Opinion
Yet again, the real Long Covid strikes: the snowballing public health disasters as a consequence of panicked, despotic Covid policies.
We’re already seeing the devastating affects of worse-than-useless Covid policies on children, a generation plagued by developmental delays and declining mental health. Preventable diseases in adults are spiking due to lockdowns and restrictions putting the brakes on checkups and early interventions.
Vaccine mandates are having predictable, devastating ongoing consequences, as well.
Australia’s childhood vaccination rates have fallen for the second consecutive year, in a trend that concerned public health experts believe is linked to shortages in bulk-billing GPs and increased distrust in vaccines.
After several years of rising uptake, the proportion of Australian five-year-olds fully vaccinated with routine inoculations – including for polio, measles and hepatitis B – has fallen 1.4 per cent, from a peak of 94.8 per cent in 2020, to 93.4 per cent in 2022.
Like all the others, this outcome is all the more damnable in that it was so easily foreseen. Studies showed, before anyone in Wuhan so much as had a cough, that vaccine mandates had little positive effect on vaccination rates. People respond far better to carrots than sticks.
And when authoritarian governments and lickspittle public health troughers hysterically belt the public with bigger and bigger sticks, people naturally dig their heels in.
The demented obsession with forcing people to submit to mostly-useless, possibly dangerous Covid vaccines has only made them distrustful of all vaccines, despite (unlike Covid vaccines) their long-demonstrated efficacy and safety.
Leading vaccine uptake expert Professor Julie Leask, from the University of Sydney, said some communities had experienced tough COVID-19 restrictions that “may have compounded a lingering mistrust in emblems of public health like vaccination”.
“They had more police out. They had helicopters out. They had the military out … They were the ones who were having to go to work to provide the essential services that supported the rest of the city,” she said.
And the government wonders why people don’t trust them.
But the data also demolishes another narrative of the Covidians: that genuine “anti-vaxxers”, rather than distrust of Covid vaccines specifically, is not the province of “bogan cookers”. Rather, it’s driven by the middle-class, bourgeois bohemian set — in other words, the Greens’ heartland.
The area around the NSW North Coast town of Byron Bay has the nation’s second-lowest rate of two-dose vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella for children aged two years, at 79.68 per cent.
The lowest rate was detected in Queensland in the Noosa hinterland. Lower rates were also detected in the state’s far north, the Daintree region, Gold Coast hinterland and Surfers Paradise, and in the Alice Springs and Barkly areas in the Northern Territory, which includes Tennant Creek.
In NSW, lower rates were detected in the Tweed Valley, Merrylands and Guildford in Sydney and Dural and Wisemans Ferry on Sydney’s outskirts.
In Victoria – which generally has higher child vaccination rates – the areas around Loddon and Elmore near Bendigo, Creswick, Daylesford and Ballan, and Manningham East and Darebin North in Melbourne reported rates below the national average.
Those are nearly all well-off, “tree change” towns, where you’re more likely to see a rainbow tshirt and multicoloured hair than a MAGA cap.
In fact, it’s those much-derided “bogans” who are more likely to ensure their kids’ health by accessing well-established, trusted, efficacious vaccines (that aren’t Covid vaccines).
The highest rate in Australia for two-dose vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella for children aged two years was detected around the towns of Sorell and Dodges Ferry in southern Tasmania, and Warrnambool in regional Victoria.
While difficulty accessing a GP is also a contributing factor, thanks to the Albanese government’s importation of half a million foreigners over just the past year, the most immediate cause of this looming public health disaster is, yet again, the authoritarianism of the Covidians.
Associate Professor Frank Beard, with the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, […said ] “Some of the research that our social science team has done … suggested that the pandemic has had a polarising effect on vaccination attitudes.”
Well, no shit. When the government and public health bureaucrats so obviously lie and bully about Covid vaccines, why would anyone trust them about anything else?
Yet again, it’s the youngest generation who’ll pay for the demented obsession with “saving” the very old and very sick for just a few weeks longer.
Dr Debra King, a Port Macquarie GP […] said the vaccination coverage was worrying and that health officials were predicting a summer outbreak of whooping cough, a highly contagious infection that Australian children can be vaccinated against for free at two months, four months, six months, 18 months, four years and 12-13 years (through school-based vaccination programs).
The Age
But just remember: it was all for our own good.