If and when a coronavirus vaccine is developed, it should be mandatory for Australia's 25 million citizens, the country's leader has declared.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said there could be a "medical exemption" but no other excuse.
"We're talking about a pandemic that has destroyed the global economy and taken the lives of hundreds of thousands all around the world," he said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Around the world, a heated ethical debate is underway, with many holding moral objections to vaccines developed from aborted infants as well as concerns about side-effects and other complications.
Morrison said the details haven't been settled yet.
"There are always exemptions for any vaccine on medical grounds, but that should be the only basis," he said in an interview with a Melbourne radio station.
The interview came after a deal was finalized for the country to manufacture a "promising" vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, AFP reported.
Morrison said getting the shot ultimately must be "as mandatory as you can possibly make it."
"We need the most extensive and comprehensive response to this to get Australia back to normal," he said.
His nation already requires innoculations against polio and tetanus for children to be enrolled in schools.
There is no proven vaccine for the coronavirus yet, but Morrison is hopeful.
"As soon as we get the recipe we'll be making it," he said.
In the United States, the religious-liberty organization Liberty Counsel has warned that programs for mass vaccinations may be voluntary only in name.
Officials, they warn, could ban people who choose not to be vaccinated from traveling, shopping or even leaving their homes.
In an online petition camapagin, Liberty Counsel points out that mandatory vaccinations set up a conflict between a government's responsibility to take reasonable actions to protect public health and "a deeply personal decision of faith and/or medical necessity."
"Just as the government has no right to force us to worship as they dictate, neither does the government have the right to force Americans to inject our bodies with unknown, and potentially untested, substances," the organization contends.
Americans likely would object to forced vaccinations, but a "voluntary" program could have the same effect, Liberty Counsel says.
"Mandatory vaccination will likely not mean that jackbooted government agents will hold you down and force a needle into your armm," the group says. "Rather, if world news reports are accurate, your life will be made so uncomfortable without taking the vaccine that you will find that you don't really have much of a choice. The playbook for how this will roll out is already on full display in several countries around the world."
In India and China, "tracking and tracing" programs already are being used to control peoples' movements.
"Before being allowed into any building, including offices, grocery stores and even pharmacies, users must display their COVID app status to officials or their deputies monitoring the doors," Liberty Counsel says.
Billionaire Bill Gates is "touring the world" promoting the idea of a "digital health certificate," which the European Union already is considering.
While President Trump has opposed mandatory vaccinations, some governors are in favor.
WND columnist Scott Lively recently warned that the U.S. Supreme Court could force Americans to accept vaccinations, and he suggests the court already has "telegraphed its intent" on the issue.
"On Friday, July 24, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Governor of Nevada, et al. It was a 5-4 decision in which the snake John Roberts swung the court to the left yet again, upholding an egregious double standard in COVID-19 restrictions on churches as compared specifically to casinos in response to an emergency appeal for an injunction against the governor's dictate by Calvary Chapel. As conservative Justice Samuel Alito noted in his dissent, there were numerous other categories of secular businesses that received favored status under Sisolak's order."
Lively explained: "Most analysts have naturally focused on the religious discrimination implicit in the ruling, especially since the Constitution expressly forbids government from passing any law 'prohibiting the free exercise' of religion. That phrase from the First Amendment is one of the most straightforward legal mandates not just of the Bill of Rights, but of all human jurisprudence of the past thousand years, echoing the exact same legislative intent of the first principle of the Magna Carta (1215), 'the English church shall be free.' And what is balanced against that massive legal foundation stone in John Robert's corrupt scales of justice? A feather-light, arbitrary public health order that exempts gambling casinos and mobs of anarchists. Nothing more need be said on this theme except perhaps a gentle chiding of 'the church' for abandoning the mission field of politics to casino magnates and hard-left pressure groups. You are reaping the natural consequence of neglecting your duty of civil stewardship."
He said, however, what sent a chill down his spine was the court's citation of the Jacobson v. Massachusetts case from 1905 as a reason to uphold Sisolak's public health order.
"Jacobson is a case upholding mandatory vaccinations! To quote Alito directly: 'Jacobson primarily involved a substantive due process challenge to a local ordinance requiring residents to be vaccinated for small pox,'" Lively explained.
"What the Calvary Chapel ruling looks like to me is an advanced warning that the same liberal majority is preparing the public for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, knowing that the controversial nature of their anti-Christian double standard ensures that their endorsement of Jacobson will get lots of attention especially among the people most likely to oppose the vaccine."
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