Not getting the Covid jab? Good luck, you’re going to need it

Either through beliefs, laziness or blind stupidity, some Queenslanders will refuse the vaccine and play Covid Russian roulette instead. But those of us doing the right thing deserve more than the prospect of more lockdowns, writes Mike O’Connor.

It is difficult to fathom when as a nation we passed that tipping point which saw us become willing slaves to the dictates of political expediency.

It was a deceptively gradual surrender as a population suffering from COVID exhaustion could in the end no longer summons the intellectual energy needed to question the dictates of government.

How much easier to lock ourselves in our homes as ordered and turn on the telly than wonder why we continued to accept having our lives controlled by unelected bureaucrats being used as hand puppets by leaders motivated by political self-survival.

Fifteen months on and it’s deja-vu all over again. The only thing that has changed is the virus as it mutates into new strains, each one branded by premiers and health officers wearing their special Very Serious press conference faces as being more terrifying than the last.

“I am very worried,” said our Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young following the latest outbreak in NSW, telling Queenslanders to stay within their own borders.

The CHO is so worried that she is tossing in her $600K-plus job in a few months’ time and moving into that great big white house in Fernberg Road in Paddington where she will be able to worry in vice-regal style, amply rewarded for doing what she has already been well remunerated to do.

Those doing the right thing and getting the Covid vaccine should be rewarded with the freedom to travel. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

If you were that worried, you might think you would stick with the job. I would have thought it more responsible to tell her fellow Queenslanders not to worry, that any fresh outbreaks would be dealt with as they occurred and for everyone to get on with whatever they were doing.

It would also be helpful if instead of merely quoting case numbers, we were told if those infected were seriously ill, in intensive care or mildly affected.

That, however, would not fit the narrative which is to describe the virus as “a beast,” investing it with demonic qualities which threaten a triumph of over evil over good, a fearsome dark force which threatens us all.

The inconvenient truth is that in spite of all that worrying and Very Serious expressions worn by chief health officers around the country, the virus is still with us and that all the opening and closing of borders, the partial lockdowns, the total lockdowns and the truly pointless snap lockdowns, here we are 15 months down the track being told to hide behind our borders.

In a year’s time, does anyone seriously believe that COVID will be a fast-fading memory? No one capable of rational thought, if they ever took the time to engage in such a process, could arrive at that conclusion.

The same logic would dictate two other inescapable conclusions, one being that if everyone was vaccinated the virus would be easily contained and the second that not everyone is going to be vaccinated.

Either due to strongly held personal beliefs, laziness or blind stupidity, there will be a section of the community which will exercise its right to refuse the protection offered by the vaccine and will elect to play a COVID version of Russian roulette.

That’s fine. Some of them will be infected by the virus, some of them will suffer long term health issues and some of them might die but that is their choice.

Once everyone has been given an opportunity to be injected, then we should all be allowed

to go wherever we chose in whatever numbers we chose and regain the freedoms which we have so timidly surrendered.

I’ll get my second shot of AstraZeneca in three weeks’ time and I then should be able to travel wherever I like.

I won’t be able to, of course, because there’ll be further outbreaks and further lockdowns as state premiers, surgically joined to their CHOs, strut the stage as saviours of an unquestioning electorate.

By year’s end, anyone who intends being vaccinated will have had the opportunity to do so and there will be absolutely no argument for lockdowns or border closures at either a state or federal level.

Lifting restrictions would be a powerful incentive to get vaccinated. Once people realised that the nanny state was no longer going to keep the rest of the world locked out of our country, they might reconsider their opposition to vaccination.

If the borders do not reopen and stay open it is for one reason only, this being that the opinion polls are telling our politicians that these draconian measures are still supported and that there is political risk attached to lifting them.

I’d like to think, however, that the tide of popular opinion is turning. Let’s hope so and to those who refuse the vaccine I say “Good luck!” You’re going to need it.