Do Not Give Up Your Rights. Dr. Julie Ponesse’s Remarkable Speech
Nov.03,2021
Julie Ponesse: Fighting the Banality of Evil in Canada
Dr. Julie Ponesse is a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate. She presented at the The Faith and Democracy Series on October 28, 2021. Dr. Ponesse has now taken on a new role with The Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity aimed at advancing civil liberties, where she serves as the pandemic ethics scholar.
Think back to a couple of years ago—fall 2019, let’s say. What were you doing then? What was your life like? What did you care about? What did you most fear? What DID YOU IMAGINE ABOUT the FUTURE?
That’s the person I would like to talk to for the next 15 minutes, + I’ll begin with my own story: At the end I’ll have a FAVOUR to ask plus a little SECRET to share.
In the fall of 2019, I was a professor of ethics and ancient philosophy; I taught students critical thinking + the importance of self-reflection, how to ask good questions and evaluate evidence, how to learn from the past and why democracy requires civic virtue.
Fast forward to September 16, 2021 when I received a “termination with cause” letter after I questioned, and refused to comply, with my employer’s vaccine mandate. I was dismissed for doing exactly what I had been hired to do. I was a professor of ethics questioning what I take to be an unethical demand. You don’t have to look very hard to see the irony.
Canada is governed by laws which are based on ethics. You could say that ethics are the bedrock beneath our democracy.
“The right to determine what shall or shall not be done with one’s own body, and to be free from non-consensual medical treatment, is a right deeply rooted in our common law.” These aren’t my words; they are the words of Justice Sydney Robins of the Ontario Court of Appeal.
With very few exceptions, each person’s body is considered inviolate in Canadian law, and this is the underlying ethos of the Nuremberg Code, a promise to humanity that we would never again endorse uninformed, non-voluntary medical decision-making, even for the patient’s own good,even for the sake of the public good.
By definition, vaccine mandates are coercive immunization strategies: in the absence of coercion — the threat of a loss of employment, for example — people would voluntarily agree to do what the mandate is trying to achieve!
Employers are holding our careers hostage, and removing our participation in the economy and in public life. Their justification is that “we are in a pandemic,” and we must therefore relinquish autonomy over our bodies for the sake of the public good.
So, let’s talk about autonomy and the public good for a minute.
In emergencies, the Parliament and provincial legislatures have a limited power to pass laws that violate certain Charter rights for the sake of the public good. But, to justify those violations, vaccine mandates would need to meet a very high threshold: COVID-19 would, for example, need to be a highly virulent pathogen for which there is no adequate treatment, and the vaccines would need to be demonstrably effective and safe.
The current state of affairs in Canada meets neither of these criteria.
Consider these facts:
1) COVID-19 has an infection facility rate not even 1% that of smallpox (and it poses even less risk to children)
2) a number of safe, highly effective pharmaceuticals exist to treat it (including monoclonal antibodies, Ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Vitamin D and Zinc), AND
3) The vaccines have reported more adverse events (including innumerable deaths) than every other vaccine on the market over the last 30 years.
In light of these facts, I have so many questions:
Why are the vaccinated granted vaccine passports and access to public spaces, when the Director of the CDC has stated that the COVID-19 vaccines cannot prevent transmission?
The Vaccine Passport: An Instrument of Social Control. The Rise of “Utilitarian Extremism”, and How to Recognize It
Why is vaccination the ONLY mitigation strategy when emerging evidence (including a recent Harvard study) shows no discernible relationship between the vaccination rate and new cases?
Why does our government continue to withhold Ivermectin as a recommended treatment when the U-S National Institutes of Health supports it, and when the state of Uttar Pradesh in India distributed it to its 230 million people, reducing its COVID death rate to almost zero? How has India surpassed Canada in Health Care?
Why are we about to vaccinate 5 year olds when COVID poses to them less risk than the potential vaccine reactions AND while there is NO effective monitoring system for the vaccines?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/do-not-give-up-your-rights-dr-julie-ponesse-remarkable-speech/5760742
