Like with so much history that is shrouded by the mists of time, the detailed tales of the thousands of British men who refused to fight in the First World War make for fascinating reading. These conscientious objectors came from all walks of life – socialists, communists, pacifists, Quakers, Jehovah’s witnesses, Methodists, the Bloomsbury Set – and found a unity of purpose in their protest, allowing them – for a time being at least – to put aside quite substantial ideological differences.
Ethics
The Cape Byron Lighthouse Declaration
In early 2023, three Australian health professionals who had all been ‘struck off’ for speaking out against their government’s pandemic response, decided they must speak up for medical ethics and freedom of debate. They met and set up the Cape Byron Lighthouse declaration. The declaration’s four aims would have been uncontroversial only a few years ago.
NUDGE DENIALISM: Why are the state’s psychological experts distancing themselves from behavioural science?
The state’s reliance on behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – to facilitate the public’s compliance with covid restrictions has been widely documented. The many psychologists and behavioural scientists advising the government during the covid event (such as those in the SAGE subgroup, SPI-B, and the Behavioural Insight Team, BIT ) have, reasonably, been assumed to hold a significant degree of responsibility for using these methods of persuasion in communication campaigns
Trying to bargain away the excess deaths problem
Politicians fancied themselves as heroes in 2020. They were saving lives. Having played doctor with the population they are now being shown the fallout and it is not pretty. They are working through the stages of grief.
Unvaccinated children barred from Birmingham schools
The new face of coercion Unvaccinated children sent home from school as a ‘National incident’ is declared. Does that ring any bells? Well maybe if you had lived in Lithuania or California during the recent pandemic. But here in the UK, those strident voices warning of ‘consequences’ for citizens declining an offer of a covid […]
‘Controlled Spontaneity’: government plan for future psychological manipulation of its people
As we enter into a new year, HART continues to retain faith in ordinary people’s ability to resist – and ultimately reject – the march of authoritarianism, and to frustrate the ‘expert’ technocrats’ systematic attempts to influence our thoughts, speech, and behaviour.
State of the nation: in a bit of a state?
Welcome to 2024. Even in the depths of the great coronapanic debacle of early 2020, one might have assumed – all things being equal, of course – that by now society would have veered back on course, the majority of right-thinking folk having realised the folly of the great misadventure.
First, Do Harm: A Sorry Tale in the Daily Mail
The sordid state of the medical system here in the UK is laid bare in excruciating detail in a recent Daily Mail article which chooses to perpetuate myths and disinformation rather than engage in genuine reporting.
Pick of the week
A selection of articles that we feel you will find worth the time.
Ethics Matter – The UK Medical Freedom Alliance
The UK Medical Freedom Alliance is one of the unsung heroes of the covid era. Formed in response to the draconian and deeply unethical policies rolled out by the government in 2020, they have worked tirelessly to ensure the public has access to important resources and information on their basic rights around medical choices.
Unjustified Unblinding
The failure of regulators to set baseline requirements for unblinding leaves a gaping hole in regulatory oversight, raising questions on the commitments to transparency, ethics, and scientific robustness in these and future trials.
Joint open letter to MPs who voted for vaccine mandates
HART have joined with The Thinking Coalition and UK Medical Freedom Alliance in a letter to all those MPs who voted for mandatory vaccination for Social Care Workers in summer of 2021. Much was written at the time of the huge ethical issues, quite apart from the likely loss of many skilled and dedicated staff. Labour voted against the government at the time, in response to calls from unions whose members were likely to be impacted.
Balancing on an ethical knife edge
It is important that we admit what we do not know and there are many gaps to the end of life Midazolam story. In fact it is possible to interpret what we do know in two totally different ways. 1. The relatives have been deceived or 2. The relatives are right.
Ethical boundaries in medical decision-making can be blurred by circumstances
An analysis of the spatial characteristics of deaths during the spring 2020 wave in Northern Italy was carried out by him along with a Panda colleague; this suggested that it looked nothing like a spreading virus, and more like the sudden imposition of a policy response.
Corporate Research NHS-style
Digging into the trial centres and the sponsorship has highlighted the current state of medical research in the UK and the influence of the drug company sponsor. Several of the centres involved are commercial companies with clearly a need to undertake drug company sponsored research in order to make a profit for their organisation.
AstraZeneca children’s trial breaches Helsinki
As a retired paediatrician, I was shocked to see the Oxford Vaccine Group advertising on Twitter for children aged 6-17 to join the latest Sars-CoV-2 vaccine trial[1]. In the two days it has taken me coposing this letter, I now see from tonight’s BBC news that the trial has already begun.
NextCOVE
You may think that Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children have been withdrawn but don’t worry your child can get their next fix by enrolling in the NextCOVE trial, launched last month in Bradford, with several other centres across the UK due to start recruiting soon. The trial was announced by Yahoo ironically on the same day, 30th June, that all routine covid vaccines ended.
The inversion of the ‘precautionary principle’
The precautionary principle (PP), in its original form, counselled those considering the introduction of an innovative idea – a new way of doing things – to pause and think carefully about the balance between potential benefits and potential harms of the novel intervention, with the emphasis on “potential”, since by their nature innovations will invariably carry a high risk of unknown and unknowable risks of harm. As such, the principle complemented the long-standing Hippocratic oath of our medical doctors to, ‘First do no harm’.
