A drama on Capitol Hill recently concerned a new move that would effectively grant pesticide companies indemnification against lawsuits for harm done. The effort took place at the committee level and was approved on a bipartisan voice vote, so that no one can track precisely who the players are here and even the language of the rider on the bill. Will it finally get through? Maybe it will, but that is not a good sign.
We see here yet another industry looking for protection against litigation.
The vaccine industry has enjoyed legal indemnification since 1986 insofar as the product appears on the childhood schedule. This change provided a tremendous incentive to explode the childhood schedule, which went from three shots and 10 to 12 doses to many shots for a total of 43 doses by 18 and many more thereafter. If you include boosters, there are as many as 80 shots by the age of 18.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has observed, this became a gold rush for the industry precisely because of the legal indemnification. There have been zero studies commissioned on how these shots play well with each other. The assumption has been that safety and efficacy should be assessed product by product, with no placebo-controlled trials. Even now, studies comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated groups are extremely rare.
The people who feel themselves harmed by these shots, either individually or in combination, are left with almost no legal recourse to do anything about it. The industry is protected. This is particularly a problem when the choice to accept the shot was not voluntary but mandated as a condition of attending school or holding a job.
Here we have an impossible bargain being offered: Accept the shot and accept the results, regardless of the consequences. The courts are closed to you.
No free society can possibly tolerate such a situation. An inherent part of the idea of freedom is bearing responsibility for outcomes. You cannot have one without the other. But in the case of vaccine harm, you have freedom without responsibility. You also have something even more objectionable: mandates without responsibility. Not only does this contradict the legal code of the free society, but also, it stands contrary to the Nuremberg Code.
In the course of debates on this subject for the past five years, I’ve sensed a great deal of confusion on this topic. Some libertarian friends told me not to worry about it when businesses forced their employees to get a COVID shot. After all, it is the employee’s choice whether to accept the deal. If they don’t like it, they can get another job. It is up to the employer to determine the terms and conditions of employment.
There are problems with this argument. One concerns the change of the labor contract in the middle of employment. That runs contrary to the laws concerning legal agreements. Another concerns this hugely important issue of liability. If the employee is injured or dies, who is going to bear responsibility? The employer can claim the shot was approved by the FDA, so it is not responsible, but the manufacturer is not responsible either.
Under such conditions, the employer cannot possibly issue a moral or just requirement that the employee comply. It’s hard to imagine an analogy. If the boss demands that you take up skydiving as a condition of keeping your job, and you hit the ground and die, the family is going to take up the issue in litigation and bankrupt the company. It would be a profound scandal in every way. But this goes on constantly with vaccination, and no one says a word about it.
In 1986, the industry argued that it needed legal indemnification because there was a flurry of lawsuits that were making it very hard for the industry to function. In those days, many conservatives were concerned about liability reform and clogged courts. Liability lawsuits that hit businesses were considered contrary to free enterprise. This claim gained resonance in the second term of the Reagan administration, and the vaccine industry gained immunity.
In addition, it was argued that vaccines were essential to a healthy society. If these lawsuits kept up, vaccines would become too expensive and risky to manufacture and distribute. Therefore, the industry needed special protection in the name of backing business and industry profits, which were seen in those days as always a good thing against court litigation.
Let’s be clear. It is not pro-business to indemnify an entire industry against claims of harms. It is not free enterprise to grant sellers of products the right to distribute anything without bearing some measure of responsibility. It is not capitalism to dispense privileges to commercial companies that you and I would not have as individuals.
This is all against the ethos of classical liberalism, enterprise, and capitalism. Business has to make a buck in its own way, obeying the normal laws of society. Anything else amounts to an intervention in the market process. It’s hard to understand how or why anyone could have become confused about that.
The vaccine industry claimed special rights because its product is regarded as essential to public health. The pesticide industry can make no such claim. There are many farmers in the United States who use regenerative methods without such products. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that the ingredients within pesticides constitute a threat to health.
The report stopped short of calling them dangerous, but that is because we don’t have sufficient evidence that could appear in court discovery.
It’s bad enough that the vaccine industry is legally allowed to evade normal liability standards. Can you imagine if most U.S. food is produced alongside pesticides that have been indemnified from harm? We are supposed to be making America healthy again, not adding to the toxic stew that Americans already inhabit. Such a change, which is making its way through committee right now, represents a genuine danger. We don’t know how much of one, but it is rather serious. Indeed this move could utterly wreck U.S. export markets. Our food has a bad enough reputation as it is.
Granting legal liability to an entire industry of any sort is a bad idea. Doing it for chemicals that we accept in medicine and food is much worse. Indeed, it is unthinkable. We’ve traveled too far away from the principles of free enterprise as it is. We need more responsibility attached to the business of commerce in order to save it.
