Dear Mr. Johnson: I consider it wholly inappropriate to find a conserva­tive leader claim at the United Nations that consumer choice and personal sovereignty have a negative impact on the development of any technology or product. How come all conservatives agree that personal consumer choice in, say, shoes and socks or bread is the very force, nonexistent in the Soviet Union, that drives innovation, yet somehow, if we remove these things and agree with Karl Marx with regards to vaccination, that it will somehow result in techno­logical innovation?
Conservative voters will not accept the doublethink in this speech, which claims that repression, censorship and control and an Orwellian state are repulsive in the areas where our dear leader seeks liberty, but not in those that he seeks to repress…
Surely, it is by government step­ping out of the way, forcing the pharma­ceutical industry to have to engage their marketing departments with those who have concerns about their products, be it vaccines, thalidomide, socks and shoes or loaves of bread, that we can allow Adam Smith’s invisible hand and not the whip hand and boot of govern­ment to drive technological innovation?
If you genuinely believe in vacci­nation, you should focus on persuasion, debate, possibly reverse psychology and certainly free-market principles, not the Orwellian boot-on-the-face that you re­jected on the one hand, supported on the other. If you continue to demonize sov­ereign individuals for their consumer choice in regards to medical products, you transfer the debate from whether these are good products to a matter of principle about personal choice. This is not the sort of debate that is easily won against the British, who tend to reject tyranny in principle regardless of its intention.