Covid vaccine segregation? This isn’t 1950s Alabama
Just when we thought the angst-ridden halfwits atop our political dungheap were backing out of our lives, here they come to impose a two-caste society.
Just when we thought, for a precious moment, that the pop-eyed, angst-ridden halfwits posturing atop our political dungheap were backing out of our lives, here they come again with another nonsensical, divisive scheme to extend the torture as far as their tunnel vision can see.
As we approach the arbitrary 70 or 80 per cent vaccination targets they have set to grant our conditional release from the restrictions which, don’t forget, they also set, their backroom teams have come up with a punishment for the remaining 20 per cent who for medical, philosophical or other reasons (and let’s, as a sop to the morally perfect, include wickedness and stupidity among them) refuse the injections.
Make no mistake, dissenters will be punished for disobedience. The NSW Premier indicated as much last week. “I don’t want people to think they can sit back and let everybody else do the hard work,” she said. “If you’re not vaccinated you will not have the freedom or the freedoms that vaccinated people have.”
In case you’re thinking we should go along with this in the hope society’s settings can return to normal, the Premier gave us a little glimpse of the future she has planned: “So long as Delta has presence in the world,” she said, “even if we had zero cases and we were at 80 per cent double-dose, you would still have to respect rules that exist around vaccinations, around social distancing, around mask-wearing.” So that’s that forever, then.
Her counterpart in Victoria was even more spitefully explicit. “There is going to be a vaccinated economy, and you get to participate in that if you are vaccinated,” he said. “We are going to lock out people who are not vaccinated.”
Inconveniently, however, there are explicit laws against forcing medical intervention on people against their will, so with malign ingenuity our leaders turn punishment of the minority into reward for the majority, and conspire to outsource the policing of the new order to ordinary citizens.
No need for unflattering government edicts, just a robust suggestion that business owners and employers might like to devise their own sanctions, in a cowardly masterclass in buck-passing.
Demonise the unvaccinated, then say: “Don’t blame us for your loss of freedom, blame them!”
That our politicians and police should be actively encouraging a culture of informing is vile and unspeakable. I struggle to find the words to describe them, and when I do they’re not fit for a family newspaper. To be honest, they’re not fit for a sailors’ newspaper.
When a government says an abhorrent practice is not only permitted but encouraged, with expensive advertisements exhorting us to call the police hotline to dob in our neighbours, then there will always be a sickeningly large group who will obey with glee.
A Canadian historian, Robert Gellately, has studied the surviving files of the Gestapo, which reveal more than 80 per cent of their investigations were commenced in response to a denunciation by ordinary German citizens.
The Gestapo had only a few thousand members; there was no need for a massive Big Brother secret police force when local people were so eager to report their neighbours. Similar research has led to the same conclusions about similar regimes.
It’s confronting to abandon the illusion that we would have had the moral strength to stand up against the tyrannies of history, but face it: there are people in our society today who you could easily see in 1930s Berlin tugging on the sleeve of their local Gestapo officer and whispering, “Excuse me, commissar, but I think the people at number 24 might be Jewish.”
Yes I know, the first person to mention the Nazis loses the argument, but this one has looked unwinnable since the beginning, so what the hell.
A “vaccine passport” now looks to be a real possibility, presumably because sensible countries around the world have considered and swiftly rejected the idea.
It will divide our society into two categories (castes, if you prefer): the vaccinated, who are protected against the serious impact of coronavirus infection, and the unvaccinated, who are not.
Here’s where things become curious. We know, do we not, that vaccinated people can still catch and transmit the virus, including from each other; yet the passport plan assumes they are terrified of encountering an unvaccinated person, particularly in the hospitality arena, when logic suggests it should be precisely the other way round. The plan further seems to assume “unvaccinated” means the same as “infected”, an even more preposterous notion.
Try as I might, I cannot see what the vaccinated have to fear from the unvaccinated. As I celebrate the protection of my double dose of AstraZeneca with a slap-up meal in a top restaurant, why should I worry about the people eating at the next table? I’m safe. Call me a monster, but I’ve never given a second’s consideration to the wellbeing of my fellow diners, sometimes even in my own home.
But like every other scheme our governments have invented in the past 18 months, this plan to enlist an army of amateur police officers hasn’t been thought through. Are bars and restaurants, already desperately struggling to maintain a skeleton staff, eager to pay someone to stand at the door to turn away customers who prefer not to divulge their medical history? Will the policy survive the departure of the table of 10 who have to leave because their guest of honour forgot his passport?
Are patrons really going to sue if they catch Covid after dining at your establishment? It will be a fascinating court case that attempts to establish who passed it on. Will restaurants be obliged to keep seating plans, with names, for 14 days? Must diners agree in advance to be genetically tested to confirm they were the source of infection?
Perhaps we could meet somewhere in the middle. A section for the unvaccinated to one side of the restaurant, with its own door, where unvaccinated waiters serve food and drinks on your own special crockery with designated cutlery and glassware. It was a very popular arrangement in 1950s Alabama, I hear. It’s the culinary extension of “social distancing”. Staying apart keeps us together.
We accept the unvaccinated might indeed be at increased risk of a bad reaction to the disease, but once they’ve had the chance to be vaccinated that’s their problem, and the risk is theirs to take.
So instead of a percentage, attainable or not, set a date by which we can be confident anyone who wants the vaccine has had the opportunity to receive it, then stop all the absurd restrictions and asinine regulations, all testing, and ideally all mention of the C-word.
But gotcha, the Chicken Littles cry. Open up and our hospitals will be overwhelmed, they say, although that hasn’t looked likely at any point, even before we had 70-odd per cent of the population vaccinated.
If it emerges that by some unknown mechanism the absence of a vaccine creates a spontaneous eruption of virus in your bloodstream, the response would be dramatic. When unvaccinated people start dying in droves, just watch those vaccination numbers leap. Within a couple of months of opening up they will contract Covid and recover, get seriously ill, die – or more likely scurry into the nearest pharmacy with sleeves rolled up. But as always, the modelling assumes that things will continue along a set trajectory, without allowing for human intelligence to modify behaviour.
And before we level accusations of selfishness at the unvaccinated, the fact they choose to take that risk should no more deny them hospital care than we should refuse to treat the consequences of any other risky behaviour: an injured motorcyclist, say, or a surfer with a spinal injury. Or, for that matter, the chain-smoking lung-cancer victim or fast-food and fizzy drink-addicted porker with diabetes and a bloated heart, barrelling along the footpath on their mobility scooter, Australian flag waving gallantly from its stern.
In fact, the lockdowns have probably created a few more fatties; perhaps we should institute a BMI passport to unlock the dessert section of the menu.
All the while the economy continues to haemorrhage money. It appears our governments’ base unit of currency in Australia is now the Billion, and we’re tipping hundreds of them down the drain with not much to show for them.
Friday’s official figures showed we have so far stuck 34,911,907 testing strips up people’s noses, to discover around 80,000 positive cases. That means 34.8 million of those tests were unnecessary; so at more than $100 each, we’ve spent $3.5bn on literally nothing.
How many hospitals might we have built with that money? How many CAT scanners, X-ray machines could we have bought? What cancer research might we have funded? How many lives – of children, young parents – might we thereby have saved?
And that’s just in the medical arena; imagine the vast network of tunnels the Victorian Premier could have paid for but not dug.
That $3.5bn is barely a rounding error amid the carnage our leaders have unleashed. Lives and livelihoods deliberately, knowingly destroyed; our schoolchildren’s prospects and mental health wilfully, cynically damaged; old people senselessly, cruelly forbidden human contact in their final months; a series of societal ticking time bombs that will detonate over the years to come.
We are getting vaccinated for another reason, of course: to escape restrictions imposed on us by our own governments and the unelected bureaucrats who advise them. It’s not a natural disaster, but completely man-made. Victoria is now generously creating pop-up mental-health clinics to deal with the despair caused by lockdowns. Let’s splash out some more of your money to relieve the pain we regret having to cause you.
That this institutional stupidity is not immediately apparent to everyone is a profound mystery, at least until you consider logic and numeracy might be alien to many of our compatriots. I don’t intend to be unkind about 12 million Australians, but that’s roughly how many are, by definition, of below-average intelligence. It’s not their fault; just the luck of the draw.
I’d bet everyone reading this newspaper would be comfortably in the top 10 per cent; few would have family, friends or colleagues sliding down towards the average, so think of the most stupid person you know and contemplate the fact that at least half of the electorate are more stupid than him or her. (Oh yes, it’s tempting to segue into a discussion about compulsory voting, but let’s save that for when we’ve dealt with Covid.)
The wildly hilarious – yet equally dispiriting – thing is that we leap at the tiny crumbs of our freedom our leaders scatter before us. Yay, five can go on a picnic (who else would love to see the high-level scientific and medical calculations that arrive at that number?), but only if they’re double vaccinated. Here, have another hour of exercise; thank you master, God bless you. It’s pitiful.
More risibly, if our premiers were to appear on television tomorrow morning and declare we no longer need to wear masks or stay at home, we’d throw them off without a second thought and invite our friends over for a barbie. All the months of fear and deadly danger would evaporate like the morning mist on the strength of their worthless say-so.
Maybe it’s not just the politicians and the intellectually challenged; our entire country is turning into the ant colony of The Once and Future King, whose motto was “Everything not forbidden is compulsory”.
We’ve put up with this utter insanity so meekly, followed palpably absurd rules so obediently, and for so long, we may have to accept we’re all idiots.
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