Let’s be frank. 

If a vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission, there is no scientific basis for a vaccine passport. 

I know there are plenty of people who want a reward for nineteen months of good behaviour, but the vaccine is your reward. That is the point of vaccination. We give lolly-pops to children, not emotionally insecure adults. 

Even if the vaccine prevented transmission, governments have no right to play with domestic vaccine passports. Why? Because participation in the society of your birth is not a negotiation with health bureaucrats – it’s an unshakeable right. If you think the world is too dangerous, stay home or dress up like an extra from CSI. Do not gift politicians infinite power thinking they can control life and death or they’ll expect you to start worshipping them. 

All vaccines are purely a matter of self-interest to protect you – they are not to sate the paranoia of busy-body neighbours. It is up to you to decide which vaccinations apply to your current situation. Not your doctor. Not the premier. Not a random health bureaucrat that may or may not have monetary connections to Big Pharma. Just you. 

The only time a vaccination is ‘for someone else’ is when we talk about herd immunity. 

If – and only if – a vaccine meets a certain set of criteria, it can be used as part of a nationwide vaccine program. The end goal of this intensive campaign is eradication of the disease. 

Herd immunity is achieved by presenting the disease with hosts that either resist infection or fail to spread it. This occurs naturally when populations successfully fight off infections, creating a robust and permanent resistance passed on to their offspring. Over time, diseases either wipe themselves out or slide into the background of ‘miscellaneous shit’ humans have to deal with. 

There are modern vaccines which mimic herd immunity successfully. Measles, Polio, Smallpox, and Tetanus are all examples of vaccines that provide 98-100% lifelong immunity. The failure rate is so low that case leakage is not sufficient for the infection to escape and mutate. Case numbers drop off to near zero pretty quickly and remain there. 

If this is achieved via natural or vaccine-induced immunity, the disease is prevented from reaching those few individuals who cannot get vaccinated. Ergo ‘herd immunity’ prevents the unvaccinated from getting sick. 

It does not give ‘extra protection’ to those who are already vaccinated. 

Let me repeat. 

The immunity of your neighbour does not protect a vaccinated person – the vaccine protects them. 

With Covid vaccines, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve been stabbed in the arm, you’re still a walking Petri dish. When commentators use their digital pulpits to insist that they ‘don’t want to breathe the same air’ as the unvaccinated, we have to ask serious questions about their basic sanity. Logic? Forget it. The government turned the unvaccinated into scapegoats and the press went along with it for the clicks. 

Most are not brave enough to challenge this mass psychosis for fear of cancellation or upsetting their peers. This lack of integrity leaves Australia as a divided nation with one group egging on the persecution of the other. It feels good to have special privileges. It feels good to be told that you’re a hero. It feels good to check-in to restaurants while the lower classes are turned away by a government app. 

While they enjoy their coffee inside the Palace of Versailles, the government has cooked up a tax hike to pay for the privilege of vaccination. Huge shock. These vaccines weren’t free and now the treasurer has decided to kill off any surviving businesses by (probably) raising the GST instead of – I don’t know – cutting public service salaries. The poor will pay, first with their jobs and then with their savings. 

The government would have had more luck with vaccine uptake if they’d made people pay for them upfront instead of handing out bribes. We are a society trained to attach quality to price. People line up for days to purchase an iPhone they can’t afford, but side-eye the unsolicited Mentos that comes free with an eBay order. 

‘Never take candy from a stranger!’ is right up there with, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…’ 

‘Take this vaccine or your life is over!’ isn’t massively reassuring. Shame on state premiers for lauding their record-breaking vaccine percentages, and shame on the press for failing to mention how that statistic was achieved. 

Can we really call any of this a ‘free choice’ when people are put under indefinite house arrest, sacked, locked out of the economy, and warned they might not be entitled to healthcare? At some point a class action suit is going to call this ‘coercion’ in violation of Australia’s code of vaccine ethics. 

The vaccine situation could have done with a bit of good old fashioned market competition. Consumer pressure forces companies to improve their product whereas government intervention allows inferior products to thrive. Look at the ABC. 

In a fair capitalist fight, mRNA vaccines would have been left collecting dust on the shelves, while the world eagerly pre-ordered Novavax. We weren’t given choices. We were given edicts. 

Potentially the best vaccine has been pushed to the back of the queue, unable to acquire essential components due to Big Pharma favourites monopolising raw production materials on the back of government agreements. Novavax will hit the market too late for most Australians who were bullied into ultimatums by their employers and schools. 

Vaccine shills demand to know why someone with a 99.98% chance of surviving Covid would dare to wait. Alright. The first draft of a product is rarely the best. It’s the same reason drug companies pay people a fortune to partake in trials. 

In India, the introduction of the combined diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis (DTP) vaccine – which was safe in most countries – paralysed a child’s injected limb if they also had a silent Polio infection. It began in the 1980s when incorrect WHO advice led to an insufficient three doses of the oral Polio vaccine being given, allowing wild Polio to interact with DTP. 

Hundreds of children have also developed Polio directly from the oral vaccine. The ‘benefits outweigh the risk’ argument prevailed, and the program continued to paralyse children. 

In 2006, the Indian Medical Association begged the government to release data on oral Polio vaccine paralysis and further called for an investigation into the rise of non-Polio acute flaccid paralysis which had climbed to 27,000 cases a year. “Nowhere in the world do we see such numbers, and yet this has remained uninvestigated,” said Dr Mittal. 

The oral Polio vaccine remains cheaper and easier to administer, but it works with a weakened, live virus. This is far more dangerous than the version Australian children receive but, according to an emeritus professor at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, “It’s easy and commercially more viable. For the sake of convenience, ethical issues have been ignored by several poor countries like India.” 

“When this injectable alternative exists it would be unethical to continue with the live oral vaccine that might be causing more Polio cases – from vaccine-associated Polio paralysis – than the wild Polio virus itself,” added Dr Jacob John. 

Oral Polio vaccinations are a World Health Organisation initiative. The WHO spends its time apologising for the harm done for jumping into mass vaccination, rather than properly testing the vaccines before distribution. The companies involved make money while hundreds of thousands of children have been injured unnecessarily. It is a culture of recklessness made possible by a lack of legal accountability for their mistakes. 

This year, the WHO is helping India double up with a joint oral Polio vaccine and a Covid shot. What could possibly go wrong? 

This sort of behaviour from the WHO explains why some people might not be super keen to play lab rat to mRNA vaccines. 

As recently as 2019, promising mRNA vaccines caused unpredictable immune responses in their trials, including severe blood conditions. This was well known, but not disclosed at the beginning of the Covid vaccine roll-out. The first instinct of global health authorities was to deny serious side effects rather than admit that they were well within the balance of probability, given what researchers already knew about the technology. 

“However, it is still too early to fully understand its safety and effectiveness in humans,” said the 2019 study ‘mRNA as a Transformative Technology for Vaccine Development to Control Infectious Diseases’. “The next five years will be very important for the field of mRNA vaccines.” 

The 2019 ‘mRNA Vaccines – A New Era in Vaccinology’ said,  “A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms induce potent type 1 interferon responses, which have been associated with not only inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity. […] Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracelluar naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation.” 

The situation is not helped by politicians, health officials, WHO representatives, and Silicon Valley having a significant monetary investment in the success of certain vaccine companies. We have witnessed them suppress negative consumer feedback and engage in anti-competitive behaviour against alternate treatments. 

Without the excuse of a ‘global emergency’ declared by those with a financial interest in vaccine manufacturing, we would not be trialling mRNA vaccines on the general population. 

Chief Health Officers insisting that mRNA vaccines are safe do not have the long term data to make that statement. All we have are real-world numbers flowing in from what can only be described as a massive live trial on unwitting citizens. 

Hospitalisation data does suggest that high risk patients may be recovering better from specific strains of Covid after vaccination, but the data is less supportive of mass vaccination campaigns for the overall trajectory of the disease. It leaves a question mark over the unintended harm to low-risk groups who suffer adverse reactions from the vaccines and there is no data on whether things like observed heart inflammation may lead to more serious consequences later in life. 

It is a point of fact that countries with the highest vaccination levels, such as Israel and Iceland, are spiralling into a future of increased Covid case numbers and waning vaccine efficiency propped up by booster shots of questionable safety. 

Meanwhile, the CDC has finally acknowledged that natural exposure to Covid results in an immune response up to eleven times higher than vaccination due to the broad spectrum response to the full viral profile. It is no surprise that Sweden’s data, a country with one of the highest natural exposure levels, shows Covid numbers flat-lining as its citizens become an impenetrable wall presenting herd immunity. 

The question then becomes, did we make a mistake by attempting mass vaccination with a rushed and woefully inefficient vaccine that has put evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate? 

Young, healthy people with an infinitesimal risk of death from Covid would have presented the perfect buffer to stop transmission if we had reserved our vaccines for the old, frail, and high-risk patients. 

Given this, it is possible that our intense fear has created a vaccine dependency system at the expense of a Covid-free future. This is why the world should never insist on a unified approach to an unknown situation. Variety is humanity’s strength because we learn things we did not expect. 

If you don’t like the quality of your vaccine, take it up with the manufacturer. You’re not entitled to a refund on ‘free stuff’, but there’s a feedback page at the CDC where you can rant about near-death experiences. 

Don’t turn around and blame a stranger for your choices. 

And whatever you do, don’t adopt a vaccine passport system which climate luvvies have already decided to mutate into a hellish Carbon allowance pass. 

No government can promise you safety, but people are entitled to their liberty. 

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at Ko-Fi.

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