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(LifeSiteNews) — Reports continued to appear over the last year arguing for the ethical case for refusing to treat the unvaccinated.

It is noteworthy that such arguments, which present themselves as the rational defense of the vulnerable, are pronounced in places which have the most liberal euthanasia laws. Canada, which offers the disabled, including military veterans seeking help the option of state assisted suicide as a treatment, is soon extending the practice to the mentally ill and even to children, and is not a state whose claims to defend the vulnerable can be taken seriously.

There are nine US states which have decriminalized assisted suicide, marketed as an extension of liberty with the appealing term “The Right to Die.” Whilst medical treatment now increasingly includes the prescription of death, with nine European states offering it in some form, the right to refuse it is under sustained attack.

The vaccine controversy rumbles on, having wider consequences in its expression of an increasingly intrusive state. This may be most generously termed as a nannying obsession with safetyism which infantilizes its populations with otherwise unmanageable anxieties, but at worst betokens the replacement of bodily autonomy, parental authority and the freedom of religious belief with the mandatory subjection to bureaucratic decrees.

This new division in society is not limited to the West, as a recent study of attitudes shows. This December 8 report in the scientific journal Nature confirms a trend towards the stigmatization of the unvaccinated as second class citizens worthy of contempt.

We demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards the unvaccinated, as high as the discriminatory attitudes suffered by common targets like immigrant and minority populations.

The legal discrimination noted above is an extension of a worldwide attitude towards the unvaccinated which sees them as deserving only limited rights. Yet this is not a two-way street, as the report also notes.

In contrast, there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people, except for the presence of negative affect in Germany and United States.

The politicization of the near-mandatory vaccination campaign has resulted in the legitimization of hatred towards people who exercise their own judgement over the merits of a novel treatment. It is hard to overstate the damage done to families, friendships and to social cohesion generally, as this is a division which is deep rooted.

We find evidence in support of discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated in all countries except Hungary and Romania and find that discriminatory attitudes are more strongly expressed in cultures with stronger cooperative norms.

The study concludes in the conflation in the popular mind of conformity with moral righteousness, a dangerous confusion which has resulted in the logic of diminished citizenship for the unvaccinated.

Elites and the vaccinated general public appealed to moral obligations to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake but the present findings suggest that discriminatory attitudes including support for the removal of fundamental rights simultaneously emerged.

The news stories we see about the unvaccinated are evidence of a global reduction in the rights of those who refused, through circumspection, prudence and moral conviction to take an injection that does not stop transmission of a flu-like disease. It creates an outgroup of the unvaccinated whose claims to justice and fair treatment it is acceptable to dismiss.

This makes dissidents of people who simply exercised careful judgement and resisted the pressure to conform. It punishes the prudent and the principled. Most recently the World Health Organization has called the unvaccinated “a major killing force” in a promotional video for the experimental injections. This reinforces a trend of demonization, ranging from the desire to punish the unvaccinated by UK journalist Andrew Neil, to their characterization as “racist misogynists” by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

It is startling to see the claim of moral obligation come from states which consider medically assisted death at the beginning and end of life as a consumer choice. Likewise, it is hard to see where the merit is in any nation which penalizes the keeping of one’s head, when all around are losing theirs.

What the vaccine controversy continues to show is that we inhabit – for the time being – a world where the state will decide what is moral, right and good for you, whilst penalizing disagreement and making a virtue of legitimized hatred. The winter of “severe illness and death” promised by Joe Biden last Christmas now seems more like a diagnosis of Western society, than the mere condemnation of those whose strength of character, conscience and resistance to propaganda would in saner times be seen as its most ardent champions.

The stigmatization of the unvaccinated serves a political function which is useful to politicians keen to distract their populations from the disastrous mismatch between their ideology and the ruinous results it produces. It is a trick used by Stalin when he labelled any peasant with more than a chicken a greedy Kulak, deserving hatred and eventually death.

Such a program of dehumanization is as politically useful as it is morally indefensible, but in this case it is persecuting not merely the innocent but those who had the strength to resist the most coordinated propaganda effort in living memory. The unvaccinated were recently termed “Superheroes” who “embody the best of humanity” by one French General. It is not a view shared by those who rule them.

This divisive policy has shown the second class nature of a Western liberal ideology in decline. It champions the worst in people and punishes the best, enforcing its will regardless of the evidence, of the arguments from conscience and individual freedom, seeing its own authority as the only argument. We are increasingly free to agree with a value system so exhausted, and so desperate to maintain supremacy, that it resorts to censorship, criminalization and hatred to suppress any argument it cannot win.

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