“Back in the summer, as the rest of the world was opening up, state after state in Australia started to impose new restrictions to deal with a handful of Covid cases. It turned us into a global laughing stock. No one is laughing now.
Time was when, even in Melbourne, we could chuckle at the absurdity of our Covid rules. We were told we could remove our face masks – still mandatory indoors and outdoors – in order to drink a coffee, but not to drink a beer.
We were also told that if we lived with five other adults, we were not allowed to all leave the house in one group. Indoors, we were no risk to each other, but outside we were apparently a viral petri dish.
Laughter has since turned into anger.
After over 230 days of hard lockdown, whatever was left of Melbourne’s social fabric has gone. And the city has been rocked by weeks of protests and violence.
On 17 September, the Victorian government announced that it would be mandating vaccinations for the construction industry.
It gave construction workers six days to get their first jab or be banned from working.
Unsurprisingly, not all construction workers were pleased about this. They took their anger out on their union the following Monday by protesting outside its offices. The union bizarrely claimed that the protest was made up of far-right and neo-Nazi agitators.
Just as bizarrely, the Victorian government then decided to close the entire construction industry for two weeks. Even the vaccinated were banned from working. The protesters were back in bigger numbers the next day, drawing in people from many other walks of life.
Melbournians have been ordered to live like this until 26 October at the earliest. That’s when Melbourne’s sixth lockdown is scheduled to end – though you would be lucky to find a single person who thinks it will actually end on that day.
By then, Melbourne will have been locked down for longer than any other city on the planet.
We got to this point because our leaders have been chasing the goal of Zero Covid.
This mindset was what drove Melbourne into lockdown on 5 August after recording just eight cases. It has been in lockdown ever since.
While the dream of Zero Covid is dead on paper, we are still trying to contain Covid at all costs. People who have already been pushed beyond the brink are still suffering under draconian restrictions on every aspect of life.
As Australians see their fellow countrymen being pepper sprayed, surrounded by shuttered businesses, they despair at the legacy that Zero Covid has left for their once-great nation.”
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Parents, teachers demand answers after NYC elementary school trashes ‘progressive’ student mural nypost.com/2021/09/29/par…
Hundreds of students, parents and teachers at PS 295 attended the Zoom meeting after the artwork — featuring phrases like “Black Trans Lives Matter,” “Equity,” “Safety” and “Pride” — was removed from the arts and culture school building this summer.
“I feel attacked,” said a fifth grader who spent 14 weeks working on the mural after school with an artist from local art collective Groundswell.
New bills passed earlier this week require landlords to give tenants 180 days' notice before raising rents and pay "economic dislocation relocation assistance" equal to three months' rent, to low-income tenants who move in response to rent hikes.
Both are the handiwork of Councilmember Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party, who argues the twin bills are needed to protect tenants from a post-pandemic upswing in rents—and from capitalism more generally.
John Ratcliffe and Mike Pompeo disputed Gen. Mark Milley’s recounting of the situation surrounding his controversial call with his Chinese counterpart washex.am/3EZKEV7
“There was no concerning intelligence that merited a call to his Chinese counterpart,” Ratcliffe said in an interview on Fox News, calling the chairman’s testimony “disingenuous and disappointing.”
“The reason that you know that I’m telling the truth when I saw that this was not an issue of concern is Gen. Milley was the principal military adviser to President Trump,” he continued.
Nearly 200 San Francisco police officers have applied for religious exemptions to avoid a required inoculation by Oct. 13 or risk being fired.
A survey this month of 733 members of the San Diego Police Officers Association showed about 91% (667) do not believe vaccines should be mandated and 45% (333) said they would rather be fired than comply with a vaccine mandate.
United Airlines is facing two separate lawsuits over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. abc13.com/health/employe…
One of the two lawsuits was filed in the U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas. In that suit, the employee alleges that their religious exemption was not accommodated.
The employees, including two pilots and a flight attendant, are accusing the airline of a "pattern of discrimination against employees who requested religious or medical accommodations."
“If the vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission, we cannot insist that everyone take them for public health reasons – to stop the spread.
And if the vaccines are sometimes harmful, failing a risk-reward calculation for many people, then we should not encourage everyone to take them for individual health reasons. Dr. Jay Battacharya of Stanford says it may be unwise for those under 30 years old to take vaccine.