Piers Akerman: Covid is not fake and vaccination is our ticket to freedom
The danger Covid poses is very real, but lockdown frustration is only going to increase — and governments are ill-equipped to deal with the blowback, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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Stripped of the cover of the Olympics, lockdown frustration is only going to increase, and the state and federal governments are ill-equipped to deal with the blowback.
More than 15 million Australians are now under virtual house arrest in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.
Celebrity film stars are seemingly free of the international travel restrictions, however, and are able to come and go as thousands of small businesses can only go ... under.
On Thursday, Victorians were slammed into their sixth closure by the nation’s lockdown tyrant Premier Dan Andrews. If smashing economies and attacking individual freedoms was an Olympic event, Andrews would be the gold medallist.
However, symptomatic of the hit-and-miss political approach to the Wuhan virus, a critical piece of information Mr Andrews relied upon to justify incarcerating 1.6 million regional Victorians has been found to be false.
In ordering the regional shutdown, he highlighted the recent detection of virus fragments at a sewage treatment plant in Wangaratta, his home town, though there were no known coronavirus cases outside Melbourne.
Wangaratta is 240km northeast of Melbourne. On Friday morning, the Mayor of Wangaratta, Dean Rees, told media he had been informed by the regional health authority that there had been a single positive detection at the facility a week ago followed by two negatives, indicating there were no ongoing infections in the area.
Within hours of Mr Andrews announcing Victoria’s latest lockdown, hundreds of protesters marched through central Melbourne, lighting flares, and clashing with police.
One ugly altercation between a female anti-lockdown protester and a man, aged 60, occurred after he shouted to the mob: “I had Covid last year. I was really sick.” The woman immediately shouted back: “Covid is fake.” With those three words, she demonstrated her idiotic ignorance.
Covid is not fake. It is real.
More than 930 Australians have died within this country, the overwhelming majority in Victoria, and a further 50 or more have died abroad. Globally, more than 5 million people have probably died, a figure greater than the official toll as there has undoubtedly been significant under-reporting in a number of nations.
The lashings of fear being dished out by governments at every level have not been matched by action at the coal face.
Premiers and Prime Minister Scott Morrison all hide behind the shield of “best possible medical advice”, but one of the few to have died in the past week in NSW did so in Liverpool Hospital where she was infected by an unvaccinated health workers who had contracted the virus outside the hospital.
This is not the gold standard of care Australians have repeatedly been promised by their political leaders. The list of bungles and loopholes which have ensured the virus remains at large keeps growing.
Mr Morrison has also to face the dilemma posed by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal’s FOI ruling that his national cabinet is not actually a cabinet and its proceedings should be transparent.
Too much information about decisions taken on handling Covid has been kept from the public, here and abroad. More than 18 months after the Chinese ’fessed up to the initial outbreak in Wuhan, important questions remain unanswered.
While the initial claims that the virus may have escaped from that city’s virus research institute were ridiculed, the evidence pointing to the likelihood of exactly that event grows daily. For suggesting an inquiry was needed, Australia was placed in economic purgatory by the Chinese Communist Party.
An inquiry is needed into US immunologist Anthony Fauci’s involvement with the Wuhan laboratory, and there is an urgent need for full disclosure of patents taken out for the development of Covid-SARS viruses before the internet overloads with even wilder conspiracy theories.
The backflips continue with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian only now admitting that we will have to live with the virus. Elimination was never an option. The federal government also has to give clear guidelines to business about whether it can make vaccinations mandatory for staff instead of waiting for test cases to be resolved.
Vaccinations for measles, mumps, chickenpox, whooping cough, tetanus shots and other viruses have been accepted in the past. Stay at home and get vaccinated. The message is clear – vaccination is the ticket to freedom.
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