No room for conscience calls when it comes to Covid

 Irish country doctor Gerard Waters has, effectively, been struck off the medical register because he will not administer Covid-19 vaccines to his patients. The Irish Medical Council held a hearing and suspended the County Kildare physician, according to The Irish Times. 

 Dr Waters is not exactly a Covid denier, but takes issue with how the disease has been handled by Irish officialdom. He also disagrees with the deployment of messenger RNA vaccines, which are those made by Pfizer and Moderna.

 

I’m pro-vaccine, across the board, a position heightened in the pandemic by the lack of any other options to restore society to normal economic functioning. But is the medical profession really a fascist mini-state with no room for individual beliefs? These professionals subscribe to the Hippocratic dictum (not actually the Hippocratic Oath, but we won’t go into the niceties here) to “do no harm”. And here is a mature person — the doctor is 71 — who believes that the vaccine is not totally safe and he could be harming those who trust his medical expertise by administering it.

 

The anomaly is that Irish doctors do not have to perform abortions if they are conscientiously opposed. Abortion was made more easily available here with new legislation in 2018, but there remains a cohort of doctors who will not carry out the procedure, and they are permitted to take this course by the Medical Council.

So it seems hysterical and counter-productive to punish Dr Waters, who is on the record both as saying he will not prevent his patients getting the vaccine elsewhere, and that his mind is not closed on the matter. 

If “circumstances change, I will change”, he said on RTE radio’s liveline program in February.

 

The situation indicates the level of insecurity at the heart of official management of the pandemic. And who could blame our leaders for their discomfort, caught on the cleft stick of saving lives immediately or saving the longer term livelihoods of many thousands of citizens.

 

In the army you have to carry out orders; in large corporations workers have to do what the bosses decide is appropriate, or else they leave, and become outspoken critics such as Tristan Harris, former ethicist with Google.

 

But in medicine, where it’s not just a matter of corporate strategy, but of life and death?

This doctor is not doing something bad, but refusing to do something which he thinks is bad. If you've seen the play or movie A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, this examines the dilemma of Sir Thomas More when Henry VIII broke with the Pope and set himself up as the head of the church in England. All Henry's lieutenants were required to take an oath confirming Henry's new status, and More, a devout Catholic, refused. 

His argument was that he was saying nothing, therefore he was not opposing the king but holding his own counsel. It was not a deed, but a non-deed. However Sir Thomas, now Saint Thomas, still lost his head for his principles. Dr Waters might take some comfort, of a sort, in knowing he is in this type of company.