Saving the Dreamers from the Sea

A couple of decades ago in the state of Victoria, Australia, the public health fraternity considered the advisability of banning or regulating rock fishing. The authoritarian response to Covid-19 in the same place two decades later was not coincidental. Both stem from a fundamental human desire to control others – to force dictates on them for their own good. Within the current debates on ‘medical freedom’ and vaccination, this desire puts those calling for vaccine mandates and those calling for banning them on essentially the same side. The other side, the side of the public, is incompatible with the self-promotion and approbation that our definitions of success require, and will always remain so.

Rock fishing regulations were proposed for two reasons. Firstly, the specialty of ‘public health physician’ was relatively new and needed justification, in much the way that a pandemic industry must find ever-increasing pandemic risk or dentists decaying teeth. As numbers increase, any profession, guild, or class of workers must expand its scope to justify its existence. In public health, existential threats like boxing, community barbeques and rock fishing are staples.

Secondly, rock fishing has a low but real mortality, as it is tempting to stand right on the furthest rocks, where freak waves hit the hardest. Some people like catching fish, or spending hours trying to, and this is heightened for many by being on a rugged coastline with dramatic scenery and crashing surf. Some people, like me, are attracted to this, as others are to fires, waterfalls, or rock concerts. Each to their own, in our wonderfully diverse species.

I used to quote this rock fishing regulatory fetish as an obvious example of public health overreach; if someone wants to go rock fishing, they clearly should be free to do so (I thought). If someone warns them of the risk of unexpectedly big waves, warning signs are erected here and there, and perhaps schools provide some basic education on the strength of waves and the hardness of rock, all the better. …

Wanting to ban the public from free choice for their own good is not unlike supporting bans on incorrect speech in order to save democracy. Such arguments only stand if the opinion of a proclaimed ‘expert’ or ‘authority’ is more important than the free choice of a member of the public. They only work in an intrinsically unequal society. Unequal societies are, in the end, feudal rather than free. If people are truly equal, then each has the final say over their own bodies. The freedom of others is the hardest thing to accept, but also the thing most worth fighting for.

We Need to Die Fishing

So, banning Covid vaccines is, broadly, in the same category of societal endeavors as banning rock fishing, Ivermectin, and base jumping. It’s not primarily about safety or efficacy, but about whether we are all born equal and free. Many health practitioners have disgraced their professions over recent years by misleading the public on the efficacy and safety of vaccines, and the risk of the diseases they purport to address. That is no reason to join them. But it is a reason to support the efforts of those now scrambling to catch up with data and get accurate information out.

Democracy depends on our willingness to allow others to say what we consider deeply wrong. Bodily autonomy has the same basis. If someone wants to make a choice regarding their health, whether it’s raising the probability of a shorter life by overeating carbohydrates or having the next Moderna shot, they may do so if they find a provider who, in good faith after sufficiently assessing the substance and their context, considers it appropriate. The clinic and the fast-food outlet have more in common than money generation.

I reserve the right to go rock fishing, and for my children to do so. It is on me to ensure we are careful – but like driving to the library, I know it will not be entirely risk-free. Medical freedom means granting others the same right, not a set of rules that we, their self-proclaimed betters, dictate. Rather die on a rock than enslaved to another’s expert definition of freedom.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.