Introduction
As a former practicing physician in Argentina, a sociologist by discipline, and now a professor of health policy, I never imagined that I would one day find myself deeply engaged in debates over vaccine policy. Quite frankly, I never had an interest in vaccines. My parents vaccinated me as a child, I vaccinated my own child according to the pediatric schedule, and I took vaccines myself as an adult when instructed – never giving them a second thought. Looking back, I realize that my lack of interest was matched by a lack of knowledge: beyond what I had memorized in medical school, I knew virtually nothing about vaccines. Unsurprisingly, like many others in March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a “pandemic” (WHO, 2020), I simply wanted to do whatever was best to protect myself and my family. Later that year, the dominant narrative became that the best protection would come in the form of a vaccine – developed at “warp speed” and hailed as a major scientific achievement. But as the COVID event unfolded, and as this “novel” medical product was not only “encouraged” but forced upon billions – in Canada, mandated to work, to study, to travel by plane or train, and even to participate in basic social life – I began to wonder: what happens when policies that claim to protect our health, our “way of life,” and even the very foundations of our democracy end up destroying all three?
To make a very long story short, over the past four years, I focused my research program entirely on Covid – several aspects of it, but a major one was the effects of vaccination mandates on the healthcare labor force in Canada. Together with my small team of mentees/co-authors, I conducted a critical policy analysis of the academic literature on vaccine mandates, two quantitative surveys (in Ontario and British Columbia), and a qualitative analysis of open-ended responses from healthcare workers themselves. What we found challenges not only the official justifications for these policies but also the very terms of the debate. Our work documents not “hesitancy” or “misinformation” – framed today as major threats to humanity (Sell et al., 2021; WHO, 2021; World Health Organization, 2019) – but coerced consent, medical injuries, discrimination, and professional exile. This article summarizes the key findings of that research and offers a broader reflection on how the rush to enforce an alleged “consensus” – confidently announced in October 2020 in the leading medical journal (Alwan et al., 2020) – has undermined both science and ethics.
Mandates as Moral Imperative: How Policy Framed the Problem
Our first study was a critical policy analysis of the expert literature on Covid-19 vaccine mandates for healthcare workers (Chaufan and Hemsing, 2024). The picture that emerged was consistent and troubling: noncompliant workers were portrayed as misinformed, irrational, or morally suspect. Ethical concerns, scientific debates, and questions about evidence were largely absent from the conversation. Resistance was positioned as a pathology in need of correction – not a legitimate expression of caution, principled objection, or informed disagreement. Underlying this problem framing were several key assumptions: that Covid vaccines were both safe and effective at preventing infection and transmission; that vaccination was an unequivocal moral duty; and that any deviation from this consensus posed an unacceptable threat to public health. But as we demonstrated, these assumptions not only ignored the evidence available at the launch of the global vaccination campaign, but also sidelined long-standing principles of medical ethics, particularly informed consent and the right to bodily autonomy.
Healthcare Workers Speak: What Our Surveys Revealed
To confirm our analysis of the expert literature and hear directly from healthcare workers, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in Ontario (Chaufan et. al, 2024) and later in British Columbia (Chaufan et al., 2025a). These provinces were among those enforcing some of the strictest healthcare mandates in Canada, with British Columbia notably holding onto its mandates longer than any other jurisdiction. In Ontario, we surveyed 468 HCWs. In British Columbia, we surveyed 166. Both surveys included a mix of nurses, physicians, allied health professionals, and support staff, across ages and vaccination statuses. The data revealed consistent patterns:
- 77% of Ontario respondents and 86% of BC respondents were unvaccinated. Most had been terminated or suspended for noncompliance.
- Among vaccinated respondents, many reported receiving the injections under coercion -primarily to avoid job loss. A significant number also described experiencing adverse events following vaccination, which were ignored or dismissed by employers and health authorities.
- Roughly one-quarter of respondents in both provinces reported having considered suicide as a result of these policies and their consequences.
- Nearly half of all respondents indicated an intention to leave the healthcare field altogether.
These findings raise profound concerns not only about the ethics of the mandates themselves but about their capacity to harm an already strained healthcare system.
Stigma, Suppression, and the Language of Disdain
Beyond the numerical data, the open-ended responses painted a harrowing picture of stigma, exclusion, and social punishment (Chaufan et al., 2025b). Respondents recounted being labeled as threats to public health, denied severance after years or decades of service, and ostracized by colleagues and family alike. The vaccinated were not spared: many spoke of having complied under duress and shared the same moral outrage as their unvaccinated peers. One nurse described being dismissed – “like garbage” – after 20 years of service. Another HCW wrote, “I am vaccinated. I had no choice. I have three children to feed.” In these testimonies, we heard not “hesitancy,” but the voice of professionals forced into a corner – stripped of agency, dignity, and basic ethical consideration.
Scientific Foundations or Manufactured Consensus?
Mandates were justified by the claim that vaccines would prevent infection and transmission. But by mid-2021, evidence was mounting that vaccinated individuals could carry and transmit the virus just as easily as the unvaccinated (Acharya et al., 2021; Singanayagam et al., 2021). Original clinical trials had not been designed to evaluate these outcomes (Doshi, 2020) – a fact publicly available as early as 2020 to anyone with a willingness to question authority, internet access, and basic literacy: it was clearly stated in the Pfizer trial registration (Pfizer – BioNTech SE, 2020) and was later quietly acknowledged by Pfizer executives when questioned before European Parliament hearings in 2022 (Zimniok, 2022).
Science Without Freedom is not Science
Meanwhile, the infection fatality rate (IFR) for COVID-19 among the general population under age 70 was exceedingly low in the pre-vaccine era, as demonstrated by Ioannidis (Ioannidis, 2021) and corroborated later by a meta-analyses in the prestigious journal the Lancet (COVID-19 Forecasting Team, 2022). From the outset, it was clear that mortality was overwhelmingly concentrated among the frail elderly, particularly those institutionalized – individuals who often died not of the virus itself, but from neglect, abandonment, and catastrophic policy failure (Rancourt et al., 2021). In Canada this neglect reached extraordinary levels, as was compellingly revealed by a report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), describing “horrific allegations of elder abuse in five Ontario long-term care homes, with […] residents being bullied, drugged, improperly fed and in some cases left for hours and days in soiled bedding (Brewster, 2020).
Interventions That Compounded the Harm
Interventions such as ventilator overuse (Williams, 2020), toxic treatments like remdesivir (Mulangu et al., 2019), and the suppression of early treatments with repurposed drugs – including ivermectin, used successfully in real-world protocols like those led by Dr. Héctor Carvallo in Argentina (Carvallo et al., 2020) and Dr. Lucy Kerr and collaborators in Brazil (Kerr et al., 2022) – further deepened the harm. These clinicians, like others advocating for early treatment in North America – Dr. Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, and Paul Marik in the United States, and Patrick Phillips and Mark Trozzi in Canada – became targets of reputational assault, deplatforming, and professional retaliation (CBC, 2021; Fiore, 2021; Swenson et al., 2023). What passed for “scientific consensus” was not a product of open debate but of manufactured agreement – enforced through censorship, credential stripping, and rhetorical violence.
The Ongoing Witch Hunt: Demonizing Dissent
If mandates were about science and safety, one might expect debate to be welcomed and dissent to be engaged. Instead, dissenters were marginalized, punished, or erased. This pattern continues today, reflected in the glowing endorsements of censorship in leading journals like The Lancet, which in an earlier editorial this year declared “disinformation” (Lancet, 2025) – not failed policies or flawed science – the primary threat to public health. Such narratives frame disagreement itself as a form of contagion – a threat to be quarantined. The strategy is familiar to those who study the suppression of dissent in science (Martin, 1999), where whistleblowers, critics, or inconvenient findings are neutralized through ridicule, isolation, and career destruction.
The policies imposed on healthcare workers during the COVID-19 era were not merely mistakes. They were manifestations of a deeper problem: the collapse of evidence-based governance into enforced orthodoxy. When consent is replaced by coercion, when debate is replaced by censorship, when inquiry is replaced by dogma, what remains is not science but power masquerading as science. The right to speak, question, and disagree is not a luxury – it is the foundation of both science and democracy. Suppressing these rights under the pretense of a “state of exception” (Agamben, 2020) does not protect public health, and it certainly does not protect democracy. It is not “misinformation” that threatens health. It is the silencing of those who ask “inconvenient” questions.
Acharya, C. B., Schrom, J., Mitchell, A. M., Coil, D. A., Marquez, C., Rojas, S., Wang, C. Y., Liu, J., Pilarowski, G., Solis, L., Georgian, E., Petersen, M., DeRisi, J., Michelmore, R., & Havlir, D. (2021). No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant (p. 2021.09.28.21264262). https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262
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(Featured Image: “Surgeon Scrubs” by Matthew Henry is marked with CC0 1.0.)
