, it's so odd to me that, I mean, our case numbers are worse than they were before
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all the vaccination started. Yeah. So if that doesn't, you don't have to, you don't have to
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come down on the side against mandates in order to allow yourself to start asking some very
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interesting and important questions about why that might be and whether or not it's reasonable
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to be so vaccine adamant or mandate adamant in the face of that kind of information. And that to me
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is a kind of, there's a kind of collective irrationality there that, that makes it very
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hard, I think, for people on both sides of the debate to have, to have a discussion, right?
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Because we're disagreeing about such fundamental aspects of it, you know, about, um, where
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misinformation comes from, what it is, whether anything that, that departs from a certain
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narrative is misinformation. I hope not, but that's certainly the default interpretation,
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you know? I think there's some wide scale, I don't know what the right word is, maybe gaslighting
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of the public at large. For example, you see all the time in the news media, um, my peers in the media,
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I think they're guilty of this a lot. Um, when talking about vaccinations for kids, you're a
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mom, I'm a mom, you know what it's like to take your kid off to the health unit to get their
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vaccinations. I'm not averse to vaccinations, but all of a sudden we've got news media telling us
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how to get your kid vaccinated as though we don't have a clue how to do it for the other vaccines
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that we've been getting our kids. Like vaccination is this new and unusual thing. Um, and how we should
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be talking to kids about vaccines. Well, we know how to talk to our kids about vaccines. We give them all
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the other ones. It's just this one that we're apprehensive of. And you see sort of a rewriting
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of the collective unconsciousness. And it's a new agey term that I'm, I sort of am loath to use, but
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on the issue of vaccination itself, for example, I think our COVID vaccination rate right now is
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somewhere around the current polio vaccination rate. And yet we don't push for 100% vaccination on
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polio. It's just a thing that we get vaccinations for. And it's, it's sort of over there and we don't
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worry about it, but there's this constant crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch on this one vaccine. And
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people aren't even being reflective about how we treated vaccines in the past, or for that matter,
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in the very recent history. It's very interesting. And one thing that I think we've done, uh, and I don't
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know how obvious this is, but we've really taken this medical choice out of the context of the
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clinical setting with your particular healthcare provider and made it a public event, you know?
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So now when you go and, and you're given some kind of consent form, but it's not, uh, full and
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sufficient in my view. And from what I understand people, I mean, I haven't done this, but you know,
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people who go and, and, and, and sign one of these things, they will, it's not like there's any kind of,
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there's not much time given to a discussion of benefits and risks and all of that. Right. So
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I think one of the problem here is we've taken something that should be properly medicalized,
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not to mention, you know, uh, up to the individual and supporting informed consent,
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but there should be properly medicalized, taking it out of that context. And one of the things that's
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really, you know, salient and important about that is that when, um, healthcare decisions are best
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made in my view with someone who knows your medical history, the best. Right. Right. And that's going
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to be your primary care, a person who has taken a good history and understands the risks that, um,
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people in your family are, are exposed to, you know, if there's a risk of stroke in your family,
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blood clotting in your family, that kind of thing. And so now we're not only removing that
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kind of insulating effect, right. It's like a safeguard, right. It doesn't work perfectly all
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the time, but it's an awful lot better than going to the Air Canada center and standing in line,
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you know, or sending this child off to school. And well, who cares about informed consent,
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as long as there's, you know, the vaccinators are wearing a superhero costume and giving your kid
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a lollipop afterwards. So we, I think we've made it, um, not only non-medicalized,
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but we've given it a kind of celebrity social media status. And now, I mean, you would never,
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should I say never, you would not be inclined, I think, to take a photo of yourself getting
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vaccinated in your doctor's office and then post it on Instagram. But now there are walls, right.
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Where you can take your kind of like when people go to the Oscars, you can stand in front of this
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wall and it says, I got vaxxed. I don't know what it is. Right. And there are stickers and there are,
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um, at the Air Canada center that flashes the numbers of people up on the big screen of,
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you know, it's become this act of celebrity and public. Um, it's become conspicuous.
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Whereas medical care in the past has always been private and we don't even have to go down the
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road further. I don't think to talk about whether that's good or bad, but it's important. Don't you
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think for us to realize that there's been a fundamental shift in how healthcare is delivered
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and where it's discussed in between whom? And now we feel that everybody has access to all of our
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personal medical information and has rights to participate in that decision-making process.
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Yeah. Uh, yeah. I, that has been one of the greatest casualties of the pandemic is just your
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privacy. People ask you inappropriate questions. They divulge inappropriate information. It's been
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very, very strange. Um, Julie, I wanted to ask you outside, uh, and this is a ridiculous question,
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but I guess outside of losing the career that you worked for and your job, what has been for you the
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hardest part of the pandemic? It's people back when my video came out in September, people wrote from
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all over the world. They still do. And they're so lovely, but they express sympathy and concern for
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me over having lost my job. And I say to everyone that I'm able to respond to that I was so emotional
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in that video, not because I lost my job. Who cares? Who cares about my job? What's terrifying and
00:25:41.460
overwhelming? And it's just like waves that comes over, come over you every day. Sometimes every
00:25:46.920
moment of every day is the fact that we live in a country where this could happen and there's no
00:25:51.740
escape hatch. So my, what I find overwhelming, I forget if you put it that way, but what I find
00:25:59.380
overwhelming about the pandemic is nothing biological or immunological at all. That's not where my fears
00:26:05.100
come from. The fears are that, you know, as an individual, I, um, won't be able to live a free
00:26:13.120
life anymore, but as a mother, I won't be able to protect my child from the state anymore. And that
00:26:18.800
there's no place on earth where that might be possible. Now you've written a new book. It's called
00:26:27.400
My Choice, The Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates. Why did you write the book?
00:26:35.680
Good question. You know, it seems to me that we, there's a lot of cognitive laziness going on these
00:26:43.120
days, I think, from our government and our media. And that's created a sort of story according to which
00:26:50.180
only certain people are invited to the table and certain opinions are highlighted and shared on social
00:26:56.040
media or in articles or in editorials or whatever. And, um, I really want to do what I can, whether
00:27:02.040
it's with the book or doing interviews or giving speeches or talking with people on the phone. I want
00:27:07.640
to do whatever I possibly can to make it clear that there's another side to the story and to help
00:27:14.620
people who, who maybe have intuitions along the lines of what, what I've been saying today, but don't
00:27:20.140
quite know how to frame or package or articulate those ideas. And, um, I hope, you know, if you buy
00:27:27.000
the book, if you read the book, please don't feel like you have to agree with everything I say. I,
00:27:32.620
it will be a win for me if people just read, open themselves up to it, and then bring it forth to
00:27:40.020
discussion with other people they have. Just take it as an invitation to further discussion and debate.
00:27:45.740
It's not the definitive word by any means. It's just hopefully gives us a little, it's like,
00:27:50.840
it's a bit like a ticket to a conversation that I think we, we, we needed to have, but haven't been
00:27:55.140
having in our country for a couple of years now. One last question before I let you go.
00:28:02.400
And do you have some advice for people out there who are struggling with job loss because they are
00:28:07.900
those ethical resistors to the lockdown and the vaccine mandates? Do you have advice for them
00:28:13.180
when they're feeling alone, especially right now during the holiday season, they, you know,
00:28:17.600
they've been told that they can't go to holiday gatherings because they're unvaccinated. They
00:28:21.780
cannot participate in a fulsome way in the world because they are vaccine resistors or vaccine
00:28:28.820
passport resistors. What's your advice for them? Yeah, a good question. Um, maybe I'll give a little
00:28:36.680
dose of harsh reality first and then try to be a bit hopeful. Um, I think, and I hope this helps
00:28:44.200
people who are listening in some sense that I guess I want to say, I hear you and I see you and I know
00:28:50.220
you're going to, you're going to have a very hard Christmas this year, just talking about Christmas,
00:28:54.280
especially, you know, um, you're going to be very lonely and there's going to be a lot of hate
00:28:59.180
headed your way and you can't control what other people will do. Um, but you know, when we think
00:29:07.340
about moral integrity and that's just acting consistently with your deeply held beliefs and
00:29:13.620
values, um, that's a lonely road sometimes. Um, but it's a choice to make, you know, it's a choice.
00:29:22.220
If you feel that you're doing the right thing, people are going to, some people will applaud you for
00:29:27.940
that and will comfort you and bring, bring you into their lives and other people will shun you.
00:29:33.340
And if you're feeling sad, you know, that you can't participate in family gatherings because people
00:29:40.160
are excluding you, then I guess I would use it as an opportunity to think about how important those
00:29:47.060
relationships are in the first place, you know, and just think if you can imagine another kind of life
00:29:52.840
moving forward. I mean, myself as awful as the last sort of year and a half of being,
00:29:57.760
and I've lost a tremendous number of deeply personal relationships. Uh, I have also had other
00:30:03.560
ones grow and emerge in very surprising places that it's often like this, right? The Phoenix from
00:30:10.460
the ashes. You, you, sometimes you, you, you end up, you find yourself in the life that you could never
00:30:16.300
have created with your wildest imagination. And that sometimes great harm and devastation can produce
00:30:22.960
some pretty wonderful things. So please don't feel like everything is beyond your control. Um,
00:30:29.460
and please don't feel like you can make the right decision and not suffer because you probably will.
00:30:38.760
Dr. Julie, thank you so much for the work that you do with the democracy fund. And thank you so much for
00:30:43.640
offering that, you know, that message of hope that things will be hard, but they will be different
00:30:48.480
and they could even be better. Um, how do people find your book and find some of the work that you're
00:30:54.820
Yeah. So you can visit the democracy fund website. Um, and you can visit my, my choice book.ca. You
00:31:01.920
can order the book that through that. Uh, and you can also go to amazon.ca. You can search for it
00:31:06.760
there. So we can give you links and you can link them. So I will put the links in the show description,
00:31:12.980
Julie, thank you so much for taking the time, all the best to you and your beautiful family in the
00:31:24.080
My name is Dr. Julie Panessi. I was a professor of ethics at Western University until I was fired
00:31:42.080
for choosing not to take one of the COVID-19 vaccines. I made an ethical choice and it cost me my job.
00:31:50.420
COVID-19 has caused a crisis in healthcare, but it has also triggered a crisis in other
00:31:58.240
institutions we regard as essential to civil progressive society, academia, especially the
00:32:04.920
sciences, journalism, government, the law, and more broadly civil discourse, how we talk to each other.
00:32:11.480
In my new book called My Choice, The Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates, I discuss how the
00:32:19.240
response to the pandemic is ushering us into a new era, away from the classical liberal world we are
00:32:25.660
leaving behind and why I think we are living through a pandemic of coercion and compliance.
00:32:31.480
I explain how we have gotten here and how we can grab hold of a safer, freer, more hopeful future.
00:32:39.040
You can get your copy of the book by going to mychoicebook.ca or bookstores everywhere.
00:32:46.120
I sincerely worry about the fate of our public institutions, academia, policing, education,
00:32:54.120
science, and even politics, when the most ethical amongst us, the ones that won't bend to public
00:33:00.940
pressure, are the ones being fired and cast aside. What happens to a society when the most
00:33:05.320
malleable amongst us are the ones put in charge? Well, everyone, that's the show for tonight
00:33:10.740
and the show for this year. I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week,
00:33:15.840
and remember, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much to think.