Dear Sir,

In today’s Royal Gazette (March 20, 2025), Donald G. McNeil Jr, in his condemnation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s antivax stance and other wacky ideas, makes a case about personal choice. It is worth reading: “Opposing life-saving mandates is childish libertarian nonsense.”

The thrust of Mr McNeil’s article is that in order for society to flourish, each of us has to make sacrifices and governments make laws for the protection of the community as a whole. We may not like wearing a seatbelt or a crash helmet, but it is mandated that we must. There are smokers who may like to smoke on aircraft, and in offices and restaurants, but for the good of the rest of us, they are not allowed to. Speed limits are imposed on vehicles driving on the public roads, and we must obey them or face punishment. You can argue that it is your personal choice to drive at whatever speed you like, but you do not have the right to endanger other road users — hence, if you break the law and are caught, you will be fined or imprisoned.

A few pages further on in the same issue, we have what seems to be a celebration of Sophia Cannonier, who has no regrets about breaking the laws that were in place on our island in 2020. She made a personal choice not to get vaccinated. No one mandated that she had to get vaccinated, but the law at the time was that unvaccinated people had to quarantine in a designated hotel upon arrival — ours was not the only jurisdiction that imposed these restrictions. Ms Cannonier decided that the law did not apply to her and her family, and she was eventually found guilty by the courts. She has not yet received any sentence (punishment) for breaking the law.

During the three years that the Government had mandatory travel restrictions in place because of the pandemic, the rest of our population obeyed the laws, paid the $75 travel authorisation fees — often hundreds of times over the long period of the Covid restrictions — and were told that if we arrived on island without a TA, we would be subject to a fine of $1,200. At the very least, the Cannonier family should have had an immediate fine for not doing what the rest of us had to do.

If there is to be no sanction on Ms Cannonier and her family, then is the Government prepared to be inundated with requests for reimbursement of all the TA fees that it collected during the long period that Bermudians were subject to travel restrictions? Will they reimburse the charges paid by those who obeyed the laws and did the mandatory quarantine in the Fairmont Southampton? This would amount to millions of dollars — millions that the Government collected from those of us who were forced to give up our right to unhindered travel, and obeyed the laws and paid what we had to pay to comply.

I am not wishing a prison sentence on Ms Cannonier and her family — at any level, given the delays in the court system, no one could make an argument that such an outcome would be beneficial. But surely we need to ask the question: at what point is it acceptable for a person to just decide that certain laws do not apply to them and for there to be no repercussions when the exercise of their “personal choice” is at odds with what society has asked of us?

Why is it OK that the rest of us have to fall in line, but that somehow the Cannonier family are exempt? It really is not OK and, quite frankly, her defiance of the law should not be lauded in the pages of our daily newspaper. Is the next person who is caught doing 85km/h along Harbour Road going to be telling us they have “no regrets”?

From the grave, maybe ...

ELSPETH A. WEISBERG

Warwick

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