Karl Changes his Covid Tune

Karl Stefanovic repents his Covid vaccine past

Karl Stefanovic who has been, apparently (I wouldn’t be able to tell him from a bar of soap), a household name from two decades of co-hosting a ratings-busting TV breakfast show (for a cool $3 million a year, thank you very much) on Channel Nine, has caused a Gordon-Ramsay-like stir by coming out against the Covid vaccines. This marks quite the evolution of the tele-host who once starred in Channel Nine’s 2021 ‘This is Our Shot’ campaign as he rolled up his sleeve on camera to receive the jab of deliverance.

“I am definitely sorry for the role I played in not questioning the science, in not questioning more the government mandates, and I feel like I isolated people because of that, and I don’t think the media should be involved in that kind of messaging”, he said in an interview with the former Liberal Senator, Gerard Rennick, on Stefanovic’s YouTube podcast, The Karl Stefanovic Show (Rennick was one of a handful of Coalition rebels against the vaccine mandates in late 2021 and who went on to form the People First Party).

We have now reached the six year anniversary of the beginning of Australia’s Covid policy fiasco which climaxed in the monomaniacal government campaign to shame, coerce and bully the population into taking an untested pharmaceutical product using the revolutionary experimental bio-technology of an mRNA injectable that had failed to protect against any respiratory virus, but which did succeed in harming its experimental animal subjects, over decades of fruitless trying. Sure, we are still reassured that the Covid vaccines saved many millions of lives but these fanciful estimates are irrelevant because, by embedding favourable assumptions in the premises, models (economic, climatological, epidemiological, etc.) wind up saying only what they are told to say.

Stefanovic was central to the Charge of the Covid Brigade. He had used his position of media influence to help stampede Australians to the nearest jab centre but now he says he regrets not being more sceptical and, well, journalist-like, and that he regrets having supported the vaccine mandates (they are ‘inherently wrong’) that had cost many Australians their jobs and businesses if they refused, or their health if they acquiesced. He now regrets his role in how the media abandoned its purported job of critical, objective reporting to become a campaigning propaganda arm of the Covid state.

There are strict limits to Stefanovic’s mea culpa, however. He has not acknowledged that his and other corporate media companies (and the ABC state media) were working directly with the state and federal governments, and with the social media tech giants, to police (i.e. suppress) debate by scrubbing the airwaves and digital spaces of any doubters and sceptics, no matter how credentialed.

Stefanovic has taken the long road on his Damascene journey to latter-day Covid vaccine critic. It took three years before he went public with any criticism of Australia’s panicked and disastrous Covid policy. In February 2023, he finally came out on his Today Show against official TGA guidance recommending the then-latest Covid booster by saying that the latest top-up could cause heart issues and other complications. The so-called initial course of two shots was plenty for anyone, he said.

Still, at least he had been paying attention to the downside of the Covid vaccines, unlike all of his media peers and the rest of the Covid establishment. ‘I have seen all those reports on the internet about fit and healthy people just dropping’, he said, noting the democratic role of social media in challenging elite opinion, mass hysteria and censorship.

Neither has Stefanovic voiced any scepticism about the full suite of unnecessary, ineffective and damaging Covid ‘restrictions’ including the marathon lockdowns (in which Australia was a world leader), and all the rest of the theatrical public health placebos such as the curfews, the maniacal masks, the ostentatiously ridiculous face-visors, the plexiglass shields that everyone talked around anyhow, the venue density limits, the taping-off of kids’ playgrounds, the ‘clean pens’ and ‘dirty pens’ demarcation in doctors’ offices, the ban on handshakes, the cardboard cut-outs of the crowd at deserted footy matches, the ubiquitous sanitiser, the regime of compulsory tracking and sign-in, the vaccine passports, travel restrictions and state border closures, the police thuggery against dissidents, the wild money-printing that still fuels stubborn inflation today, the corruption of all Covid ‘statistics’ (remember the ‘died with’ and ‘died of’ data trickery), the Covid tests that were as reliable as two-bob watch, the mandatory home detention of those testing positive or returning from overseas and all the other virus charades. The dots are all there to be connected, all adding up to the vaccine as the ‘escape route’ from the Covid ‘mitigation’ nonsense predicated on a whopping great fear campaign.

Stefanovic has made no call for accountability by the Prime Ministers who orchestrated the Covid craziness, the state premiers who locked down cities, shuttered small businesses and sent helicopters into the skies to monitor miscreants, the top state bureaucrats who micro-managed every act of daily living and who decreed who could remain employed or enter coffee shops.

Stefanovic’s current intervention is belated and partial but, that said, it deserves acknowledgement if only because he stands out so starkly from the rest of the media herd. That matters because, for those who still get their ‘news’ from the one-eyed screen monster, which provided the soundtrack to Covid fear and panic, his breaking of ranks can give legitimacy to more incisive, thorough Covid-dissenting views.

If you were thinking ‘too little too late, Karl’, you would be justified but there is a little more to it than that. Amongst the media class, there have been vanishingly few public defectors from Covid orthodoxy. The only other one I can think of is Warren (‘Tredders’) Tredrea, the Channel 7 Adelaide sports reporter and 255-game Port Power AFL premiership captain who declined the Covid vaccine when working for the station and was subsequently sacked (he took the TV station to court but so useless was the Covid-compliant judicial system that his only defence was the ‘sovereign citizen’ one which had no hope).

All of the others are in the camp of Stefanovic’s fellow media hotshot, Kyle Sandilands, with his prime gig of twenty years as a noisy Sydney radio host, and who was, like Stefanovic, a Covid vaccine zealot – Sandilands had put out a dreadful pro-vax song-and-dance routine called Get Vaxxed Baby (thanks to gregoryno6 for the reminder) which was typical of the unthinking Covid media mouthpieces (unlike Stefanovic, Sandilands has shown no self-reflection or any hint of an open mind on the Covid vaccines). Stefanovic may be as lonely as a lighthouse keeper in a desert but at least he is one more dissenter than the appallingly Covid-crazy ABC has ever had. What an indictment of Australia’s media class, their hive-mind groupthink laid bare by a PR-hyped but really pretty routine respiratory virus.

The Covid vaccine narrative has now collapsed like a cheap folding chair under the weight of a ‘body-positivity’ activist. Only 1.1% of working-age Australians (aged 18-64) have had a Covid booster in the last six months and even the ‘vulnerable’ groups (those aged 75+) have only seen 13.4% of their number who have stamped their Subway loyalty card for the latest Covid-booster. These figures are so low only partially because of changed official guidelines, guidelines which have largely followed an already declining public trust in the Covid vaccine in the context of the absence of draconian mandates and punishments for non-compliance.

If there had been more, and earlier, media heretics who had shown some professional integrity, who had committed some actual journalism, then the Covid policy farce may have been somewhat mitigated, unlike the Covid policy mess which was always doomed to fail at ‘mitigation’ against a rapidly mutating virus. True, it might have cost any media mavericks their jobs, but they could have had a helluva podcast career as a freelancer, especially back when it really mattered in the Dawn of the Covid Era when the terrifying freedom-hunting monsters of government, medical and media authoritarianism roamed the earth.