Narrative Wobble Downunder
It's only a volte face for one mandate for one booster in one state but it's a start
Well, it’s only taken two years but there are signs that the wheels are starting to wobble a little on the Covid Narrative Downunder.
The list of countries showing the white flag, or staging strategic retreats, in World War Covid is gaining momentum. A number of European countries are significantly relaxing, or abandoning for good, Covid restrictions, including the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland whilst the Netherlands, Italy, Lithuania and even France are beginning to relax their iron grip on their citizens. Israel looks set to abandon its discriminatory and useless vaxx passport for some (but not all) venues and they have gone cool on their planned second booster. Many of these countries are officially downgrading the virus to mere endemic status or reclassifying it as ‘not socially critical’.
That leaves the Covid basket-cases like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Jacinda ‘Gnashers’ Ardern is still a ‘Zero Covid’ holdout but, in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan has recently gone over to the “let’s live with the virus” camp whilst the magnificent Canadian truckies have forced their Prime Minister into hiding (Trudeau claims, of course, that it is his close shave with the virus, and not his angry subjects, that has made him run).
Even in Australia, my neck of the woods, there is positive movement. Australia’s largest state, New South Wales, is backing off mandating booster no. 1 for health care workers, despite jabberwocky loons like Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, calling for a national effort to officially include the booster in the definition of ‘fully-vaccinated’ for mandate purposes. Sure, the New South Wales move is only for one mandate for one booster in one state, at this stage, but it is movement in the right direction, a tiny but useful breach in the national wall of Australian Covid tyranny that has delivered to the Australian population two tedious years of lockdowns, restrictions, medical coercion, medical discrimination, hectoring propaganda, stifling censorship and general misery.
The New South Wales Health Minister announced the sudden volte face after consulting with the Health Services Union and the Nurses and Midwives’ Association (the two major unions in the health care industry) who told him that the booster take-up would come up short as reluctance was already high for the first two jabs and that this would strain the health workforce to breaking point thus dumping a real health care crisis into the lap of the government.
In other good news, all authorities appear to have lost their enthusiasm for lockdowns, which now seem to be a thing of the past (famous last words? I hope not!).
I’m very much looking forward to the day when I am again granted access to normal human activities. When I can sit in a cafe and have coffee, go to a movie or buy a bottle of wine … imagine that!