A message to protesters: The ticket to Covid-19 freedom is getting vaccinated

The ticket to freedom from Covid-19 is arming yourself against the disease by getting vaccinated, rather than protesting against important health measures designed to keep us all safe.

Anti coronavirus vaccine protesters rally near the Smith St Mall in Darwin on Saturday. Picture: Glenn Campbell

WE should all be very alarmed at what we witnessed in Darwin and the rest of Australia on Saturday.

Anti-vaxxers and those opposed to Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns took to the streets in their thousands to spread their message of “We want our freedom back”.

From Darwin’s point of view, the few hundred who gathered were peaceful, albeit that there were calls for those there to stand up and fight against forced injections, which was odd given the fact the vaccine rollout is, and always has been, voluntary.

What separated Darwin’s Freedom Rally from the rest of the nation is that we actually have our freedom and we are thankfully Covid-19 free, so the Darwin message was ill-informed misinformation.

However, what we saw in the rest of Australia was the extraordinary selfishness of anti-lockdown protesters and the dangerously defiant divide that is emerging between those who care about endangering other people’s lives and those who don’t.

At present, we’ve got cases going through the roof in NSW and, elsewhere, in other states the numbers are continuing to grow.

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One man who was unvaccinated with no mask has led to Sydney now having six deaths, large numbers of people with infections and half the country in lockdown, so there’s no better argument for a vaccine.

Yet, on Saturday, there were thousands upon thousands protesting the lockdowns while potentially spreading Covid-19, which in turn would prolong the lockdowns because of community transmission.

We live in a democracy and people in general have a right to protest.

But these protests were in direct defiance of the law and a threat to the health and safety of their fellow Australians.

By ditching their masks and defying lockdown to have their voices heard, the threat of further infections now looms.

This virus does exist.

It is a not a scam and the situation is particularly concerning given the Delta strain is highly-infectious, even outdoors.

The ticket to freedom is arming yourself against Covid-19 by getting vaccinated.

Vaccination is our pathway to a normal life, the end to lockdowns, border closures and restrictions.

The anti-lockdown demonstrators have been labelled “clowns”, “idiots” and “unbelievably selfish” by those watching events unfold on social media, many of them enduring lockdown themselves.

These people have made the correct assessment about the demonstrators.