The Covid Vaccine is Dead! Long Live the Covid Vaccine!?

State Covid vaccine mandates for health care workers are in slow retreat but the Covid Narrative lives on

(Originally published in The Spectator Australia)

Did you now that, four years after the Great Covid Pandemonium first erupted, vaccine mandates are still a thing in some of the more stagnant backwaters of the Covid overreaction swamp?  Only now are some states moving towards getting rid of the last remaining but useless and unethical government-ordained mandates for health care workers.

The latest of the bitter-ender states to wave a grimy white flag is South Australia where SA Health has announced the imminent end of vaccine mandates for frontline, patient-facing health care staff.  There will be a consultation, ending on 10 May, with SA Health’s forty thousand affected public sector staff before the proposed policy ending the mandatory vaccination policy comes into effect which the department is signaling as their desired outcome (never seek a consultation on something you haven’t already made your mind up about).

The original mandate had prompted a state Supreme Court challenge by vaccine-decliner, ICU nurse and Crows AFLW footballer, Deni Varnhagen.  The challenge failed when the court declined to rule on any of the substantive matters of the merits of the Covid vaccines, the medical ethics of vaccine mandates or the human rights of employees forced to choose between an income and a potentially dangerous experimental drug, instead deciding that because the public health order mandating the vaccine was legally issued it was thus legally valid.  This was the easy way out that left government power intact provided that all the paperwork was in order and all the legalistic boxes were ticked.

Now, however, it appears that reality (of the ineffectiveness of the Covid ‘vaccine’, health staff shortages and the precipitous decline in Covid vaccination rates more generally) has finally caught up with the state government.  There is a catch, however.  There always is.  Those health care workers who had remained unvaccinated at the cost of their jobs are now eligible for reinstatement or for future employment with their old employer but only after they sign a declaration acknowledging that they have been advised of the “proven benefits” of Covid vaccination “and their active decision to forgo its benefits”.  Only then could they be exempted from the vaccine requirement and resume employment.

Even then, by signing a document acknowledging the advice received, they could leave themselves open to disciplinary action should they even hint of any downsides of Covid vaccination to their patients.  There is also the PR goldmine for the state government of being able to say that 99% of healthcare workers believe in the “proven benefits of Covid vaccination".  Leaving outdated policies in place for ideological reasons may also further erode people’s trust and confidence in the health system and the state government, already badly bruised in the Covid era, so there is that, too.

The department justifies its about-face by citing near-universal population immunity arising from “hybrid immunity” due to “vaccination, past infection or a combination of both”.  Now, they argue, we have the “highest level of protection against related severe disease, hospitalisation, death and long-Covid” (but not infection or transmission, of course – all the Covid authorities have given up on that vaccine staple, preferring the much more fuzzy and harder to measure ‘protection’).

The SA state government’s change in policy, particularly the obligation to sign a piece of paper attesting to the ‘proven benefits’ of the vaccines, sounds like a pathetic, face-saving measure.  The formal acknowledgement of the ‘advice’ received of the benefits of Covid vaccination might just raise a bitter horse-laugh from those forced to sign – I can imagine them thinking ‘yes, I will sign to the effect that I have the received the advice, even though that advice is still a crock.  Now when is my next shift’. 

The state governments decision to rescind the mandate whilst requiring formal acknowledgment of the wonders of the Covid ‘vaccine’ by the previous refusers would also have had something to do with the almost certain likelihood of individual or class actions by unjustly sacked doctors and nurses who thus sign away their claim for compensation because they believed, and can point to the scientific literature in evidence, that  the jabs are unnecessary, useless and risky.

The government is doing its damnedest in the face of the anti-vaccine tide to preserve the narrative that the original mandates were justified and the Covid ‘vaccines’ are an essential element of their brilliantly-Generaled ‘victory’ over Covid.  The Covid vaccine is dead!  Long live the Covid vaccine!

Similar policy U-turns on Covid vaccine requirements for health care workers had already been made in Queensland and Western Australia in 2023, and News South Wales has just announced that it will do the same.  The remaining states will probably fall into line with the new policy trend - not because it is the right thing to do but because no state, whose health systems are all under human capital strain, would want to lose their trained, skilled nurses and doctors to the mandate-free states.

The slow-motion collapse of Covid vaccine mandates for health care workers follows the fall of other mandate dominoes.  The Queensland Supreme Court had earlier declared that that state’s Covid vaccine mandate for police officers was unlawful and also that Qld Health did not have the power to make vaccine mandates for ambulance service workers.  The great disappearing vaccine mandate is all very haphazard and jurisdiction-dependent, highlighting the political, not scientific, underpinnings of the Covid vaccine mandates from the very start.

Vaccine mandates are a failure of science, logic and ethics.  If a vaccine doesn’t work then a vaccine mandate won’t work.  If a vaccine does work (in the old-fashioned sense of preventing infection and transmission) then compulsory certification of an individual’s vaccination status still violates human rights because an effective vaccine would have protected all who had freely chosen to take it whilst the right to refuse (and to accept the risk of infection and its potential consequences) is a fundamental medical freedom which the whole Covid debacle should have triple-underlined.

Without admitting as much, most state health authorities are at long last starting to acknowledge this.  Perhaps they should all now be forced to sign such an acknowledgment of essential bodily freedom as a condition of their well-remunerated employment.  Fair’s fair.