Sport in Australia is being managed by some of the dumbest but most dangerous fanatics that the whole Covid fandango has elevated to positions of authority. It is completely nuts that the pointless Covid ‘bio-security’ measure of isolating ‘close contacts’ of positive-testing ‘cases’ when a not-all-that-special virus has been endemic for two years means we now have the enforced quarantine of, for example, the fabulously healthy Australian Test cricket captain, Pat Cummins, because, on the eve of the Second Ashes Test against England in Adelaide, he ate at the same steakhouse restaurant in the capital city’s CBD where some other perfectly healthy diner returned a positive but clinically meaningless PCR test result. Cummins is now forced to sit out the match in a crummy hotel room for seven days because of ‘Covid protocols’ based on a dodgy PCR test.
Ah, the PCR test – the test, remember, that can not tell the difference between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the influenza virus (as even the Covid-compliant regulatory agencies and the WHO now concede as they prepare to authorise alternatives of unknown reliability). This is the test, not the virus it allegedly detects, that magically made influenza disappear off the face of the planet in a case of mistaken identity. This is the test that also can’t tell the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and any other coronavirus, so even what goes down on record as a ‘case’ of Covid may simply be a ‘case’ of the common cold or any other respiratory coronavirus infection. This is the test that, where if it indeed flukes a correct identification of a SARS-CoV-2 infection, still tells us nothing about whether the scrap of DNA it finds and technologically amplifies to clinically ridiculous levels is that of a long-dead infection or a live infection which, even so, falls way short of actually being symptomatic or even mild.
This is the useless PCR test which keeps the whole absurd Covid production on statistical life support, and without which, there would be no pandemic because actual clinical cases of Covid would be extremely thin on the ground and of no practical concern for most people because the virus targets the low-hanging fruit of the immuno-senescent, multiple-comorbid aged in residential care who are already at or past average life expectancy.
Without the daily ‘case watch’ drama and contact-tracing histrionics, which ensnared the Australian cricket captain, no ‘pandemic restriction’ policies would be justified or even contemplated, apart from those conjured-up by the mysterious clique of self-important public health magi seeking to perpetuate their new-found power and to justify their wrongheaded, overwrought and utterly disastrous policy response to a mild-middling virus.
So, Australia’s Test cricket captain finds himself in solo hotel-room isolation under the set of Public Health Orders that operate in the capital city of the state of South Australia (my home state). This, despite Cummins subsequently testing negative following his ‘exposure’ at the ‘restaurant of concern’.
Cummins has since been allowed to drive himself to Adelaide airport to take a private charter plan trip back to Sydney in a one-man ‘bubble’ extraction operation devised by the geniuses at Cricket Australia and the health authorities in SA and NSW. If you are the Australian Test cricket captain, strings will be pulled; if you are an ordinary Joe, then no such luck.
This little episode involving an Australian cricket icon, means that South Australia is vying for Most Stupid Covid State in Australia (and there is stiff competition for that title) because in every other state in Australia, Cummins would have been allowed to play after being cleared of the Mark of the Covid Beast by the Holy PCR Test but, oh no, not here in Adelaide where our Public Health panjandrums decree that he must twiddle his thumbs in hard quarantine simply BECAUSE HE WAS AT AN ‘EXPOSURE SITE’ (sorry about the all caps, but JEEZ!). Bet the Contact-Tracer who got to make the phone call/text message to Cummins is feeling chuffed, pumped up with public service pride.
Other assaults on the simple recreational pleasure of cricket are ramping up under more ‘bio-security’ dictates. Only the double-jabbed, of course, are allowed to watch the game in person because the unvaxxed are barred entry to Adelaide Oval (and I thought cricket and apartheid had been sorted back in the late sixties). Meanwhile, another ‘Covid scare’ (how the establishment media love that alarm-ringing phrase) shook the knee-tremblers yesterday as two members of the media (one a member of the visiting BBC radio crew) working at Adelaide Oval returned positive tests, prompting the public health nabobs to send broadcasters from the BBC and its Australian clone, the ABC, into isolation where they called the game from the commercial television coverage.
The BBC positive ‘case’ spread further alarums because he had interviewed the English batsman, Dawid Malan, but full-blown panic and the quarantining of all the English cricketers (who are, of course, close contacts of Malan), thus abruptly forcing the abandonment of the match, was averted when it was learned that the broadcaster had (I feel more all-caps coming on again) WORN A MASK during the interview. So, it was play on because everyone was rendered safe by a strip of blue cloth. Our Covid-Crazy public health masters actually believe their own propaganda which makes them doubly dangerous.
As Omicron ‘case’ numbers ‘surge’, however, Australia’s panicky Chief Health Officers are banning all the cricketers from meeting friends and family indoors unless the players undergo testing and come up negative. City trips for shopping and dining are ruled out. Getting hair cuts is forbidden, as is mixing with fans (all double jabbed, of course, but not ‘fully vaccinated’, obviously) at the ground, including signing autographs for the little kids and taking selfies with the adult kids, a kill-joy policy to be enforced by yellow-jacketed Covid Marshals. The level of pandemic bio-security theatre is now at Defcon 4.
It is not just Australia, of course, where fit, healthy, elite athletes at zero risk from Covid are being dramatically but needlessly pulled from games under ‘Covid protocols’ (a phrase I am coming to detest with as much fervour as ‘flatten the curve’ or ‘stay safe’). The phenomenon is accelerating in English soccer, whilst, in the NFL in the US, around a hundred gridiron footballers, out of 1,700 on the total playing roster, are sitting out games because someone somewhere who they were in the vicinity of tested positive. By the way, 94% of NFL players are fully-jabbed. That vaxx mandate stuff is working out well, isn’t it.
In better news, Team Sane is fighting back against Team Stupid. Australian ‘teenage tennis sensation’, Olivia Gadecki, has just been booted from the Australian Open in Melbourne in January 2022 because she rejects the experimental, risky, gene-therapy drug and has thus fallen foul of the Victorian Labor state premier, Dan Andrews, whose No-Jab-No-Job vaxx tyranny applies to professional athletes as well as much of the workforce in his state. The outrageously healthy-looking Gadecki, full of all the vitality and promise of youth and whose risk profile for contracting or transmitting Covid is non-existent, hasn’t turned off her critical thinking ability, however, and is not prepared to sacrifice her health, especially her reproductive health (she is nineteen and would make a fine mother down the track to healthy children whose life prospects haven’t been aborted or marred in-utero by the vaxx), for a degrading show of compliance to unscientific vaxx authoritarianism. Gadecki’s stance will see her forfeit at least $90,000 in appearance money that she would have received as a wildcard entry to the tournament.
Gadecki is a protégé of World No. 1 and Wimbledon champion, the thoroughly likeable Ash Barty, who says she’s “proud” of Gadecki’s stance, a principled position by Barty in favour of vaccine choice. Barty is double-jabbed, to all intents willingly so, but her moral compass is in good working order, demonstrating that it is possible to be pro-Covid-vaccine but anti-mandate. Barty will not demonise the unvaxxed or pressure them to take something that poses all pain and no gain to themselves. Barty’s humane position rests on the view (I’m reading this into her statement because she is too diplomatic to directly poke the eye of the vaxx mandaters) that if the vaccine works, the vaxxed have nothing to gain from penalising the unvaxxed through a mandate, and, if the vaccine doesn’t work, then why mandate a dud product for anyone.
In a democracy, we can argue the toss about the merits and demerits of the Covid vaxxes yet leave the decision up to the individual after mature assessment of their relative risks from the disease and from the vaxx, and leave the health authoritarians out of the picture. It shouldn’t be necessary to force a vaccine on anyone as a precondition for them to work, to eat, to shop, to volley and lob. Covid vaxx mandates are just stupid – and nasty.
Olivia Gadecki is a Hero of the Covid Resistance. At least she will be in good company, with unvaxxed French tennis player Pierre-Hugues Herbert (five-times grand slam doubles champion) who has also been similarly disinvited. World No. 1, Novak Djokovic, who is refusing to ‘show his papers’, may also be blacklisted from the event. Another Frenchman, Jeremy Chardy, won’t be playing at the tournament after having suffered a severe adverse reaction to Pfizer in September. Good work by the Covid control-freaks who are ruining every bit of society they can get their hands on in their deluded quest to demonstrate mastery and control over viral spread.
Martyrs and résistantes like Gadecki, and their fellow-travellers like Barty, are desperately needed because the suffocating ‘Covid protocols’ in sport and the rest of society are being accepted, at both elite and popular levels, as an unquestioned part of our new Covid reality. So, doing the QR Code sign-in ritual for contact-tracing purposes is now automatic behaviour. PCR testing is something that one just has to do in response to a sniffle or to meet travel requirements or because they were at a ‘venue of concern’. Taking the Glorious Goo (hope you don’t mind me plagiarising that phrase, Rudolph) is the only way of securing your freedom. Participating in the rest of the street theatre of ‘bio-security’ - sanitiser, stand-there/don’t-sit-here signs, mask mania, enforced isolation of the healthy, ‘temporary’ suspension of democracy and civil rights, censorship by Big Tech (to counter ‘misinformation’, of course) – all this will supposedly contain the virus and it countless variants (of which there are some six million different genome sequences and growing) through human intervention – for the first time ever. So runs the oppressive script.
The New Stupid is still hegemonic two years into the Covid farce, ruining everything good and pleasant, because the political and public health architects of ‘pandemic restrictions’ dare not say, for the sake of their political prospects and bureaucratic reputations, that they egregiously over-reacted in a fit of politically-motivated panic - ‘Oops, looks like we got it all disastrously wrong - so sorry about ruining your life for absolutely no purpose’. Much of the broader population, too, will be reluctant to admit they were so easily gulled by the crude propaganda of fear whilst they found themselves demonstrating, at times, frightening levels of blind obedience to authority, uncritical thinking and demonisation of outgroups like the unvaxxed and Covid rule-breakers.
So many have invested so much of themselves in the hysteria around Covid that they will have to keep up the pretence that the whole debacle was a necessary public health response to an unprecedentedly threatening virus. So, we keep hearing phrases, in the media and echoed on the streets, that ‘it is what it is’, ‘it’s just something we have to accept, now’ and other resigned but soothing platitudes. Thus we have the orchestrated flapdoodle about Omicron, the mild-mannered variant to sensible, old-school virologists but destroyer of worlds by the arm-waving, hand-flapping professional panickers in politics and public health.
All of which makes dissenters like Olivia Gadecki so precious. It helps that sport is such a secular religion in Australia that the high profile this bestows on our athletic icons gives them an outsize influence on social attitudes, particularly for young people who idolise their sporting heroes. The more who try to emulate Gadecki, or even Barty, and their off-field views, the more that the monolithic, leaden weight of Covid orthodoxy with all its hysteria, panic, psychological conformity, medical apartheid and endless life-sucking restrictions will start to lift.