Dr. Julie Panessi, a 20-year ethics veteran fired by Western University in August for refusing its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, argues mandates violate autonomy and ignore risks like natural immunity or PCR limitations. Her book, My Choice, challenges systemic coercion, comparing it to polio-era vaccination debates, while she warns of a "pandemic of compliance" eroding civil liberties. Facing state overreach as a mother, she insists moral integrity demands resistance—even at personal cost—urging others to seek new alliances. With dissenters silenced, Gunn-Reid fears society’s ethical decline, but Panessi hopes for a "freer 2022" through open debate. [Automatically generated summary]
What impact will vaccine mandates have on the ethical and moral compasses of society going forward?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
My name is Julie Panessi.
and this message is about mandatory vaccinations.
I am a professor of ethics at Huron College at the University of Western Ontario.
It's one of the largest universities in Canada.
Today I'm going to teach you a short lesson on the universally accepted ethics of coercing people into medical procedures.
I'll be the example.
My employer has just mandated that I must get a vaccine for COVID-19.
If I want to keep working at my job as a professor, I have to take this vaccine.
Here's my conundrum.
My school employs me to be an authority on the subject of ethics.
I hold a PhD in ethics and ancient philosophy.
And I'm here to tell you, it's ethically wrong to coerce someone to take a vaccine.
If it happens to you, you don't have to do it.
If you don't want a COVID vaccine, don't take one.
End of discussion.
It's your own business.
But that is not the approach of the University of Western Ontario, which has suddenly required that I be vaccinated immediately or not report for work.
So with the school year beginning in a few days, I am facing imminent dismissal after 20 years on the job because I will not submit to having an experimental vaccine injected into my body.
That's a clip of Dr. Julie Panessi's video to her students.
She recorded it right after she saw her career of more than 20 years just disintegrate after she refused to comply with her university's COVID vaccine mandate.
However, unlike most of us, bioethics is something that Dr. Julie had already given a lot of thought to.
She's a master's in philosophy with a collaborative specialization in bioethics from the University of Toronto and a diploma in ethics from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.
She's a bit of an expert here.
She stood on her conscience and careful consideration, and she would not allow herself to be coerced.
However, she paid a high price for that moral stand.
Now she finds herself as the pandemic ethics scholar at the registered Canadian charity, the Democracy Fund, wherein she educates the public on civil liberties.
And she has discussions on lockdowns that the lockdown enforcers and vaccine mandators don't want us to have with each other.
And she joins me tonight in an interview we recorded before the Christmas break, wherein we discussed how she found herself at the center of a bioethics controversy and why she wrote her brand new bestseller, My Choice, the Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates.
take a listen.
So joining me now from her home is Dr. Julie Panessi.
Dr. Julie, for those of you who don't know about you, and I don't at this point know how you couldn't, but why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself professionally and I guess sort of how you found yourself in the position you are today?
That's a very good question.
Who really ever asked me that particular question?
Professionally, so I've been in academia for quite a long time.
I have a PhD in ethics and ancient philosophy and I've taught at universities in Canada and the US for a long time.
And then the vaccine mandate came on the horizon at Western in August, I guess it was, and I chose not to comply with it and was pretty quickly, efficiently terminated with cause and life's just been kind of a roller coaster since then.
And the irony to that that still sort of haunts me and impresses itself upon me every day is that I was fired quickly, expediently, seemingly unreflectively for doing exactly the kind of thing that as a person trained in ethics is supposed to do.
You know, you're supposed to evaluate evidence, especially when we're talking about harms, you know, great, not just physical harms, but the kinds of, you know, moral injury that we can do to other people.
And at the very least, I mean, even if we don't have answers to how to resolve those problems, trying to identify where the harms are happening and asking questions about them and opening up debate so that we're really sure that we're on the right path here and that we don't do more harm than we might otherwise do.
You know, and so I work at that every day.
Fired for Doing Good00:03:34
And honestly, most days I probably fail.
Maybe every day I fail, but I've got to think that there's some value in the trying and hopefully that in the end we will, you know, help people and that truth will come to light.
And that's what keeps you going every day.
Yeah, I think that's the nature of being human is that we're just really not good at it.
And the point is we're supposed to keep trying.
Now, I wanted to ask a question because I don't think I've ever heard this answer from you or maybe it hasn't been posed to you.
What did you think at the beginning of COVID?
What did you think about this emerging disease?
Did you have any sort of inclination that this would be a massive civil liberties violation?
What were your first thoughts on COVID as the pandemic sort of flowed into North America?
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.
Interestingly, my own personal case, I was about eight months pregnant when I first heard of it.
And so was, you know, distracted by other things and limitations were being imposed in the hospital and there were worries about what delivery was going to look like.
So it was quite focused on those things.
In terms of civil liberties, nope, as someone born in the 70s in Canada, I honestly, perhaps naively, never thought we would have a civil liberties crisis again.
I thought we'd learned from history.
I thought we were morally mature as a group of people.
Not that we wouldn't make missteps, but I would never have imagined if someone asked me if what we're going through now was possible, I would have very confidently denied it.
Just goes to show how smart I am.
Well, you know, you don't want to think of your government as this benign creature.
But I mean, it's, you know, or rather, you don't want to think of your government as this malignant creature and it's more just sort of this benign thing that does its thing over there and doesn't really bother you until such time as a lot of people ignore it until they end up mugged by reality.
Which takes me to my next question.
What was the one thing that really changed the pandemic for you that sort of opened your eyes?
Was it when you were being laid off or was it sometime sooner and what was it?
Much sooner.
I mean, back in March of this year, I started working with the Canadian COVID Care Alliance because I knew something was off and I knew they were a group of scientists and physicians and other professionals who are trying to provide a more balanced approach to this narrative that has just picked up steam like a locomotive.
I think the thing that first kind of got my radar twinging a little bit is when you, I mean, I've done some work in medical ethics and sat on research ethics boards and things like that.
And one of the things that you notice, if you notice nothing else, is just how painfully slow everything moves because there's an extreme amount of caution.
And as you might know, medical education has operated on this evidence-based model for a long time, decades now.
And so there's been an extreme amount of attention paid to how things play out in the clinical setting and then a feedback loop to policy.
Understanding Vaccination Mandates00:15:21
So here's an idea.
Let's implement this policy, but then let's also see how it works in the clinical setting.
Let's see what health outcomes look like.
Let's see if there are other adverse effects from this particular policy.
Let's make sure we uptake that information and make sure the policies we're making actually fit that evidence that we're seeing.
And I started to notice that none of that was happening.
That from the beginning, any questions that are raised about how case numbers are arrived at, how the PCR test works, whether or not it's the best assessment of viral load, whether or not there are other ways to, how can I say, establish immunity, looking at natural immunity.
The fact that all of these things are disregarded, and we don't even need to talk about vaccine adverse events, but the fact that none of these things are part of a conversation to ensure that we've identified all of the benefits and risks on both sides of the issue, that was just a red flag right away.
And of course, looking into things more, it's become clear that we have no openness.
We have no debate, in my view, within science, within politics, within journalism.
And we are very egregiously and very negligently ruining people's lives irreversibly.
You know, that's a really great point because not only are the people who are supposed to be asking these sorts of questions, are they not asking the questions?
But if somebody else tries to ask the questions, you are completely shut up.
And it's not just, you know, medical associations enforcing this sort of hard sense.
It used to be soft censorship.
Now it's hard censorship when you can lose your job as a doctor if you simply say, you know what, let's just pump the brakes and ask this question.
If you're a journalist, you are censored.
You're othered.
Big tech is enforcing the censorship.
We see the government now pressuring the big tech people who aren't doing the censorship to continue to censor it.
I guess for me, and I'll ask you to look in your crystal ball, but I think you've got a bit of a crystal mind on this issue too.
What do you think this means for the state of society?
When we aren't allowed to ask these questions, what does it mean for medical advancement?
What does it mean for the enlightenment of people?
What happens to society when all the questions aren't allowed to be asked?
I think that quest, that one question you're asking, you know, what does it mean for society to me is both retrospective and prospective because there's a question there about, you know, what does it mean in terms of where we've come from and how we got here?
And I think the situation we're in is showing us that we've been on this track for a long time, decades probably.
I think postmodernism and academia is part of the problem.
I think this cancel culture, which in ethical literature we call like a culture of silence, right?
So anytime you're privileging silence over asking questions and dissenting and trying to get to the truth and things like that, right?
And that I think is fueled by social media and it's fueled by media now.
But then the other part of your question is, well, where are we going?
How do we work our way out of this?
And I think we can't do that until we understand how we got here and until we fix, never mind COVID.
Like COVID is, if it wasn't COVID, it was going to be something else that is eroding our liberties right now.
So we need to understand what we, each one of us, we don't get to blame Trudeau every day.
We don't get to blame Ford every day.
We don't get to blame the star every day, though they are leading the moral harms in my view that we're going through now.
We have to blame ourselves every single day for having gotten ourselves into this position.
Some of us have done better than others.
Some of us have been more negligent in our ignorance than others.
But every single Canadian who, you know, if you're getting, and Sheila, can I say this to your viewers?
If you're getting ready to enjoy a lovely Christmas where you're excluding your family because of a personal medical choice you've made, you are fueling the fire of this horrible situation that we are in.
And until we bring that to light, until we can talk about that on shows like yours, in the media, with our friends, with people in the coffee line, our democracy is sick and it's never going to recover.
You know, that's a great point.
There are a lot of people who think that they would be the conscientious objectors until such time as they're given the opportunity to be a conscientious objector and then they choose the path of least resistance.
And we see this all the time with the vaccine passport system, where people say, well, you know, I want to go out for supper, so I'm going to show my vaccine passport.
Well, you just validified the system.
You validated this system of segregation and you took an opportunity to exercise your medical privilege over other people.
You didn't earn it.
You just got it.
And now you're part of the system.
Whether you see that or whether you want to admit that to yourself or not, you are propping up a system of segregation.
I guess, what is it going to take for people to realize that, you know, when you engage in the system, you are part of the reason the system stays together?
Yeah, you know, I think part of that narrative structure that you're mentioning, because I hear this a lot lately, is this idea that if I just give a little, I'll get back all.
And I've heard this a lot in particular contexts, most specifically talking with someone who runs an exercise facility lately.
And they said, we hate imposing these passports, but if we just do it a little bit now, January will be better.
And I think we need, until we understand, and part of our problem, honestly, and I've been saying this over and over again.
And, you know, in the book I just finished, part of the, like the last couple of chapters are about this, we are not good historians.
We've forgotten, you know, the political ideals of the past.
We have forgotten how to read good literature.
And by good literature, I don't mean it has to be like highfalutin stuff that's, you know, it's not that.
It's literature where there's a transparency and an honesty of ideas.
And I think we forget that historically, these tiny little creeps have led to the greatest harms and that complicity, right?
So complicity is this idea that you are partly responsible for some harm without being solely responsible.
Complicity is not morally neutral.
You don't get a get out of jail free card because you say, well, I only did a little bit of harm or I only helped this, you know, I only helped the government to squash our liberties a tiny little bit.
So I'm not that bad, right?
It's so interesting to me, Sheila, that I've talked to a few people who, you know, they have vaccine passports, but are unwilling to use them.
And I find that so interesting.
And that's such a sign of maturity in citizenship to me because they've made the medical choice that they feel is best for them.
And I can't do anything other than respect that fully.
But they've made a political choice that they feel is best for everyone.
And if you want to talk about collectivism and being in it together, those are the people who are, you know, carrying that flag, not the people who are bullying and pressuring people into making a choice that they do not believe is right for themselves.
I wanted to ask you, did you ever see, did you foresee the idea of vaccine passports and mandatory vaccination for someone like you to do your job?
You don't work in medicine.
I suppose there could be arguments made for people who work in medicine, not ethical ones, but there are arguments to be made there.
But for someone like you, did you ever even foresee that this would be on the horizon?
You know, the question is prompted by you just saying, you know, this, the slow creep of civil liberties violations and to give a little give a little to get a lot back.
You know, we've gone through 21 months of this, of giving in, giving in, giving in, and people are still giving in.
But did you ever foresee that this would come to your doorstep, these vaccine passports?
Yeah, sorry, you just cut out there a little bit for me, but no, I had no, I would not have guessed.
This is all, this came out of the blue for me.
There is a saying that I quite like in the moral context, and it's, you know, where there is risk, there ought to be choice.
And again, charitably, if you want to understand our situation as one according to which we face this lethal, you know, and I'm going to qualify this and say, I think there are problems at each step of this narrative.
But if we want to say that we face a potentially lethal virus, we have a potential treatment for it, but there are risks on both sides, then the idea of mandating and quite possibly, I mean, I think we're being primed by our government and mainstream media to enforce a national mandate.
I have no doubt about that.
So people who feel that we'll get worse off scot-free.
I mean, I see on social media, people celebrating Christmas and New Year's like this pandemic situation is behind us.
And if only the other 10% will get vaccinated, we'll be, you know, we'll be free.
Well, that's not going to happen, you know.
And I think we need to, you know, again, we just, we need to look to history and see how this has unfolded in the past.
And it's so odd to me that, I mean, our case numbers are worse than they were before all the vaccination started.
So if that doesn't, you don't have to, you don't have to come down on the side against mandates in order to allow yourself to start asking some very interesting and important questions about why that might be and whether or not it's reasonable to be so vaccine adamant or mandate adamant in the face of that kind of information.
And that to me is a kind of, there's a kind of collective irrationality there that makes it very hard, I think, for people on both sides of the debate to have a discussion, right?
Because we're disagreeing about such fundamental aspects of it, you know, about where misinformation comes from, what it is, whether anything that departs from a certain narrative is misinformation.
I hope not, but that's certainly the default interpretation, you know.
I think there's some wide scale, I don't know what the right word is, maybe gaslighting.
of the public at large.
For example, you see all the time in the news media, my peers in the media, I think they're guilty of this a lot.
When talking about vaccinations for kids, you're a mom, I'm a mom, you know what it's like to take your kid off to the health unit to get their vaccinations.
I'm not averse to vaccinations, but all of a sudden we've got news media telling us how to get your kid vaccinated as though we don't have a clue how to do it for the other vaccines that we've been getting our kids.
Like vaccination is this new and unusual thing and how we should be talking to kids about vaccines.
Well, we know how to talk to our kids about vaccines.
We give them all the other ones.
It's just this one that we're apprehensive of.
And you see sort of a rewriting of the collective unconsciousness, and it's a new agey term that I'm sort of am loath to use.
But on the issue of vaccination itself, for example, I think our COVID vaccination rate right now is somewhere around the current polio vaccination rate.
And yet we don't push for 100% vaccination on polio.
It's just a thing that we get vaccinations for and it's sort of over there and we don't worry about it.
But there's this constant crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch on this one vaccine.
And people aren't even being reflective about how we treated vaccines in the past or for that matter in the very recent history.
It's very interesting.
And one thing that I think we've done, and I don't know how obvious this is, but we've really taken this medical choice out of the context of the clinical setting with your particular healthcare provider and made it a public event.
You know, so now when you go and you're given some kind of consent form, but it's not full and sufficient in my view.
And from what I understand, people, I mean, I haven't done this, but people who go and sign one of these things say, well, it's not like there's any kind of, there's not much time given to a discussion of benefits and risks and all of that, right?
So I think one of the problem here is we've taken something that should be properly medicalized, not to mention, you know, up to the individual and supporting informed consent, but it should be properly medicalized, taking it out of that context.
And one of the things that's really, you know, salient and important about that is that when just healthcare decisions are best made, in my view, with someone who knows your medical history the best.
Right.
Right.
And that's going to be your primary care, a person who has taken a good history and understands the risks that people in your family are exposed to.
You know, if there's a risk of stroke in your family, blood clotting in your family, that kind of thing.
And so now we're not only removing that kind of insulating effect, right?
It's like a safeguard.
It doesn't work perfectly all the time, but it's an awful lot better than going to the Air Canada Center and standing in line, you know, or sending this child off to school.
And well, who cares about informed consent as long as they're, you know, the vaccinators are wearing a superhero costume and giving your kid a lollipop afterwards.
So I think we've made it not only non-medicalized, but we've given it a kind of celebrity social media status.
And now, I mean, you would never, should I say never, you would not be inclined, I think, to take a photo of yourself getting vaccinated in your doctor's office and then post it on Instagram.
But now there are walls, right, where you can take your kind of like when people go to the Oscars, you can stand in front of this wall and it says, I got vaccines, I don't know what it is, right?
And there are stickers and there are at the Air Canada Center that flashes the numbers of people up on the big screen.
You know, it's become this act of celebrity and public.
Advice Amidst Inappropriate Questions00:06:28
It's become conspicuous, whereas medical care in the past has always been private.
And we don't even have to go down the road further, I don't think, to talk about whether that's good or bad.
But it's important, don't you think, for us to realize that there's been a fundamental shift in how healthcare is delivered and where it's discussed and between whom.
And now we feel that everybody has access to all of our personal medical information and has rights to participate in that decision-making process.
Yeah, yeah, that has been one of the greatest casualties of the pandemic is just your privacy.
People ask you inappropriate questions, they divulge inappropriate information.
It's been very, very strange.
Julia, I wanted to ask you outside, and this is a ridiculous question, but I guess outside of losing the career that you worked for and your job, what has been for you the hardest part of the pandemic?
It's people back when my video came out in September, people wrote from all over the world.
They still do, and they're so lovely, but they express sympathy and concern for me over having lost my job.
And I say to everyone that I'm able to respond to that I was so emotional in that video, not because I lost my job.
Who cares?
Who cares about my job?
What's terrifying and overwhelming, and it's just like waves that come over you every day, sometimes every moment of every day, is the fact that we live in a country where this could happen and there's no escape hatch.
So my, what I find overwhelming, I forget if you put it that way, but what I find overwhelming about the pandemic is nothing biological or immunological at all.
That's not where my fears come from.
The fears are that, you know, as an individual, I won't be able to live a free life anymore.
But as a mother, I won't be able to protect my child from the state anymore.
And that there's no place on earth where that might be possible.
Now, you've written a new book.
It's called My Choice, The Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates.
Why did you write the book?
Good question.
You know, it seems to me that we, there's a lot of cognitive laziness going on these days, I think, from our government and our media.
And that's created a sort of story according to which only certain people are invited to the table and certain opinions are highlighted and shared on social media or in articles or editorials or whatever.
And I really want to do what I can, whether it's with the book or doing interviews or giving speeches or talking with people on the phone.
I want to do whatever I possibly can to make it clear that there's another side to the story and to help people who maybe have intuitions along the lines of what I've been saying today, but don't quite know how to frame or package or articulate those ideas.
And I hope, you know, if you buy the book, if you read the book, please don't feel like you have to agree with everything I say.
It will be a win for me if people just read, open themselves up to it, and then bring it forth to discussion with other people they have.
Just take it as an invitation to further discussion and debate.
It's not the definitive word by any means.
It's just hopefully gives us a little, it's like, it's a bit like a ticket to a conversation that I think we needed to have, but haven't been having in our country for a couple of years now.
One last question before I let you go.
Do you have some advice for people out there who are struggling with job loss because they are those ethical resistors to the lockdown and the vaccine mandates?
Do you have advice for them when they're feeling alone, especially right now during the holiday season?
They, you know, they've been told that they can't go to holiday gatherings because they're unvaccinated.
They cannot participate in a fulsome way in the world because they are vaccine resistors or vaccine passport resistors.
What's your advice for them?
Yeah, a good question.
Maybe I'll give a little dose of harsh reality first and then try to be a bit hopeful.
I think, and I hope this helps people who are listening in some sense, but I guess I want to say I hear you and I see you, and I know you're going to have a very hard Christmas this year.
Just talking about Christmas, especially, you know, you're going to be very lonely and there's going to be a lot of hate headed your way.
And you can't control what other people will do.
But, you know, when we think about moral integrity, and that's just acting consistently with your deeply held beliefs and values, that's a lonely road sometimes.
But it's a choice to make, you know, it's a choice.
If you feel that you're doing the right thing, people are going to, some people will applaud you for that and will comfort you and bring you into their lives and other people will shun you.
And if you're feeling sad, you know, that you can't participate in family gatherings because people are excluding you, then I guess I would use it as an opportunity to think about how important those relationships are in the first place, you know, and just think if you can imagine another kind of life moving forward.
I mean, myself, as awful as the last sort of year and a half have been, and I've lost a tremendous number of deeply personal relationships.
I have also had other ones grow and emerge in very surprising places that it's often like this, right?
The Phoenix from the Ashes.
You sometimes, you find yourself in the life that you could never have created with your wildest imagination.
And that sometimes great harm and devastation can produce some pretty wonderful things.
So please don't feel like everything is beyond your control.
And please don't feel like you can make the right decision and not suffer because you probably will.
But that's what morality is about.
The Phoenix from the Ashes00:02:37
Dr. Julie, thank you so much for the work that you do with the Democracy Fund.
And thank you so much for offering that, you know, that message of hope that things will be hard, but they will be different and they could even be better.
How did people find your book and find some of the work that you're doing?
Yeah, so you can visit the Democracy Fund website and you can visit mychoicebook.ca.
You can order the book through that.
And you can also go to amazon.ca.
You can search for it there.
So we can give you links and you can link them.
I will put the links in the show description.
Julie, thank you so much for taking the time.
All the best to you and your beautiful family in the new year.
And here's to a freer 2022.
Absolutely.
Merry Christmas.
Thank you, you too.
My name is Dr. Julie Panessi.
I was a professor of ethics at Western University until I was fired for choosing not to take one of the COVID-19 vaccines.
I made an ethical choice and it cost me my job.
COVID-19 has caused a crisis in healthcare, but it has also triggered a crisis in other institutions we regard as essential to civil progressive society.
Academia, especially the sciences.
Journalism, government, the law, and more broadly, civil discourse, how we talk to each other.
In my new book called My Choice, The Ethical Case Against COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates, I discuss how the response to the pandemic is ushering us into a new era, away from the classical liberal world we are leaving behind, and why I think we are living through a pandemic of coercion and compliance.
I explain how we have gotten here and how we can grab hold of a safer, freer, more hopeful future.
You can get your copy of the book by going to mychoicebook.ca or bookstores everywhere.
I sincerely worry about the fate of our public institutions, academia, policing, education, science, and even politics, when the most ethical amongst us, the ones that won't bend to public pressure, are the ones being fired and cast aside.
What happens to a society when the most malleable amongst us are the ones put in charge?
Well, everyone, that's the show for tonight and the show for this year.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.