AMA Defies Supreme Court Ruling, Own Code Of Ethics, Calls For Employer Vaccine Mandates
The president of the Chicago-based American Medical Association, Gerald E. Harmon, M.D., wrote on Friday in Crain’s Chicago Business that employers should impose COVID vaccine mandates as a condition of employment.
Last week’s decision by the United States Supreme Court invalidating the Biden Administration’s attempt to force employers to do so “should not,” Harmon wrote, “prevent these employers from doing what must be done in the name of public health: requiring vaccines to protect their workers, our communities and our nation from the ravages of this pandemic.”
“Our only hope is that large employers do what’s right—not only for their own employees and their families, but for the health of our nation,” says Harmon.
If only we could hope that Harmon and his association would honor their own code of ethics. The AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 2.1.1 says this:
Informed consent to medical treatment is fundamental in both ethics and law. Patients have the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that they can make well-considered decisions about care. Successful communication in the patient-physician relationship fosters trust and supports shared decision making. The process of informed consent occurs when communication between a patient and physician results in the patient’s authorization or agreement to undergo a specific medical intervention.
That’s a plain statement of the informed consent doctrine, which is among the most widely recognized and time-honored principles of medical ethics here and abroad. Everybody of sufficient age and sound mind is supposed to have right to decide what is to be done to his or her body.
It’s “arguably the most deeply rooted doctrine in contemporary medical ethics,” wrote two medical ethics experts last year in the Wall Street Journal. In that column, a director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California, Irvine and a law professor at Notre Dame wrote, “Authorities rushing to implement mandatory vaccination protocols are ignoring available scientific data, basic principles of immunology and elementary norms.”
The AMA’s Code of Ethics is for physicians, not employers, but that’s precisely what makes Harmon’s indifference to the principle of informed consent so egregious. He is effectively calling on employers to override the physician-patient relationship entirely, thereby avoiding the duty physicians would have to honor it.
That workaround may not fly legally since employers may have a legal duty to get informed consent to coerced vaccinations, at least as some mandate opponents see things. I have no opinion on that; the point here is not about the legalities.
The point, instead, is about doing what is right and what is ethical. It’s the principle that matters, and it should matter not just for physicians. The AMA’s code of ethics properly states that principle and it is rightly applied to any person or entity, including employers, who are in a position to force medical treatment on somebody else. Harmon and the AMA apparently care nothing about that principle.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/still-calling-employer-vaccine-mandates-american-medical-association-ignores-its-own-code