Anti discrimination has a noble history. Now there is a new form of discrimination that seems to be escaping the notice of the civil libertarians. If we are going to discriminate against Covid superspreaders, let us at least practise rational governance. Let us get our facts right.
Australians take discrimination seriously. No one likes being “othered”. Sticks and stones could always break bones, but names were never meant to hurt us.
So, we set up machinery of government to protect us from the slings and arrows of outrageous bullies. Great in theory, but through one of the greatest acts of mission creep in history, such machinery has been used eventually as a weapon to demonise those who could be shown to have offended someone in a selected identity group. But back in the day, and anyone who group up in the fifties and sixties will remember this, you wouldn’t want to be growing up in a Western country as a Paki, or a poofter, or a spastic. Parents with children growing up in the late twentieth or earlier twenty-first centuries have surely appreciated the fact that their children’s schools have rules now about bullying. It doesn’t stop it, of course, because bullies are clever. And sometimes the bullies are those who actually set up all the human rights commissions and signed the international treaties said to protect us.
Yet in these enlightened times, we are seemingly about to enter an age of novel and unprecedented othering. The othering of the unvaccinated. And orchestrated by a political class and associated useful idiots characterised by people about whom the redoubtable Katie Hopkins has said:
You’ve had a little prick. You are a little prick. And you want a certificate to prove it.
Yes, we in the West, despite the courageous protests by people who actually are no more or less selfish than the next person, and despite all the analysis by the informed Covid and vaccine dissidents on the world wide web – those who haven’t been silenced by Big Tech on behalf of Big Pharma – are about to create the Vaccine State. And my, won’t it be a deep State.
And despite all the human rights commissions in every damned state and territory, and all of the international rights treaties to which we are a signatory, this new Vaccine State will be government-run, even where, cleverly, it is outsourced to oh-so-willing third parties. And there will be many, from the passionate conformist end of the quadrant of conformism, from the Karen class, from the pharmacologically correct, and from the simply low information masses, who will “roll up their sleeves” for Australia.
But there will be those who don’t, and won’t, for whatever reasons and despite the consequences.
That this whole new architecture of conformism will be built on the very thing – discrimination – that we as a nation have been trying so hard, and through so many silly mechanisms, to eliminate, should be a cause of knowing smiles as to its utter irony. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Vaccine apartheid is normally seen, by those for whom the penny has dropped, to be discrimination between the vaccinated, who will be allowed to travel and go to the pub and the cricket, and the unvaccinated, who won’t.
But there is another form of discrimination that makes the whole thing an utter farce, since we now know that the fully-vaccinated routinely still get Covid. And still spread Covid. Just ask Shane Warne, both double-jabbed and feeling decidedly crook, having caught the virus. Let us assume, for the sake of rational argument, that the purpose of vaccine passports is to stop the spread of the Covid virus, as part of some manic, totally misplaced and impossible-to-achieve desire on the part of Australia’s political class to achieve “zero Covid”.
Given that we now know that people like Shane Warne – and many others – have probably spread the virus themselves, why should the vaccinated superspreader be allowed to visit his or her children in another state or another country, go to the opera, see the new Bond movie, meet up with the family at a “venue of concern”, while the unvaccinated yet metabolically healthy, non-superspreader without any sign of Covid is not so allowed?
That would be rank idiocy, wouldn’t it? Surely someone soon will see this, and, say ask a premier about it at a press conference. Mr/Ms Premier, should we have spreader passports rather than vaccine passports, since vaccines do not stop the transmission of the infection? Such a question would blow their tiny minds. The robot at the podium would not compute.
Studies undertaken in the UK suggest that the efficacy of vaccines as preventers of transmission might be in the forty per cents. Yes, that low. Studies in Israel show similarly embarrassing findings. Personages as great as the UK Health Secretary – himself double-jabbed and yet suffering from Covid – now tell people to get the vaccine so as not to get sick, or die. Even the UK Government has given up pretending the (non) vaccines prevent transmission. Almost no one with the slightest knowledge of Covid would now deny this, hand on heart.
For any rational-actor politician, the game would be said to have changed. Yet the calls for, and suggestions of, vaccine passports not only persist, but grow stronger by the day, since the path to freedom is assumed by the elite class to only be available via the jab.
The unvaccinated, non-superspreader might be of no threat to anyone because he or she might already have had the virus, and so be rendered immune. He or she might be young and healthy, and so not remotely likely to be getting the virus. He or she might be older yet still metabolically healthy. He or she might be asymptomatic, and so hugely unlikely to infect anyone, especially through astonishingly casual, passer-by contact with others, especially outdoors where we already know that virtually no one gets infected with Covid. Or he or she might be wearing a face nappy, and we all know those work. Or he or she might just be social distancing, because we all know that works too. The Government told us these things. Or we as a country might have already reached herd immunity, without vaccines. (Or, at least we would have earlier if we hadn’t locked up the healthy for a year and a half).
No, this proposed discrimination, demonically evil as it is, is also a farce on steroids. To properly prevent transmission of this middling virus, the discrimination should be directed at everyone who is deemed likely to spread the virus, and they should, at the very least, include the vaccinated. A non-spreader passport, for those least likely to acquire and pass on Covid, would be smart, goal-directed discrimination.
Or perhaps vaccine passports are coming for some other reason.
