Patrick Carlyon: Time to move on and let unjabbed take part in life

The unvaccinated in Victoria will be treated like the great unwashed until 2023, but they pose little threat to anyone but themselves. Are we punishing or protecting them?

Victoria will restrict freedom for the unvaccinated until 2023.

That’s no good for them. More importantly, it’s no good for the rest of us either.

Much of the world has opened up – to all – at vaccination thresholds.

NSW, which has led the way for a furtive Victoria, will pull the lever in December.

Vaccinated or not, and more than nine in 10 will be, all people there will pretty much go where they please, much as it once was in Victoria’s olden days.

The hospitals will not be overrun, despite the unbridled and irresponsible shrillness of the medical fraternity. The sky will not tumble into the harbour.

The world is shedding its pandemic controls. High vaccination rates place us in the lucky few countries which can throw forward with certainty.

The unvaccinated will not be able to go where the rest of us can. Picture: Mark Stewart

NSW has treated each day of restrictions as a day lost. Yet there is a residual numbness to the Victorian measures of the past 20 months, a recognition that the pandemic overreach will be remembered as a historical signpost in how not to do it.

As the Andrews government seeks to further concentrate oppressive powers, it also insists on controls which will affect us long after the next Spring Carnival.

The unvaccinated will be treated like the unwashed. They will not be able to go where the rest of us can. The quirk (or contradiction) in this directive is that the unvaccinated, until November 24, can go where everyone else does, presumably to load up for the long months ahead.

After that?

“Whether it’s a bookshop, a shoe shop, a pub, cafe, a restaurant, the MCG, the list goes on and on,” Premier Dan Andrews has said.

“You will not be able to participate like a fully vaccinated person because you’re not a fully vaccinated person.”

The moral ethics of this proposal triggers all sorts of flags. To speak of “participating” in free movement would once have inspired visions of a sinister Stephen King character. George Orwell called it newspeak. “Freedom” has lost its meaning – aren’t “limited freedoms”, by definition, also oppressive controls?

That we have been conditioned to accept this kind of language, as if every day liberties are to be rationed at the behest of the state, is best measured by the ridicule heaped on the Victorian response by the rest of the world.

A few people have made what most of us consider to be an unwise choice (along with those who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons). The anti-vaxxers’ kookier theories, such as the parroted line about the “scientific experiment”, appear to have been borrowed from a King book.

But why restrict their freedom for another year or more? Are they being protected or punished?

The Andrews government is insisting on controls which will affect us long after the next Spring Carnival. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

The unvaccinated pose little threat to anyone except themselves.

Bioethicist David Kirchhoffer recently crunched Dutch and British research in The Conversation in concluding: “ … vaccinated people in a restaurant or shop don’t seem to have anything more to fear from an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated person. The unvaccinated person, by contrast, should be wary of contact with anyone.”

Separating the two means that going to the footy, or a shoe shop, will require proof of vaccination.

True, the technology appears to have improved from the pandemic early days, when Victoria lagged months behind NSW and Queensland for reasons that never seemed to be explained.

But how long will it take to process 85,000 fans at the MCG? Will anyone be seated before half-time?

For too long, life was reduced to waiting outside Bunnings or the like when you wrenched yourself off the couch. Click-and-collect doubled as an outing.

Now we can go inside, but like kids with permission notes from their parents, we must get ticked off first.

We shouldn’t have to be verified to enjoy legitimate liberties. Picture: Jason Edwards

Isn’t it time to move on? We’ve done the bulk of the pandemic pain. Throw off all controls at a vaccination threshold, say 90 per cent, so that the era of being held to account by a teenage waiter can end.

Retail and hospitality staff grow more uncomfortable with policing the system. Some places don’t ask at all, and who can blame them? We are all equally as tired of the institutionalised submissiveness required of walking into a supermarket.

We shouldn’t have to be verified to enjoy legitimate liberties. Almost everyone has done what protects us best. The biggest horrors of the Victorian story should be behind us, even if the scientific experiment of extended lockdown will haunt us.

Yet the unjustified caution of the Victorian approach will stymie a return to a way of life that much of the Western world already enjoys.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist