Inform Choices and Consent
In this age when we can find out the facts on anything in seconds we also need to be aware that we can use the findings to make decisions, and give informed consent to issues we are confronted with especially when it concerns our health!
Story at-a-glance
- Informed consent means you have the right to be fully informed about the benefits and risks of a medical intervention and the freedom to make a voluntary decision about whether or not to accept those risks without being coerced or punished for your decision
- Informed consent applies not just to risks taken by participants in scientific experiments, but also to risks taken by patients under the care of physicians
- Vaccination must remain a choice because it is a medical intervention performed on the body of a healthy person that carries a risk of injury or death, and this risk cannot be calculated or determined ahead of time
- People are born with different genes and a unique microbiome. As a result, we do not all respond the same way to drugs and vaccines, and vaccine risks are therefore not being borne equally by everyone in society
- Utilitarianism, which decrees that some people are expendable for the good of the majority, is a pseudo-ethic that must be rejected as the moral foundation of public health policy and law
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