On Tuesday, two men were going quietly about their business at a nudist beach south of Sydney or at least a beach where they felt compelled to nude up. It was a cloudy day where the mercury nudged 18 but even in these mild climes, our two covidiots thought it sensible to disrobe and feel the breeze where normally a breeze is not felt.
It would have ended unreported, an anonymous meeting of two underwhelming minds but our two covidiots claimed they were startled by a deer and fled unclad into the adjoining Royal National Park. An 18-person search party was called upon to find them which they did later that evening, with one covidiot still unabashedly nude. Before our two covidiots knew it, they were the subject of media reporting that was thick with public humiliation but light on detail.
I have questions, so many questions. The main questions relate to deer behaviour. Deer are often startled. They don’t do the startling. They are not predators, they are prey. Deer do not loom out of the forest of the night to attack with threats of serious nibbling.
There are no herds of impala sweeping majestically across the Serengeti Plain only to stop, double back and startle a lion.
Where would human evolution be if left to our two nudist covidiots? We were just about to walk upright and grab something with these really cool opposable thumbs but then we were startled by a deer. It would have all ended there - the whole box and dice, civilisation, agriculture, Sumer, Greece, Rome. All gone. We’d still be flinging mud at one another in the primordial slime when not bowing to our deer overlords.
A NSW SES spokesperson said “too often” people entered the bush “without sufficient clothing, footwear, equipment or preparation” for where they are going, draining resources and wasting time. Our covidiots ticked all of those boxes and one or two more.
NSW Police chief Mick Fuller confirmed the two men were fined a gorilla each for breaching Covid-19 guidelines. No deer were harmed but one at least might be looking at a lifetime of psychotherapy.
“You can’t legislate for idiots,” Fuller said.
On Thursday in Brisbane, an inner city beauty salon decided to unleash the nail files and cry freedom to guarantee our inalienable right for a pedicure or pop in for a quick Brazilian (which is known in depilatory circles as the Gamma variant) during a pandemic.
Police were obliged to attend the premises and in that awkward way coppers have of dealing with idiots, smiled politely while the beautician cited her knowledge of the law.
The beautician said she was “familiar with federal laws’’ which she claimed trumped the Queensland Public Health Act 2005 mandating pandemic public safety measures.
With more than a hint of the SovCit, the shop wallah’s defence was the overall ‘vibe’ of the Australian Constitution somewhere up the back and what she believed were specific protections in it which extended to beauticians, all in a document that runs a breezy 25 pages but admittedly gets a bit boring after page three.
It is your common or garden variety Covidiot providing nourishing amusement in these dreary days of lockdown and submission. We should cherish them without getting too close as it seems they startle easily.
But what do we say, when people presumed not to be idiots lapse inexplicably into idiocy?
Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young is no idiot. She is the governor-designate of Queensland and the nation’s longest serving health officer. She has an MBA to match her twin degrees in medicine and surgery. She is unlikely to be startled by a deer. She probably has read and understood the Australian Constitution.
Yet on Wednesday, Jeanette Young veered dangerously into anti-vax territory when she said, “I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who, if they got Covid, probably wouldn’t die.”
“We are not in a position that I need to ask young, fit, healthy people to put their health on the line (by) getting a vaccine that could potentially significantly harm them,” she added.
And with that, a surge of idiocy was unleashed. The Chief Medical Officer of Queensland had become an unlikely ally and urger for the anti-vax movement in this country. Her words at the Wednesday presser were cut up and placed in digestible snippets of misinformation in anti-vax heartland.
If nothing else, Young had provided another layer of confusion to the already noodle scratching advice on the use of AstraZeneca and more widely to Covid-19 vaccination in general.
I’ll let people do their own maths and make their own choices on a vaccine that co-chair of Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, Allen Cheng described thus: “If a younger person said that they were happy to take a one-in-200,000 risk of clotting for the benefit of getting protected from Covid-19 earlier, then as long as this was an informed decision, we should respect that choice.”
It is incredible to think a state health officer with all the power she has at her disposal during the pandemic is unaware of the concerted efforts of the anti-vax movement in this country and globally to undermine the safe roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations.
Anti-vaxxers are liars who routinely spread misinformation to deter other people from choosing to be vaccinated. They babble about mandatory vaccination as if we’re all being frog marched to a clinic to be injected with a rusty seven gauge needle. But they use kernels of truth emanating from officialdom, any lapse, any misstep, any misspeaking -- to prosecute their dismal views.
Leave the idiocy to the easily startled, the bush lawyers in their wellness full dudgeon. Leave idiocy to idiots. It’s what they are good at.
