Andrew Bolt: Why hyping vaccine mandates does more harm than good

Vaccines save lives but by banning the unvaccinated from shops and events to “keep us safe”, our politicians are exaggerating the dangers of not being jabbed.

Last Thursday, the dictatorial Victorian government kept secret information we need now that politicians are treating the unvaccinated like lepers.

Another 25 people had died – the third highest toll in this pandemic – even though nearly 80 per cent of adults have been vaccinated.

How could this be? Were the dead all unvaccinated?

But deputy chief health officer Ben Cowie said while the data was available, “we’re not going to be reporting on that”. Excuse me? Cowie never said why. I’m guessing it’s because many of the dead had been vaccinated.

Be clear. I am vaccinated. I think vaccines save lives – about 70 per cent of Victorians in hospital with the virus last week weren’t vaccinated.

So I understand why the government wouldn’t want to say anything that might give people an excuse not to get vaccinated, especially when the unvaccinated are clogging up hospitals.

But secrecy also has its price.

Now our politicians are banning the unvaccinated from shops and events to ‘keep us safe’?. Picture: Ian Currie

A study in the Lancet medical journal suggests while vaccines do prevent most infected people from getting very sick or dying, they’re less effective in stopping people from being infectious.

Vaccinated people who were sick were about as likely as the unvaccinated to infect people at home – the most common site of infection – because they “have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully-vaccinated contacts”.

Worse, an Oxford University study of its Astra Zeneca vaccine found it worked well at first at stopping the injected from infecting close contacts, but “three months later, that chance rose to 67 per cent … on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus”.

Ireland has seen the same thing. It has a population the size of Melbourne’s and Europe highest vaccination rate – 89 per cent of everyone over 12.

Yet infections have surged to nearly 3000 a day, albeit with just two deaths a day. Chief medical officer Tony Holohan said vaccines were good at saving people from dying but “probably not performing as well as we might have hoped in terms of preventing transmission”.

So what does this tell us, now our politicians are banning the unvaccinated from shops and events to “keep us safe”? It says they’re exaggerating the danger of the unvaccinated. Vaccines are now less about stopping infections spreading than about saving the lives of the infected.

There’s another danger. Hyping vaccine mandates could encourage a false sense of security. The vaccinated can also be dangerous.