Did you know that four years after the Great Covid Pandemonium erupted, vaccine mandates are still being enforced in the stagnant backwaters of the overreaction swamp?

Only now are some states moving towards getting rid of the last unethical government-ordained mandates for healthcare workers.

The latest of these bitter-ender states to wave the white flag is South Australia, where SA Health has announced the imminent end of vaccine mandates for frontline healthcare staff.

There will be a consultation, ending on May 10, with SA Health’s 40,000-strong public sector staff before the proposed policy to end mandatory vaccination requirements comes into effect.

The original mandate 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 the substantive matters surrounding the merits of the Covid vaccines, the medical ethics of vaccine mandates, and the human rights of employees forced to choose between an income and a potentially dangerous experimental drug. Instead, the decision addressed the public health order mandating the vaccine, viewing it as legally issued and thus valid. In my opinion, this was the easy way out. It left government power intact provided that all the paperwork was in order and all the legalistic boxes were ticked.

Today, it appears that reality has finally caught up with the state government, whether that be the ineffectiveness of the Covid ‘vaccine’, health staff shortages, or the precipitous decline in Covid vaccination rates more generally.

There is a catch. There always is…

Those healthcare workers who had remained unvaccinated at the cost of their jobs are eligible for reinstatement and 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 are they able to be exempted from the vaccine requirement and resume employment.

By signing a document acknowledging the receipt of advice, they could leave themselves open to disciplinary action should they 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 per cent 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Leaving outdated policies in place for ideological reasons may also further erode people’s trust and confidence in the health system (and the state government).

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’. They argue that 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 acknowledgment of the ‘advice’ received regarding the benefits of Covid vaccination might raise a bitter laugh from those forced to sign.

I can imagine them thinking, ‘Yes, I will sign to the effect that I have received the advice, even though that advice is a crock. Now when is my next shift?’

The government is also maintaining that the original mandates were justified and the ‘vaccines’ are an essential element of the ‘victory’ over Covid. The vaccine is dead! Long live the vaccine!

Similar policy U-turns on Covid vaccine requirements for healthcare workers have been made in Queensland and Western Australia in 2023, and News South Wales has 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 under human capital strain, would want to lose their skilled nurses and doctors to the mandate-free states.

The slow-motion collapse of Covid vaccine mandates for healthcare workers follows the fall of other mandate dominoes. The Queensland Supreme Court had earlier declared that the 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 be forced to sign such an acknowledgement of essential bodily freedom as a condition of their well-remunerated employment… Fair’s fair.