A Pandemic of Discrimination and Repugnant Human Behavior #TeenTuesday

Contributing article by Teens Against Mandates

With the height of the pandemic apparently behind us, many people want to move past that rough patch in our lives – you know, the patch where you were probably disinvited to at least one event, forced to dine outdoors, wear a mask indoors, and/or dropped by a friend or two.

But as someone who has personally lost internships, opportunities, and friendships over the vaccine, I find it hard to just “move on,” as do so many others.

I previously volunteered remotely as a teen mental health volunteer, but I was forced to leave when vaccination became a condition of my volunteer service. Keep in mind, I was volunteering from the confines of my bedroom the entire time. I felt as though I was being forced to choose between my fundamental right to bodily autonomy, my religious beliefs, and my passion for teen mental health. This feeling of discrimination based on medical status is, unfortunately, very familiar to many people who likewise refused the COVID vaccination. If you’ve been a victim of medical discrimination, how do you just move on now that society is returning back to normal?

Recently, in a COVID hearing in the European Parliament, Janine Small, one of the Pfizer directors, just admitted: “At the time of the introduction, the vaccine had never been tested on stopping the transmission of the virus.” This is scandalous; and from both a medical and societal perspective, this admission matters tremendously.

The Pfizer Vaccine was authorized for emergency use to prevent COVID-19 – and was heavily marketed as offering a communal benefit of protection before it was actually tested in preventing transmissibility. This would remove the entire legal and ethical basis upon which the COVID mandates were predicated.

This puts so many mandates in question: for example, requiring the shot to invulnerable demographics such as school children and young, healthy adults – neither of which are at a general risk from any comorbidities. The known risks of the vaccines and listed SAEs in the VAERS database and several other resources, however, far outweigh any benefits to the population. Vaccine mandates were immoral, unscientific, and criminal from the beginning. Still, millions of people felt coerced to get vaccinated because of the slogan that we “do it for others.”

The ones who did not comply were faced with unjustifiable institutional discrimination. The justification offered by governments and health bodies to act for the sake of communal welfare was nothing less than a fabrication designed to perpetuate public compliance. So after a year-and-a-half of that kind of first-hand discrimination, how do you move past that? How are we expected to trust a government that continuously lies to us for financial and political gain?

It’s one thing for the government to lie and implement discriminatory policies without a scientific basis, which they did. But how do you handle it when some of your closest friends and family are enthusiastically embracing these policies, disinviting you to holiday dinners, milestone events, and other social gatherings? What about the friends who were too embarrassed to tell you outright that they wouldn't see you but subtly distanced themselves?

These policies and the sentiment that it’s “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” trickled down from the highest ranks of leadership–from Biden, Fauci, Justin Trudeau, and Prime Minister of France Macron–along with so many others. Our closest friends and family turned on us because the government told them the unvaccinated were “selfish, irresponsible, and morally repugnant.” That is probably the scariest part. People were complicit, and many continue to distance themselves. If you have lost friends over your immunological status, how do you just move on?