With less than a fortnight until the start of Australia’s Grand Slam tennis tournament, Victoria’s health henchmen caved in and granted a medical exemption to Novak Djokovic. Presumably, Premier Dan Andrews realised that excluding the world’s number one tennis champ from the Australian Open made it look, er, closed.

Yet the exemption has provoked outrage, particularly in Victoria among the premier’s fans. ‘I hope Novak contracts Covid again down here and can’t even play in the Australian Open,’ fumed a furious tweeter. ‘What an INSULT to everyone in Melbourne – in Australia – to let this guy in on an exemption.’

An ABC journalist posted a ‘joke’ suggesting that waiters in Australia would want to spit in the tennis star’s food. A Victorian journalist tweeted ‘Good morning to everyone except Novak Djokovic.’

Emergency doctor Stephen Parnis snarled, ‘I don’t care how good a tennis player he is. If he’s refusing to get vaccinated, he shouldn’t be allowed in.’ Parnis lamented that the exemption sent, ‘an appalling message to people trying to stop the spread of COVID-19 to millions seeking to reduce COVID-19 risk to themselves and others,’ and that, ‘Vaccination shows respect, Novak.’

Not wanting to miss out on the hate-fest, the federal minister for Home Affairs Karen Andrews hinted her government could still overturn Djokovic’s exemption saying, ‘While the Victorian Government and Tennis Australia may permit a non-vaccinated player to compete in the Australian Open … if an arriving individual is not vaccinated, they must provide acceptable proof that they cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons to be able to access the same travel arrangement as fully vaccinated travellers.’

Djokovic’s exemption might signal the beginning of the end of Australia’s draconian vaccine mandates which have led to thousands of workers losing their jobs but there is still a long way to go. The rampant spread of the Omicron variant in NSW has prompted the state government to rule that infected healthcare workers can return to their jobs so long as they are asymptomatic, yet healthcare workers who have recovered from Covid and don’t want to be jabbed cannot get recognition that their immunity is as good (indeed better) than the fleeting immunity conferred by vaccines. It’s the same stubborn refusal to accept natural immunity that confronts Djokovic whose infection-acquired immunity has also been rejected.

The fact that the vaccines have done nothing to stop the transmission of Covid in Australia is never mentioned. More than 90 per cent of Australians aged 12 and over are fully vaccinated yet there are over 1000 new Covid cases per day per million. Compare that with India where only 44 per cent of people are vaccinated and there are only 13 new Covid cases per million per day. Or Japan, where even more people are vaccinated than Australia and there are only 3 daily cases per million. What is the secret of these Asian nations, and others such as Indonesia where there is less than one case per million per day?

The head of Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration Professor John Skerrit insists that the success of all three countries in reducing Covid to virtually zero has nothing to do with their use of ivermectin. Just before Christmas he warned people not to try to import the drug, which would be seized at Australia’s border.

Meanwhile, in Varanasi, in India this week, teams of workers are distributing Covid medicine kits to rural areas as a preventative measure. They include 12mg tablets of ivermectin, the antibiotic azithromycin, Vitamins D, C, B, zinc and paracetamol. In Indonesia, the government has been distributing free ivermectin and vitamins to Covid patients since July. In Japan, the chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association Dr Haruo Ozaki recommended the use of ivermectin to treat Covid in August.

Censorship — of effective early treatment and so much else — has been a hallmark of the pandemic and continues unabated. Last week, Twitter deleted the account of Dr Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA technology that was used to create the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 injections. That inspired the wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who has an audience reach of 11 million, to interview Malone for three hours. It was perhaps the most downloaded interview on YouTube, until it was promptly deleted, although it can still be heard on alternative platforms including Spotify.

Malone, who holds numerous patents in gene delivery and vaccines, made his ground-breaking discoveries in the manufacture and delivery of mRNA into cells at the world-famous Salk Institute 30 years ago, at the time home to seven Nobel laureates as well as Jonas Salk, the inventor of the first successful polio vaccine.

Why is Malone censored? Because he is at the pinnacle of his profession, an insider, and a whistle-blower. He has served as chair on US government health and defence committees, including the committee tasked with managing clinical research for a variety of drug and antibody treatments for COVID-19.

Malone is the antithesis of an ‘antivaxxer’; he has spent his life developing vaccines in conjunction with treatments and was shocked at the moves to prevent scientists from publishing peer-reviewed academic papers on drug repurposing and physicians from practicing medicine, as well as the ‘unethical mandates for administering experimental vaccines to adults and children (which) began to be pushed by governments.’

Malone is concerned about the safety of the COVID-19 genetic vaccines and the bioethics of how they have been forced upon the world. He writes that he used to believe that drug and vaccine development were regulated by the Federal government for the common good but that over the last two years the regulatory capture of the federal government by pharmaceutical companies has warped the work of Congress and Federal agencies to such an extent that they no longer represent what is in the best interests of the nation, the world, and humanity.

The hubris of the social media titans turned tyrants in censoring such a giant in his field is breath-taking, but one can hardly be surprised when Twitter censored President Trump while leaving the Taliban free to use the platform. Like the Wizard of Oz, behind the grandiose facade of social media, are a bunch of small, narrow-minded Silicon Valley lefties. Their mantra is that they are just ‘following the science’; the reality is that if you can’t question a proposition, it’s not science, it’s propaganda. As Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.’

Yet slowly the tide is turning. Joe Rogan has a larger audience than anyone on CNN. And whether he claims another Grand Slam title or not, the fact that Djokovic was admitted into Australia at all, unvaxxed, means he — and those on the side of science — have already won.