It’s Time to Restore Ethical Integrity at the University of
British Columbia: An Open Letter to the UBC Administration
By
Dr. Matthew Evans-Cockle
As a University of British Columbia (UBC) alumnus, with a PhD from the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures, I share responsibility for UBC’s policies. Because my credentials are associated with UBC, whenever I make use of them to gain employment, or to secure positions as a volunteer or committee member, whenever I draw benefit in any way from the accreditation that I have received from UBC, I am tacitly supporting UBC as an institution.
As far as I am able, I attempt to live in an ethically responsible fashion that minimizes harm to others. As such, because my professional credentials are bound up with UBC, it is essential that I oppose any UBC policy which, in my view, constitutes an obvious and significant departure from ethically acceptable practice. I am writing this open letter because I believe UBC’s COVID-19 genetic vaccine mandate was egregiously unethical. I refuse to accept UBC’s decision to coerce students, staff, and instructors into receiving this experimental treatment. I refuse to accept UBC’s pretense that this treatment could be called safe when there was absolutely no long term safety data available to support that claim. Moreover, there remains no controlled phase 3 clinical studies that show these vaccines prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, reduce the severity of COVID-19, or prevent transmission. And finally, I refuse to endorse UBC as an institution of any merit until its administration has issued public apologies for its coercive COVID-19 policies, and for its role in misleading the general public with respect to the safety and efficacy of these mRNA vaccines.
I volunteer with the Canadian Covid Care Alliance (CCCA)—a volunteer not-for-profit organization, of over 700 independent scientists, medical doctors and other health care professionals and hundreds of others from diverse backgrounds. I volunteer with the CCCA in the hopes of restoring integrity to Canadian healthcare. I am currently assisting a team of researchers—people whose work I respect and for whose tireless and care-filled diligence I am deeply grateful—in a project identifying, mapping, and explaining the pervasive conflict of interest that is plaguing Canada’s public health system.
The problem of conflict-of-interest corrupting health related decision-making and policy-making is particularly grievous in BC—one of the only provinces in Canada that has maintained the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. In spite of an extreme shortage of nurses, BC still has not re-hired those terminated for refusing vaccination. We’re talking about thousands upon thousands of BC nurses. These are qualified professionals with families to support. These are individuals who benefit from robust naturally acquired immunity after working on the frontlines of COVID-19 care throughout the first year of the declared pandemic! While the CBC and corporate media refuse to consider their plight, it is imperative for anyone capable of empathetic critical thinking to consider the financial difficulty imposed on these nurses and their families. It is imperative that we consider the emotional and psychological difficulty imposed on these nurses and their families by the nightmarish situation in which they find themselves –punished for standing up for the right to informed consent and the right to refuse unwanted medical interventions. They are being punished for doing the right thing. These frontline nurses are being punished for doing the right thing while UBC continues to stand by and endorse COVID-19 vaccine mandates that do far more harm than good. In fact, UBC is blocking the acceptance of students in medicine, dentistry, nursing and other health disciplines unless they agree to submit to vaccination against COVID-19. Contrary to all common sense, UBC is insisting on vaccination regardless of whether these individuals already have natural immunity, and they are doing this more than three years into the COVID-19 pandemic!
I realize that our universities are caught up in a similar web to that which has seized hold of our healthcare system. Cash-starved institutions are always vulnerable to corporate influence and even capture. But administrative expediency—simply doing whatever is required to maintain and increase funding—leads inevitably to real human harm. I have a friend who works at UBC. She really wanted to keep her job. She was injured by both of the Pfizer shots she received. She was hospitalized both times. Conscientious researchers have established that the shots pose similar risks—associated with the production of spike protein—to those posed by SARS-CoV-2 infection. Indeed, the shots pose much greater long-term risk to heart tissues than COVID-19 itself. We all now know that these inoculations are not effective at stopping or slowing transmission. That much has been admitted publicly by a Pfizer representative speaking before a European Union parliamentary committee. And we all know that they are not safe. When we take all of the reports of all of the vaccine injuries, hospitalizations, and deaths in the US VAERS, the UK Yellow Card, and the World Health Organization’s VigiAccess systems, what we see is that there are more vaccine injuries reported from the three U.S. approved COVID-19 vaccines in the past two years than from the combined sum of all the other vaccines administered over the last 30 years.
Instead of requiring COVID-19 vaccination for students admitted into its MD, dentistry, and nursing programs, UBC needs to stop endorsing this vaccination program immediately—the shots are NOT SAFE, and they are NOT EFFECTIVE! UBC needs to get in front of this catastrophe of pharmaceutical industry-leveraged global health policy. Real people need to take real responsibility at UBC. They need to apologize for coercing students, staff, and instructors into receiving these still experimental COVID-19 genetic vaccines. They need to actively seek out the injured and address their injuries. And once apologies have been issued and reparations begun, these responsible individuals need to initiate significant internal reform to prevent the imposition of similarly coercive policies in the future.
After three long years, I am tired of being continuously ashamed of UBC. I want to see representatives of the UBC community begin taking the steps necessary to restore UBC’s ethical integrity. I’m calling upon the UBC Board of Governors, the UBC Senate, the UBC Heads of Departments, the UBC Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic, and the UBC Office of the President—I’m calling upon the human beings in these offices, the human beings in these roles, to take responsibility and begin doing the right thing. I’m calling upon you all to begin making amends for the harm UBC’s COVID-19 policies have done to UBC as a community as well as for the harm they have done to UBC’s reputation as an institution of higher learning.
We can all do better,
Dr. Evans-Cockle
Contact: Dr. Cockle dr.evans.cockle@gmail.com
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