Dr Mihnea Capraru a philosopher from Kazakhstan has used a controversial journal to claim that mandatory vaccines are ‘morally akin’ to sexual harassment
Forcing vaccines on people is ‘morally akin’ to sexual harassment, a philosopher has controversially claimed.
Dr Mihnea Capraru, from Kazakhstan, argued it is morally wrong for employers to harass staff into receiving what he describes as a ‘medical penetration’.
He even compared it to people being pressured or extorted into receiving ‘sexual penetration’.
The Nazarbayev University academic said any kind of non-consensual vaccination was ‘morally impermissible’ for similar reasons.
Writing in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, Dr Capraru conceded the ‘gravity’ of such incidents were not necessarily comparable.
He argues non-consensual vaccination, such as physically forcing someone to get a jab, is wrong for same reasons as sexual assault.
Whereas policies enforcing mandatory vaccination, where people are threatened with harsh consequences like losing their job or having their movement restricted, is more like sexual harassment in the workplace, he claims.
Such controversial rules were adopted in Britain and the US during the pandemic.
During the height of Covid, unjabbed care workers in England and health workers in some US states were forced out of their jobs for refusing to get vaccinated.
Conservative politicians decried policies requiring ‘vaccine passports’ to enter the likes of nightclubs and other venues as a ‘horrible’ curb on individual freedoms.
Is pressuring someone to get a vaccine, and threatening them with financial penalties or restrictions similar to sexual harassments? One philosopher thinks so yes in a controversial new article
For most of the pandemic countries, including the US, the UK and Japan, have also required proof of Covid vaccination for foreign nationals.
Sharing his viewpoint in the journal, Dr Capraru, who previously studied in New York State, illustrated his point by describing a bizarre scenario where a virus emerges in 2025 with an estimated mortality rate of up to 1 per cent — similar to that of Covid.
In a twist, some people are naturally immune to the virus and a weakened version of this protection can be somehow transferred through sex.
However, as some people refuse to have sex with strangers, Dr Capraru explains experts are forced to develop a way of giving the same protection through a ‘medical dildo’ instead.
But some still decline because of the sexual penetration element.
He then goes through multiple steps where the ‘dildo’ is made smaller and smaller, until, instead of delivering immunity through sexual contact, it does so through the skin — essentially becoming a vaccine.
But for some people this is all still not enough. Dr Capraru explains that, regardless of how small the object, it can still represent a ‘violation’ of bodily autonomy.
‘Albeit no longer a sexual assault, it is a physical assault, and one of a particularly disturbing variety,’ he said.
Dr Capraru then enters the final stage of his narrative, where politicians adopt a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to force the vaccine-hesitant to get the jab, an echo of some policies enacted during the very real Covid pandemic.
‘Some people will be given money, or other benefits, in return for consent,’ he said.
‘The rest will be banned from restaurants, shopping centres, trains, airplanes and buses, they will be fired from their jobs, and banned from reemployment.’
Dr Capraru, therefore, argued we should condemn non-consensual vaccination, and all pressures and threats to get people to sign up for jabs, on the same logic we do for sexual harassment.
‘We all agree that if a company threatens to fire an employee for refusing to have sex with the boss, that constitutes sexual harassment,’ he said.
‘Likewise, if the company threatens to fire the employee for refusing to be sexually penetrated with a medical dildo, that still constitutes sexual harassment.’
Dr Capraru claims this logic isn’t meant to equate sexual and vaccine harassment as being equally wrong, but that simply both are morally objectionable.
He concluded by claiming that in any situation where sexual intercourse would be considered nonconsensual, and therefore wrong, the same applies to vaccination.
While Dr Capraru’s article is a philosophical debate, Covid vaccine mandates in the UK and beyond had real-world impacts.
About 40,000 care home staff in England were sacked in November 2021 for not being unvaccinated against Covid under the Government’s then ‘no jab no job’ policy.
Ministers quickly U-turned on the policy and abandoned a similar move for the NHS.
But the reversal came too late for the ailing care home sector, with industry bosses warning many wouldn’t bother coming back to the hugely understaffed sector.
While mandatory vaccination sprung into focus during the Covid pandemic, the idea is not a new one.
Politicians have previously argued NHS and care home staff should be forced to get the flu jab to help protect patients in the winter season.
Some NHS staff already have to get a Hepatitis B jab if they wish to work in parts of the health service where there is a risk their blood could come into contact with a patients’ internal tissues.
This is meant to minimize the risk of a medic passing the disease onto to a patient if they accidentally cut themselves, for example, with scalpel during an operation.
In the US, the City of New York enacted a Covid vaccine mandate for all health care workers and employees and customers of indoor dining, fitness, and entertainment venues.
US sport was also impacted, with basketball players who refused to get the vaccine unable to play in certain games depending on restrictions in particular states.
Countries can also enforce vaccination as a condition for entry for non-citizens and some have done so even before Covid.
For example, some nations in the tropics require people from countries with yellow fever, a serious viral infection spread by mosquitoes, to have a jab before allowing them entry.
They do this because, in theory, a person with yellow fever who enters the country could then be bit by mosquitoes which could spark further infections.
Dr Capraru’s article is just the latest outrageous argument featured in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
Other authors have used publication to argue that it is ethical to let people who eat meat die, that a biological man claiming to be a women is no different to them claiming to be dragon, and even one where a researcher openly admitted to being a paedophile and argued that society to be ‘more tolerant to people attracted to children’.
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