Carlton Supporters Club

When Delta does get into the communities they will all scramble to get jabbed.

Vaccine resisters sacrificing their jobs are not heroes
“Poor is the nation that has no heroes,” Cicero said. But poorer still is a nation with the kind of heroes celebrated on Fox News.

The nation’s leading purveyor of lethal medical advice during a pandemic (trademark pending) has recently elevated the resisters against coronavirus vaccines — an airline pilot here, a nurse there — as models of citizenship. These abstainers are risking their livelihoods in the cause of … what? Well, that depends on your view of the vaccines themselves.

For generations we’ve had vaccine mandates, particularly for childhood diseases, in every state plus D.C. Few thought to call this tyranny because communities have a duty to maintain public health, and individuals have a duty to reasonably accommodate the common good — even if this means allowing your child to be injected with a substance carrying a minuscule risk of harm.

So there can be no objection rooted in principle to vaccine mandates, unless you want to question them all the way down to measles, mumps and rubella. The problem must be covid-19 in particular.

If the coronavirus vaccines are risky, experimental concoctions with frequent side effects, then government and business mandates are social coercion run amok. We might as well mandate vaping.

But if these vaccines are carefully tested and encourage greater immunity to a deadly disease, with minimal risk of side effects, then the “heroism” of vaccine resisters takes on a different connotation: It means resisters are less courageous and more selfish than your average 6-year-old getting a second MMR dose. Perhaps vaccine mandates should be modified to include lollipops for whingeing malcontents.

So which view is correct? If only there were empirical means, some scientific method, to test the matter. If only there had been three phases of clinical trials, involving tens of thousands of volunteers, demonstrating the drugs to be safe and effective. If only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were constantly monitoring safety concerns about the vaccines. If only we could estimate the number of covid deaths that might have been prevented if vaccine uptake were higher.

To break the suspense — we do live in such a world. “From June through September 2021,” concluded a recent Peterson-KFF report, “approximately 90,000 covid-19 deaths among adults likely would have been prevented with vaccination.” So the matter is simple: Who is making vaccination more likely to take place, and who is not?

In this light, it’s hard to blame the small group of workers who have been misled into believing that liberty is the right to infect your neighbors with a deadly pathogen. The main fault lies with the media outlets that spotlight and elevate such people, and with political figures who seek their political dreams by encouraging lethal ignorance.

In the latter category, the Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas are the repellent standouts. If the coronavirus could vote, these men would be governors for life. Most recently, Abbott issued an executive order saying “no entity” could impose vaccine mandates in his state. So far, many Texas business entities have treated his order with contempt, preferring to comply with President Biden’s vaccinate-or-test mandate.

In my political youth, conservatives praised state governments as “laboratories of innovation.” Now they’re graveyards of sanity and public spirit. And the actual graveyards provide evidence.

The effectiveness of vaccine mandates is demonstrated by current practice. The United States has generally high rates of coverage for childhood vaccinations. But in states that make it easy to gain an exemption — for religious or sometimes “philosophical” reasons — the rates of coverage decline. And we’ve seen outbreaks of preventable diseases such as measles as a result.

For my part, I’m not even sure what a “religious” exemption means in the case of covid. I understand that a few religious traditions object to receiving medical care entirely. But I don’t think this is the main excuse for evangelicals seeking exemptions from covid vaccinations. What type or tradition of religion asserts the right to avoid minor risks and inconveniences in service to our neighbors? The Church of Perpetual Selfishness? The coven of Ayn Rand? Do Christians really want to be identified as people who permit breast augmentation but frown on vaccination? Getting vaccinated is not only good public health; it is also a small but important act of generosity.

Abbott and his ilk are seeking a morally desolate world in which people demand their autonomy even if it kills their neighbor. But there is a better world in which institutions have duties to the health and safety of citizens, and citizens have obligations to the health and happiness of one another. That is not only a better place to live — it is a place where more of us would remain alive.

Many people not taking the vaccine have a profound mistrust for the motivation to do so and the medical professionals telling us to.

There is a saying, you reap what you sow.

I've been to plenty of GP doctors who provide the service of see you, give certificate then dismiss you and on next visit talk to you like they've never seen you before.

Ive finally found one over the last 10 years that recognised me and discussed my last visit with me and then spotted what I was there to see her about before I told her what was happening and am hanging onto this GP as they are rare.

You might simply be seeing disenfranchised people turn to alt medicine because they aren't getting the care they think they should be from medical professionals.

The thing is both sides are wrong in that equation.  People expect a lot from medical professionals but they can't know everything about everyone.

Hell no, she’s on her way to sainthood after being a martyr to ICAC, so best avoid that.

Brilliant opinion piece from Michael Gerson in the Washington Post. When you’re reading this, bear in mind he is a neo-conservative and former speechwriter for George Dubya:

But if these vaccines are carefully tested and encourage greater immunity to a deadly disease, with minimal risk of side effects

And there is not minimal risk of side effects (and no one has any idea about the longer term issues - as we aren't there yet).

Brilliant?

Far from it.

Each unvaccinated worker cited similar concerns about insufficient long-term data on COVID-19 vaccine safety and side effects.

The cases used various arguments to attack the validity of the health orders but contained common threads.

They contended that the orders violated rights to bodily integrity and privacy, implemented civil conscription, represented a breach of natural justice and were made by Health Minister Brad Hazzard without clear legislative authority.

He said any consideration about the reasonableness of orders should be undertaken by reference to the objects of the public health act, which were "directed exclusively at public safety".

The judge found that if an order was made interfering with freedom of movement and differentiating on "arbitrary grounds" unrelated to public health risks, such as race or gender, it would be at "severe risk" of being found to be invalid.

"However, the differential treatment of people according to their vaccination status is not arbitrary," Justice Beech-Jones wrote in his judgment.

"Instead, it applies a discrimen, namely vaccination status, that on the evidence and the approach taken by the minister is very much consistent with the objects of the Public Health Act."

The judge further rejected a constitutional argument about civil conscription and an asserted inconsistency with the immunisation register act.

"So far as the right to bodily integrity is concerned, it is not violated as the impugned orders do not authorise the involuntary vaccination of anyone," he said.

"Curtailing the free movement of persons, including their movement to and at work, are the very type of restrictions that the public health act clearly authorises."

"So far as the right to bodily integrity is concerned, it is not violated as the impugned orders do not authorise the involuntary vaccination of anyone," he said