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THE MOUTHPIECE
- Mark Neugebauer - FCP Australia
- 21 hours ago
- 21 min read
“Life Will Be Miserable for the Unvaccinated” — Dr Chris Perry, Informed Consent and the Price of Refusal
On the morning of 10 November 2021, Channel Nine’s Today program broadcast an interview with Professor Christopher Perry, then President of the Australian Medical Association Queensland. I have retained the original broadcast footage, portions of which are reproduced below. Nine also published the segment through its official 9 News Australia YouTube channel under the title Doctors support new Queensland COVID-19 restrictions, businesses frustrated.
In the Channel Nine footage, Perry tells viewers that life without vaccination will be “miserable”. People will not be able to “hide”. Maintaining employment will become difficult. Access to entertainment will disappear. Doctors issuing medical exclusions will be audited, with Perry referring to possible professional sanctions, while people attempting to circumvent the system could face fraud allegations.
Toward the end of the exchange, presenter Allison Langdon suggests that these consequences might provide the momentum needed to get hesitant people vaccinated. Perry’s response is perhaps the most important sentence in the interview:
“Their livelihood is on the line.”
These were not the words of an anonymous commentator on social media, nor was Perry introduced merely as an individual surgeon offering a personal opinion. In additional footage from the segment, Nine introduces him as Queensland President of the Australian Medical Association and asks whether he supports the “tough rules” applying to the unvaccinated.
Perry answers: “Yes, we do.”
He then describes the AMA as “the mouthpiece”, the organisation representing doctors, and repeats that “we talk for the doctors”.
That claim of authority matters. So does the timing.
One day earlier, on 9 November 2021, the Queensland Government issued a media release under the extraordinary title “Vaccinated Queenslanders rewarded with life as normal.” The Government said the measures were a “reward” for vaccinated Queenslanders who deserved to have their lives returned to normal. From 17 December, or once the state reached 80 per cent fully vaccinated, vaccination status would determine access to pubs, clubs, restaurants, cafés, entertainment venues, music festivals, stadiums and various government facilities.
The following morning Perry appeared on national television.
Chronology does not prove coordination. I have not found evidence that the Queensland Government scripted Perry’s words, nor that AMA Queensland was instructed by government to deliver them. But the sequence raises a question I no longer think should be avoided:
How did Australian medicine move from an ethic built around voluntary informed consent to a point where a senior medical leader could publicly invoke employment, exclusion and social isolation as reasons to undergo a medical intervention? And under whose authority was he speaking?
This is not the first time I have approached that question. In Transparency Denied: FOI Request on Informed Consent During COVID Mandates I explained why I eventually sought the Commonwealth Department of Health’s own internal understanding of voluntary, informed, free and un-coerced consent during the mandate period. In The Accountability Gap I went further, examining whether the conditions Australians actually faced were compatible with the consent standard government itself continued to affirm.
Perry appeared in that investigation, but he was not its focus. This article returns to that moment and asks more directly what his words represented, what ethical framework should have constrained them, and what institutional authority stood behind them.
The person before the policy
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”— Genesis 1:27
My Christian understanding of the human person begins here, with the Imago Dei: every human being is made in the image of God.
That cannot remain a theological abstraction when political and medical power becomes difficult. If it means anything, it means that a human being cannot simply be reduced to a vaccination target, a transmission risk, an economic variable or a unit of public-health compliance. The body is not the property of the State, an employer, a medical association or a communications campaign.
Governments may face genuine emergencies. Doctors may urgently recommend treatment. Communities may reasonably ask individuals to consider the welfare of others. Infectious disease can create circumstances in which governments legitimately restrict particular conduct to protect people from demonstrable risks created by others. Those questions deserve serious treatment. But restricting conduct and claiming authority over another person’s body are not the same thing.
If every human being bears the image of God, then no government, employer, medical association or doctor possesses inherent authority to compel a medical procedure upon another person. Advice may be urgent and persuasion may be strong, but the final decision about whether a medical intervention enters a person’s body must remain theirs.
That conviction also places a restraint on this investigation, because the same principle applies to Christopher Perry. I do not write this because I wish to destroy his reputation, question his human worth or make him carry every grievance I have about the COVID era. Perry too bears the image of God. He is entitled to fairness, context, evidence and an opportunity to explain himself.
But dignity is not immunity from accountability. Where a person exercises extraordinary institutional authority over others, accountability becomes more important, not less. The Australians whose livelihoods were placed on the line possessed inherent dignity. So did the doctor who told them that was what was happening. Both truths must be held together.
Why voluntary consent matters
Any serious discussion of modern medical consent eventually encounters the Nuremberg Code, and this is where precision matters.
Australia in 2021 was not Nazi Germany, and invoking Nuremberg should never become a device for pretending that it was. Nor does a later statement by Greg Hunt, discussed below, automatically establish as a legal proposition that every vaccinated Australian was a formal participant in a clinical experiment governed directly by the Nuremberg Code.
The importance of Nuremberg lies deeper than that. Following the atrocities exposed during the Doctors’ Trial after the Second World War, the Nuremberg Code placed voluntary consent at the beginning of its principles concerning human experimentation:
“The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”
It went on to require circumstances permitting free choice without force, fraud, deceit, duress or other forms of constraint or coercion. Nuremberg was neither the beginning nor the end of medical ethics. It did, however, become an important marker in a wider post-war insistence that medical knowledge and institutional authority do not extinguish the agency of the person.
That principle continued to develop. The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Geneva, in the version operating by 2021, required physicians to respect the autonomy and dignity of the patient and pledged that medical knowledge would not be used to violate human rights and civil liberties.
Australia’s professional standards reflected the same concern. The Medical Board of Australia’s Good medical practice code operating during the vaccine rollout defined informed consent as a person’s voluntary decision about medical care, made with knowledge and understanding of the benefits and risks involved. (4. Working with Patients, point 5)
The AMA’s own Code of Ethics in force during 2021 is particularly important because it expressly said its principles applied to doctors regardless of professional role. It required doctors to respect a patient’s right to make their own healthcare decisions, including accepting or rejecting treatment, and stated that valid consent must be informed and voluntary.
The Australian Immunisation Handbook made the vaccination standard still more explicit: valid consent had to be voluntary and given in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation.
That was not wording added retrospectively after the pandemic. The Handbook’s own criteria for valid consent were already on the record in a 2021 Fair Work Commission proceeding: in Barber v Goodstart Early Learning, the judgment reproduced that language while summarising the applicant’s submissions, rather than announcing it as the Commission’s own independently declared legal test.
These principles matter precisely because emergencies are when ethical restraints become difficult. If voluntary consent matters only when authorities are indifferent to the choice a person makes, it is not much of a restraint at all.
This was a central theme when I sat down in 2025 with independent researcher Elizabeth Hart and former military doctor Dr Bruce Paix for a long-form FCP discussion about informed consent, mandates and the responsibilities of medical practitioners.
Hart had already spent years pursuing government departments and medical organisations over these questions, while Paix approached them from decades of clinical practice and his own experience challenging aspects of COVID policy.
During that discussion, Paix returned to Nuremberg and the longstanding obligation of a doctor toward the individual patient, while Hart focused on the tension between government mandates and the continuing requirement for voluntary informed consent. The conversation was forceful, and some propositions made within it require independent testing rather than automatic acceptance. That is part of why I have continued the investigation.
But the central question remains legitimate: what happens when institutions requiring practitioners to obtain voluntary consent simultaneously operate within a policy environment deliberately designed to make refusal costly?
That question becomes more significant when we return to the beginning of Australia’s vaccine rollout.
“The largest global vaccination trial ever”
On 21 February 2021, immediately before Australia’s national vaccine rollout commenced, then Health Minister Greg Hunt appeared on the ABC’s Insiders program.
The interview is unusually important because several themes that would later become separated in public debate were discussed together. Hunt defended the safety assessment undertaken by the Therapeutic Goods Administration and repeatedly emphasised the importance of confidence and uptake.
When David Speers asked about mandates for aged-care workers, Hunt said the medical advice at that point was not to make vaccination mandatory. He described the program as “free, universally available, but voluntary”, arguing that confidence based on safety and individual control was the best way to achieve high uptake.
Later in the same interview, discussing questions that remained unresolved about transmission and the longevity of protection, Hunt acknowledged that the world did not yet know all the answers. He described what was unfolding internationally as “the largest clinical trial” and the largest global vaccination trial ever.
It would be misleading to isolate that phrase and declare that Hunt had legally admitted every Australian was a clinical-trial subject. But it would be equally misleading to pretend that all material questions surrounding the vaccines had already been answered. Australia’s regulator did not say that either.
When the Therapeutic Goods Administration provisionally approved Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine in January 2021, it stated that the decision rested on short-term efficacy and safety data and that continued approval depended upon longer-term evidence from ongoing clinical trials and post-market assessment.
AstraZeneca’s provisional approval carried comparable ongoing evidence requirements. The TGA also stated at the time that, although the vaccine had been shown to prevent COVID-19, it was not yet known whether it prevented transmission or asymptomatic disease.
None of this establishes that the vaccines were therefore unsafe. The TGA concluded that the benefit-risk profile supported provisional approval. It establishes something more modest and much harder to dispute: material scientific uncertainty remained when the rollout began. That should have made the quality of informed consent more important, not less.
“This is an advertising campaign”
The same 21 February interview contains another passage that deserves to sit beside Hunt’s acknowledgement of developing evidence. When Speers asked how the Government intended to address vaccine hesitancy, Hunt spoke about information, facts, communication campaigns and prominent medical voices. He then said plainly: “This is an advertising campaign with broad support across the Parliament.”
Again, there is nothing inherently unethical about government advertising a public-health intervention. Governments encourage Australians to stop smoking, wear seatbelts, undergo screening and receive vaccinations. Nor is it remarkable that a government facing a pandemic would seek high vaccination coverage if its public-health advisers believed vaccination would substantially reduce serious illness and pressure on hospitals.
But it is important to describe the purpose accurately. The campaign was not simply a passive repository of information from which Australians were expected to reach independent conclusions. Government openly sought to increase confidence and uptake. That distinction becomes more important as 2021 progresses, because the Commonwealth’s own documents show the communications strategy moving beyond information alone.
Information became encouragement. Encouragement increasingly became motivation. And motivation would eventually include freedom itself.
From information to motivation
The Operation COVID Shield National COVID Vaccine Campaign Plan, published in August 2021, is one of the most important primary documents for understanding what followed.
The plan set out a series of “Motivate” campaigns and described public advertising intended to promote vaccine uptake. It said the work would focus on motivating specific demographic groups and driving uptake among those not yet vaccinated. The same document then turned to “other incentives to promote vaccine uptake” and recorded:
“Personal freedoms: providing vaccinated people with greater personal freedoms.”
That sentence deserves careful consideration. It does not establish that every person subsequently vaccinated was coerced, and its existence does not itself establish illegality. What it establishes is that the Commonwealth formally contemplated differential personal freedom as an incentive capable of driving medical uptake.
The same Operation COVID Shield plan is also important for another reason. Its stakeholder consultation section said that specific communications campaigns and messengers could drive uptake, called for coordinated and clear messaging across levels of government, and said further development of the Motivate strategy would involve stakeholders including primary-care providers and peak bodies, giving the AMA as an example. Such engagement could occur ahead of critical milestones including the launch of new communications campaigns.
This does not establish that Christopher Perry personally received Commonwealth talking points, a prepared script or instructions from Operation COVID Shield. I have found no evidence demonstrating such a connection.
But it does establish the communications environment in which his later comments were made. Government had a structured strategy designed to increase uptake, recognised particular messengers as capable of doing so, contemplated AMA engagement, and explicitly considered greater personal freedom as one of the incentives available. That makes the provenance of Perry’s November message a legitimate question rather than a conspiratorial one.
Medical authority as persuasion
By September 2021, the Commonwealth had gone further in formally recognising the persuasive power of health professionals. An explanatory statement registered on the Federal Register of Legislation in connection with permissions for COVID-vaccine promotion said that health professionals carried significant public credibility and had the ability to “enhance vaccine uptake” through public promotional statements and by countering misinformation.
The document also described businesses offering encouragement and incentives as a way of supplementing the Government’s public-health campaign. Promotions permitted under the scheme were required to remain consistent with Commonwealth messaging and could not state that vaccines were incapable of causing harm or had no side effects.
This matters because doctors do possess unusual authority. That authority is part of what makes medicine possible. Patients disclose intimate information and submit their bodies to interventions because the profession has cultivated a relationship of competence and trust.
But authority carries an ethical price. The more powerful the messenger, the more important it becomes to ask whether the influence being exercised respects the agency of the person receiving it. There is a meaningful difference between a doctor saying, Here are the medical reasons I believe vaccination is in your interests, and a doctor invoking the economic and social consequences attached to refusal as an additional reason to accept it.
By October 2021, that distinction was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Spread Freedom
On 24 October 2021, the Australian Government launched another phase of its vaccination communications campaign. It called it Spread Freedom.
The advertisements depicted overseas travel, birthday parties, weddings and a family Christmas. The official announcement described a positive and hopeful campaign, but its behavioural objective was also explicit: it sought to motivate people who remained hesitant to get vaccinated so they would not “miss out on greater freedoms”.
At the 24 October launch press conference, Lieutenant-General John Frewen, then leading Operation COVID Shield, said the campaign was focused on the final 10 to 15 per cent of Australians who had not yet come forward. Its purpose was to highlight the connection between vaccination and regaining, or protecting, the freedoms Australians wanted to enjoy.
Hunt was equally revealing during the same press conference. Asked what would appeal to those who had still not come forward, he said that freedoms were “right at the top”, adding that this was why the campaign was called Spread Freedom.
The phrase deserves more scrutiny than it received at the time. Freedom was no longer simply the ordinary condition from which emergency restrictions had temporarily departed. It was increasingly presented as something vaccination would help return.
For Australians living through the distinction, that was not philosophical wordplay. The campaign itself invoked travel, weddings, parties and Christmas. Government policy increasingly connected vaccination status with access to ordinary economic and social life. The Commonwealth’s own plan had already contemplated greater personal freedoms as an uptake incentive. The public campaign now encouraged hesitant Australians to vaccinate partly so they would not miss out on those freedoms.
The language was optimistic. The structure underneath it was conditional.
From persuasion to separation
The Commonwealth campaign did not exist in isolation. By September 2021, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was openly describing what he called a “vaccinated economy”. He said people would participate in that economy if vaccinated and that the Government would “lock out people who are not vaccinated and can be” in order, he argued, to protect the health system.
The public-health justification deserves to be recorded. Governments believed differential rules would increase vaccination and reduce risks to the health system. But policy language also has social effects. As the year progressed, vaccination status became more than a medical fact. It increasingly became an administrative category governing who could participate in parts of ordinary economic and social life.
I use the word othering cautiously here. I cannot establish that every politician, public-health official or advertiser who used this language intended to portray unvaccinated Australians as inferior people, and I will not attribute a motive I cannot prove. But intent is not the only thing worth examining.
One category of citizen was increasingly spoken of in the language of reopening, reward, protection and restored normality. The other encountered the language of restriction, exclusion and being locked out. That distinction was reinforced through policy, advertising and repeated public commentary until medical status acquired a social meaning as well.
I know how that period felt from the inside, but this article does not depend upon my memory of it. The Government’s own language is enough to establish the distinction. The question for medicine is whether a profession committed to patient autonomy should merely reinforce such pressure, or whether part of its role is to guard the boundary at which legitimate public-health persuasion begins to compromise the voluntariness it is simultaneously required to protect.
“Rewarded with life as normal”
Then came Queensland. On 9 November 2021, the Palaszczuk Government announced that from 17 December, or once the state reached its vaccination threshold, pubs, clubs, restaurants, cafés, entertainment venues, festivals, stadiums and various government facilities would become vaccinated-only environments.
The title of the Government’s announcement remains striking: “Vaccinated Queenslanders rewarded with life as normal.” The Premier described the measures as a reward for vaccinated Queenslanders who deserved their lives returned to normal. The following morning, Perry appeared on Today.
Again, chronology does not prove coordination. But chronology matters. The Commonwealth had formally identified greater personal freedoms as an uptake incentive. It had developed a Motivate strategy contemplating AMA consultation and the use of influential messengers. It had then launched Spread Freedom, aimed specifically at remaining hesitant Australians. Queensland subsequently announced that vaccinated citizens would be “rewarded with life as normal”.
The next morning, the president of AMA Queensland was on national television explaining in stark terms what refusal would cost.
The mouthpiece
Perry’s message went considerably beyond telling viewers that he believed vaccination would protect their health. In the Channel Nine footage he refers to difficulty maintaining employment, exclusion from weddings, pubs and clubs, inability to access entertainment, scrutiny of medical exemptions, professional consequences for doctors and possible fraud consequences for people attempting to circumvent the rules. He says life will be “miserable” without vaccination and that people will not be able to “hide”.
Most strikingly, he tells viewers that refusing vaccination will lead to a “very very lonely life” and difficulty maintaining employment. When Langdon then suggests these consequences might create momentum for vaccination, Perry responds that people cannot remain relaxed because:
“Their livelihood is on the line.”
There is an important defence available to Perry, and a fair investigation must take it seriously. He did not create Queensland’s rules. Employment requirements and access restrictions were real. Medical exemptions were regulated, and businesses had government directions to follow. Perry may reasonably argue that he was explaining the practical consequences of a policy already announced.
An accurate description of government policy cannot simply be transformed into proof that the speaker created or controlled it. But that explanation does not resolve the ethical question. Perry was not merely asked what the Government had announced. When asked whether the AMA supported the tough rules, he answered “Yes, we do.” He then grounded that position explicitly in organisational authority, describing the AMA as “the mouthpiece” and saying that it spoke for doctors.
That changes the question. Was Perry expressing his personal judgement, a formally adopted AMA Queensland position, or both? What consultation with members informed that position? What discussions had occurred between AMA Queensland and government? Had Perry received briefing or communications material before the appearance? What did he understand his responsibility toward voluntary informed consent to require when he used the consequences of refusal as part of the case for vaccination?
Those questions remain unanswered.
The deeper consent problem
There is an important distinction between the legal arguments surrounding COVID mandates and the moral principle I am advancing here. Most mandates did not involve government physically restraining people and administering vaccines against their will. They commonly operated by attaching consequences or conditions to employment, entry, travel or participation. That distinction matters legally and descriptively, and different mandates operated under different statutory, employment and public-health frameworks.
Courts may therefore distinguish between lawful government regulation, employment conditions, medical consent and the degree of pressure required before consent becomes legally invalid. Those are legitimate legal questions. I do not pretend they are simple, and I am not claiming here that every vaccinated Australian’s consent was legally invalid.
But my concern goes deeper than the minimum legal threshold. If every human being bears the image of God, then no government, employer, medical association or doctor possesses inherent authority to compel a medical procedure upon another person. The body belongs to the person whose life is bound up with it. Governments may regulate conduct to protect others where that is necessary and proportionate, but the final decision about whether a medical intervention enters a person’s body must remain theirs.
That is why the mandate question cannot, for me, be resolved simply by determining whether a particular employment condition or public-health direction survived legal challenge. A person can face a legally valid consequence and still be placed under profound moral pressure.
The Australian Immunisation Handbook itself says legally valid vaccination consent must be voluntary and given in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation. It also requires disclosure of the risks and benefits of the vaccine, the risks of not receiving it and alternative options.
If the practical choice confronting a person becomes undergoing the medical intervention or losing a livelihood, profession, access to significant parts of ordinary society or the ability to participate normally in community life, the ethical question is not answered merely by observing that two theoretical options remained.
The question is whether medical consent worthy of the name should ever be pursued through consequences deliberately intended to make refusal increasingly unattractive. That question becomes still sharper where medical professionals themselves invoke those consequences as reasons to undergo the intervention.
Human dignity requires more than the existence of two options on paper. It requires that the person not be reduced to a behavioural target to be moved or a body over which institutions may exercise dominion for a collective objective. This does not settle every legal dispute concerning COVID mandates. It establishes the moral standard against which I believe their use, and the role of medical professionals in promoting them, should be examined.
The doctors who answered differently
Perry’s approach also deserves to be considered alongside doctors who reached very different conclusions about their professional obligations. I have previously written at length about one of them in Dr Bruce Paix: The Cancelled Military Doctor Who Beat the System and Refused to Break. Paix is not the only Australian practitioner who challenged aspects of mandates, informed consent, COVID vaccination policy or the regulatory environment and subsequently faced professional consequences.
Those cases differ substantially. Their facts, statements, professional conduct and regulatory histories need to be examined individually. It would be wrong to construct a simple morality play in which every dissenting doctor was correct and every doctor supporting government policy was wrong. The comparison worth making is narrower.
In March 2021, AHPRA and the National Boards told health practitioners to use their professional judgement and the best available evidence when speaking about COVID vaccination. The same position statement also warned that promoting anti-vaccination material, contradicting what regulators regarded as the best available scientific evidence, or seeking to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign could potentially constitute a breach of professional codes and lead to regulatory action.
Importantly, that statement also told practitioners advocating for population health to use their expertise and influence to advance the wellbeing of individuals as well as communities and broader populations. That is an important qualification. The professional framework itself recognised both responsibilities.
But it also creates the symmetry question I first raised in The Accountability Gap. What happened when a doctor’s speech could discourage vaccination? And what happened when another doctor’s speech pushed forcefully in the opposite direction by invoking employment loss and social exclusion? Were the same professional principles applied regardless of which direction the doctor’s influence operated?
That is a question about professional independence and regulatory consistency, not about deciding in advance which side of the COVID debate was morally pure.
What happened to the individual?
Looking back from 2026, there is a temptation to treat these questions as disputes Australians should simply leave behind. Australia’s own COVID-19 Response Inquiry makes that difficult.
The Inquiry found that mandating public-health measures, particularly vaccination, had the biggest negative effect on trust identified through its public consultation. Participants described feeling “forced” and “disempowered”, while one survey participant expressed the experience in stark terms: vaccination or losing a job.
The Inquiry did not conclude that every mandate was unlawful or unjustified. Nor does the existence of public anger establish that the underlying policies had no public-health rationale. What the Inquiry does establish is that the consequences for trust were substantial. It found that mandatory measures, combined with a perception that government decisions could not be questioned, contributed to distrust in both government and medical science.
That matters because future public-health responses depend heavily upon voluntary public cooperation. It also brings us back to a distinction medicine cannot afford to lose. Public health necessarily deals in populations, probabilities and aggregate outcomes. Clinical medicine ultimately encounters persons. Those responsibilities can coexist, and the AMA’s own ethical code recognises responsibilities beyond the individual patient, but they are not identical.
When population objectives become urgent, there is always a danger that individuals begin to be seen primarily in terms of whether they advance or obstruct the objective.
Vaccinated or unvaccinated. Compliant or hesitant. Rewarded or locked out.
Behind every category stood a person.
What we know — and what we do not
The documentary record now allows several propositions to be made with confidence. The Commonwealth Government expressly wanted to increase vaccine uptake. Greg Hunt openly described the communications effort as an advertising campaign while simultaneously describing vaccination at that stage as voluntary. Operation COVID Shield subsequently developed Motivate campaigns aimed at increasing uptake among people not yet vaccinated, identified greater personal freedoms as a possible incentive, recognised that particular messengers could drive uptake and contemplated consultation with peak bodies including the AMA.
A September 2021 Commonwealth explanatory statement expressly recognised the ability of health professionals, because of their public credibility, to enhance vaccine uptake through public promotional statements. The Commonwealth then launched Spread Freedom, deliberately highlighting the relationship between vaccination and restored freedoms to motivate people who remained hesitant.
Victoria openly developed what its Premier called a vaccinated economy and spoke of locking out people who remained unvaccinated. Queensland then announced that vaccinated citizens would be “rewarded with life as normal”. The following morning, Chris Perry appeared as AMA Queensland President, expressly endorsed the tough rules, described the AMA as the mouthpiece for doctors and invoked employment, exclusion and isolation while urging vaccination.
Those things are documented. There are equally important things I do not yet know. I do not know whether Perry received communications or briefing material from the Commonwealth. I do not know whether Operation COVID Shield engaged directly with AMA Queensland or whether relevant engagement occurred through the federal AMA. I do not know what discussions took place between AMA Queensland and the Queensland Government before the 9 November announcement, or whether Perry received government or organisational talking points before appearing on Channel Nine.
I do not know how AMA Queensland internally developed its support for these restrictions, what consultation occurred with its membership, or the evidentiary basis for Perry’s assertion during the broadcast that 99.7 per cent of doctors firmly supported vaccination. I do not know whether Nine independently sought Perry’s appearance or whether government, AMA or another media liaison process contributed to arranging it.
Most importantly, I do not yet know how Christopher Perry himself reconciled the language he used with the medical profession’s commitment to voluntary informed consent.
Those are not gaps to fill with suspicion. They are questions to investigate.
Accountability is not vengeance
I have returned repeatedly to informed consent in my writing because I believe something foundational was placed under extraordinary pressure during the COVID era. Transparency Denied, The Accountability Gap, my conversations with Elizabeth Hart and Bruce Paix, and my continuing FOI work have approached different parts of essentially the same problem: what remains of the autonomy of the person when government, medicine and institutional power become convinced that a particular outcome must be achieved?
Whether a pandemic is severe or mild, whether a medical intervention ultimately proves highly beneficial or disappointing, and whether those exercising authority act wisely or badly, the human person does not cease to possess moral agency.
A human being made in the image of God cannot simply become an obstacle to a vaccination target. A livelihood is not merely a behavioural lever. Family and social life are not merely incentives. Exclusion from ordinary society cannot be treated merely as a communications strategy, and the body does not become public property because authorities believe circumstances are exceptional.
But neither can Christopher Perry become an instrument of my anger about what happened during those years. He too is a person. That means I want his explanation rather than a caricature of him.
I want to understand what Perry believed his professional obligations were when he made those statements. I want to know whose authority he believed he carried when he described the AMA as the mouthpiece and said that he spoke for doctors. I want to know what guidance he had received, what evidence informed his position, whether those words were entirely his own or reflected a broader institutional communications environment and whether, with nearly five years of distance from the emergency, he would use the same language again.
Because the question underneath this investigation is larger than Christopher Perry, and ultimately larger than COVID.
When government believes a population must be persuaded to undergo a medical intervention, where are the ethical limits on the power it may bring to bear, and what responsibility belongs to the doctors who lend medical authority to that persuasion?
Nuremberg does not answer every modern medical question. It does leave us with an ethical warning worth remembering: there are moments when medicine, government and appeals to the wider good can become so compelling that the individual person begins to disappear behind the objective.
The task is to make sure that person remains visible. Public health matters. The protection of neighbours matters. The conscientious work of doctors matters. But none of those things requires us to surrender the principle underneath them all.
The human being still matters, and the image of God is not suspended during an emergency.
Why I finish here
I began this article in Genesis, with the declaration that every human being bears the image of God. I finish with Christ’s warning about authority because the two belong together.
Scripture does not teach that authority itself is evil. Government has responsibilities, medicine carries genuine expertise, and those entrusted with leadership will sometimes have to make difficult decisions for the welfare of others. But Christ overturns the instinct to treat authority as permission to dominate: “Not so with you.” Power is justified by service, not by the ability to make another person comply.
That is why this passage belongs at the end of an article about informed consent. The deeper question is not simply whether a government possessed legal power, whether an employer could impose a condition, or whether a doctor sincerely believed vaccination served the public good. It is what happens to the person when institutional power becomes convinced that the desired outcome is important enough to make refusal increasingly costly.
The Christian answer cannot begin with the usefulness of that person to the objective. It begins with who that person is.
Made in the image of God, and therefore never merely a means to somebody else’s end.
“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you.”— Mark 10:42–43
Thanks for reading
God Bless
Mark
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