People across the world have been protesting against vaccine mandates to prevent the spread of Covid 19. A federal appeals court in US found that President Biden’s vaccine mandate was a “one-size-fits-all sledgehammer” that did not capture differences between workers and workplaces. It found the vaccine and testing requirements for private businesses “fatally flawed” and “staggeringly overbroad”. Surprisingly, although protests have raged in different parts of the world, news reports of these are not carried in the mainstream press. There have been protests in the UK, France, Italy, Australia, Germany, Ireland and India.
On November 20, 2021, over 1,500 people gathered at Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest coerced vaccination, the proposal to vaccinate children, the imposition of disastrous lockdowns, and to demand free access to public places, regardless of vaccination status. Advocates Nilesh and Dipali Ojha, who had earlier served notice on World Health Organization’s chief scientific officer Soumya Swaminathan for suppressing early treatment options for Covid-19, spoke at the gathering. There were other speakers too, who decried the loss of freedom that citizens are suffering, on the pretext of containing a virus.
The Awaken India Movement (AIM), a civil society group that has been coordinating these gatherings, issued a press release, stating, “We demand and end to the medical tyranny and fraud… and the perpetrators of this fraud who have destroyed our lives be put behind bars.” Similar protests have been held in Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bangalore and Gurgaon. AIM has also taken the matter to court, and in the northeast, courts have decided against vaccine mandates. There are also cases against mask mandates, mandatory testing and the unscientific assumption of asymptomatic transmission.
Robert F Kennedy Junior, nephew of former US president John F Kennedy, has been a campaigner against irrational vaccination. As a lawyer, he has fought for the parents of children injured through vaccination. In a conversation over TV recently, he said, “People must love their freedom more than they fear a germ”. He also thanked Tucker Carlson, his interviewer, saying he had not been given an opportunity to appear on TV for over 15 years, ever since he began to speak about the irrational overuse of vaccination.
