Ei pakkorokotuslaille

"Look before you leap" is a well-known adage in the UK, my country of birth. Unfortunately, when I heard earlier this month of the Finnish government's intention to enforce vaccination upon the population of this land, my home for nearly 20 years, my indignation blinded me and I leapt with both feet into the act of adding my name to this petition.

After all, the implication was clear! Saddled with warehouses full to the ceiling with vials of suspect, soon-to-be-out-of-date serum, bought with an unholy sum of tax-payers' money from scaremongering pharmaceutical companies with connections to "the right places", the authorities had finally decided to show who's in charge in Finland! Sign the petition, and off to the barricades! Then I read the document itself.

As I understand it, the main theme of the proposal is to move the responsibility (for deciding when supplies of vaccine are necessary and from whom they should be purchased) up a notch, from the THL to the Social and Health Ministry, lessening the risk of conflicting interests within the THL affecting purchasing policy. Now, all attempts at increasing the transparency of decision-making in public bodies would certainly have my support, so why did I sign the petition protesting against it? Ah yes, it was the enforcement of vaccination!

HE 243/2010 certainly talks about this, but further reading (Tartuntatautilaki 25.7.1986/583, updated 2003) shows that the State, at one or another level, has already had this power for quite some time. Come to think of it, how many citizens have been fined, arrested, or worse for refusing to accept vaccination against influenza in any of its many forms? For that matter, what about SARS, or the awaited polio outbreak back in the 1980s?

Personally, I belong to the school of thought that generally fears the possible side-effects of vaccination more than the dangers of the common diseases they are meant to control. However, if, for example, some variation of the Black Death was to surface somewhere in the world, and be clearly making its way to northern europe, decimating populations en route, I think I might regard vaccination more kindly, under the circumstances.

Thus, I remove my support from this petition, which "throws the baby out with the bathwater", to use another English-language saying.