Jab: where there's blame there's a claim
We will not change government policy by blogging and protesting. Only two things matter: voting intentions in the runup to an election, and the Treasury.
The first can be managed by spinning and suppression, especially with the assistance of Silicon Valley.
If an individual is exceptionally embarrassing and persistent, he can get special attention. Think of Julian Assange. Or how about the magnificent Brian Haw, who staged a tented protest outside the Houses of Parliament for almost ten years? Did our MPs admit their shame and change their ways? No, they passed a Bill to ban demonstrations like his. Unfortunately for them it didn’t work in his case, since he pointed out that his protest predated that law. So they got the Mayor of London - a portly blond gentleman - to scrape him off the streets on their behalf. When Sartre was targeted for civil disobedience in the Paris riots of 1968, De Gaulle said ‘One does not arrest Voltaire’; thankfully, we do things so much more efficiently over here.
That leaves money as a prime stimulator. I have argued elsewhere that if the government had to pay all the costs associated with harm caused by vaccines (to a minority, we still think), it would ‘concentrate the mind wonderfully.’ For although government money is simply our money, if the Treasury loses control of the country’s finances we see someone like the IMF stepping in and showing us who really runs the show; most embarrassing.
As it is, a payment scheme for vaccine injury has existed since 1979. It’s hard to get - you must be 60% disabled or worse. Who decides on your claim? It was the DWP (remember the joys of the ‘all-work test’?) but as of a year ago it came under the purview of the NHS Business Services Authority; I wonder why, and how the members of the panel are chosen? Safe pairs of hands?
If awarded, you get a miserable £120,000; tax-free, whoopi-do! The Authority stresses, ‘It is not a compensation scheme.’ That is obvious from the fact that in court the defendant might have to face making you whole for your lost earnings (estimated UK lifetime median £566,00) and other potential losses including the expenses of medical treatment (will you always get what you need free and in a timely way from the NHS?), assistive devices, occupational therapy - plus an amount to reflect pain and suffering.
By the way, sudden death without prior disablement does not seem to qualify.
One could argue that those who suffer from ‘the jab’ would have suffered instead from not being vaccinated and catching the Cov. On the other hand that’s possibly even harder to prove, except by statistical implication; a given individual’s immune system might be up to handling a few virus particles from the environment, as opposed to an syringeful of them in a suspension fluid composed of many other potentially allergenic materials. I look forward to a definitive resolution on this point (‘don’t hold your breath,’ remarked my wife, but surely restricting respiration is close to the advice we were given for two years.)
Advice is one thing, compulsion another. If you have to have the jab to work, shop or travel then he who gives the orders owns the problem and all that flows from it.
To make the argument for proper compensation, I’d like to tackle the notion of ‘no fault.’
The pharma companies have been greatly heartened by getting immunity from Cov-vax-related prosecution. This carte blanche has allowed Pfizer to market a new version tested only on eight mice, who have yet to be interviewed (I must be quasi-wrong, an Oz fact-checker says so.)
It seems to me that if A grants immunity to B, the moral legal and financial obligations are not vapourised but pass to A. When I worked in reception at an Army officers’ mess I was told that it was vital to get an officer to sign off on your accounts; if there were errors (or worse) in them they then became the officer’s difficulty, not yours.
Human life is cheap here in Blighty. In WWI ‘The man who commanded Wheatley's division, General Sir Oliver Nugent, had boasted that a double decker London omnibus would hold all the men he intended to bring home alive.’ (p. 139 here.) Yet if the ‘social contract’ between the State and its citizens-or-subjects had been an equitable one then the prospective costs of compensation might have deterred our government from squandering our lives and property with such profligate abandon.
For the expenses of war are huge, and we’re still suffering the consequences of declaring war (unvoted) on Germany, twice. Why are our State pensions so small, why has our technological creativity been turned into profit for others abroad? Lack of money. What we didn’t throw away was seized from us as part of the plan to destroy our Empire.
Now we are pretty nearly bust, and crumbling because our hobby-politicians are undermining the social fabric for variously business and doctrinal reasons. Yet as our society becomes more genetically and culturally diverse it is going to become harder to persuade us that we are the playthings of our rulers, or even of an increasingly remote and unresponsive Parliament.
The weakening cohesion of the people has serious implications for political legitimation - already exemplified by Germany’s Foreign Minister when she airily declared that ‘we’ would stand with Ukraine ‘no matter what my German voters think.’ If nation-states are to be superseded by supranational bodies then let our ‘human rights’ be the basis of fair compensation for damage caused by official diktat.
The government may not like the idea of paying the bill, but if it’s going down the Enlightenment/globalist route maybe we can let Strasbourg’s ECHR sort out that one.