Dear [name],

I am currently a [job role] at [name of care home] and am in receipt of a letter from you dated [date].

In this letter, you state that you require me to receive two doses of the COVID-19 vaccination, as a condition of my continued employment.

I do not wish to receive this vaccine and have sought legal advice surrounding my rights in this area. I am advised that my rights to decline any medical processes I am offered, without suffering penalty or disadvantage as a result, are enshrined in law, under a number of domestic and international human rights laws, and that my employer cannot legally coerce me into receiving any medical products I do not wish to receive.

In the first instance, the application of medicine in this country is governed by the Montgomery ruling (1), which makes informed consent a prerequisite of receiving any form of medical product or procedure. The Montgomery ruling, which is legally binding, states that patients must be informed of all material risks before their consent to a medical process can be considered legally valid.

The key passages from the Montgomery judgment involve what a patient would consider to be material risk:

'The doctor is therefore under a duty to take reasonable care to ensure that the patient is aware of any material risks involved in any recommended treatment, and of any reasonable alternative or variant treatments.

'The test of materiality is whether, in the circumstances of the particular case, a reasonable person in the patient's position would be likely to attach significance to the risk, or the doctor is or should reasonably be aware that the particular patient would be likely to attach significance to it.'

Nowhere in your letter to me are the material risks of vaccination made plain, and there are a wide range of risks attached to the COVID-19 vaccinations, which I will subsequently detail. Hence, exerting pressure upon staff to receive vaccinations whilst not clearly elucidating to them the risks, nor offering reasonable alternatives, qualifies under the law as a medical exemption, as consent can only be medically valid if the protocols regarding informed consent, as laid out under the Montgomery ruling, are rigorously adhered to.

As regards the risks of COVID-19 vaccinations, my initial concern is the very accelerated nature of the development of these injections - so accelerated that the clinical trials are still ongoing and will not be complete until 2023 (2). Vaccine development usually takes years or decades, whereas the COVID-19 vaccines have been produced in a matter of months. This necessarily means there is no data on long-term safety, and so we may discover in years to come - as has been the case with so many medical products initially deemed "safe", such as thalidomide - that the long-term effects are far more deleterious to health than any benefits the vaccines may provide.

The UK Government is certainly expecting the vaccines to cause severe impairments and disability in some individuals and has structured a compensation programme accordingly (3). Therefore, these vaccines represent a potentially very serious risk to my health, one that I am not prepared to take, given it is a possibility these vaccines could disable me to the extent I am no longer able to work. The one-off sum of £120,000 offered by the UK Government in such circumstances would not be sufficient to support myself and my family for the rest of my life. 

It is also important to note that harbouring concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines is not an "anti-vaccine" position, and many very eminent and entirely pro-vaccine authorities have issued stark warnings about these vaccines, in particular, their accelerated development.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, has said: “I understand the importance of accelerating timelines for vaccines in general, but from everything I know, this is not the vaccine to be doing it with." (4)

Dr. Hotez worked on development of a vaccine for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), the coronavirus behind a major 2003 outbreak, and found that some vaccinated animals developed more severe disease compared with unvaccinated animals when they were exposed to the virus.

In plain English, this means that the vaccine could enhance the effects of the disease, when vaccinated individuals come into contact with the wild virus - an effect we might not see until winter, when coronaviruses are generally circulating. Again, this is not a risk I am prepared to take. 

Leading on from this is the fact that all the unknowns surrounding the COVID-19 vaccinations, and the fact that they are still in clinical trials, qualifies them as experimental medicine. Therefore, the injections are licensed for emergency purposes only, and do not have a general approval for use (5). As such, anybody who elects to receive a COVID-19 vaccination is partaking in a clinical trial, making this vaccination programme a widespread medical experiment. Participation in a medical experiment requires the free and express consent of the human subject, as laid out in the Nuremberg Code, which states:

"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion." (6)

Clearly, and as I have detailed earlier in this correspondence, preconditioning my continued employment on receipt of a vaccine is deeply coercive, and, therefore, it is in breach of the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code resulted from the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi war criminals - primarily doctors - who conducted inhumane and unethical human medical experiments, were held accountable for their crimes. The Nuremberg Code was developed and instituted specifically to ensure unethical human experimentation could not again legally occur.

Underscoring the imperative legal and ethical requirement of free and informed consent for all medical processes is UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which states at Article 6, section 1:

"Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice." (7)

Clearly, the ultimatum to receive a vaccination or lose my job does not represent an opportunity for 'free' consent and does threaten me with major disadvantage and prejudice should I not comply. Therefore, this ultimatum is illegal, under multiple domestic and international laws, including but not limited to the Montgomery ruling, the Nuremberg Code, and UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

This being the case, I look forward to your prompt written acknowledgement that my decision to decline receipt of the COVID-19 vaccination will be accepted by management, and that there will be no further pressure exerted upon me to receive this, or any other medical product, as a condition of my continued employment.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

[Name]

References:

1. https://www.themdu.com/guidance-and-advice/guides/montgomery-and-informed-consent
2. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728?term=NCT04368728&draw=2
3. https://www.gov.uk/vaccine-damage-payment/eligibility
4. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-vaccines-insight/as-pressure-for-coronavirus-vaccine-mounts-scientists-debate-risks-of-accelerated-testing-idUKKBN20Y1I1?edition-redirect 
5. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3115838/what-are-coronavirus-mrna-vaccines-and-how-do-they-work
6. https://media.tghn.org/medialibrary/2011/04/BMJ_No_7070_Volume_313_The_Nuremberg_Code.pdf
7. http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31058&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html