I was heartened to hear of Woolworths volte-face concerning its despicable vaccine mandate policy. Nevertheless, despite the passage of time and having moved to London for an exciting role and a new life far from the madhouse Australia became following Covid, I found myself still seething with indignation at the treatment I and many of my colleagues suffered at the hands of the retail giant.

Luckily for me, I was able to find a job prior to being officially terminated, but not before I was subjected to a sort of soft form of harassment by the Woolies bureaucracy surrounding my vaccine status.

My department lead headed a meeting informing us that – notwithstanding that we might hold different views on the vaccine – ‘at the end of the day, if you do not take it, your employment with Woolworths will be terminated’.

I was sent text messages and emails after hours, reminding me that I was yet to upload my vaccine certificate to the relevant intranet portal. I had to have meetings with my line manager, updating him on whether or not I was still unvaccinated so he could give HR a timeline for my termination.

I applied for an exemption on religious grounds, only to be informed by Woolworths’ Chief Medical Officer that it never would have been granted. I asked ‘Doctor Rob’ whether my having had Covid, and therefore gained natural immunity, made any difference to whether Woolworths felt that I needed to be fired on account of my being a Covid risk to my colleagues (who I hadn’t seen in eight months due to our Work-From-Home arrangement). It did not. But, ‘Great news!’ he told me. It did mean I was granted an automatic three-month extension to the deadline to submit my vaccine certificate. Science, she is a fickle mistress!

I had a bad feeling about moving to Woolworths from the moment I got there. The self-congratulatory smugness from those at the helm was palpable and their activism was overt. In one panel in which he appeared, Brad described himself as having attended a liberal university in South Africa involved in the anti-apartheid movement. How poetic (in a bad way) that he should have overseen a form of medical apartheid in the business over which he presided years later.

Poetry aside, I consider myself a resilient and fairly aloof person, but I was not spared the stomach-churning discomfort of my employer using my medical choices against me. It’s ironic that in many other Woke battlegrounds, an individual’s medical choices and associated rights to privacy are amongst the Woke sacred cows. Try to tell a long-haired bloke with a penis that he’s not, in fact, a woman, and science is nowhere to be found. Forcing someone by threat of termination to take an experimental vaccine for a flu-like illness they have already had with a 99.9 per cent survival rate for their age group? Suddenly Mother Science appears to the Woke seers at the corner of Yellow Brick Road and the Highway to Hell.

I found out that Woolworths quietly amended its vaccine policy when a few ex-colleagues sent me word of the internal announcement. Unfortunately Sky News Australia doesn’t air in the UK, but I happened across an excerpt of The World According to Rowan Dean featuring Karina Brown. I discovered it is to her that I owe a huge debt of gratitude for speaking up when I didn’t have the moxie to and her latest appearance seems to have made all the difference. It is a welcome reminder that although truth, reason, and logic (and those who hold them dear) rarely win out in these modern culture wars, David does occasionally beat Goliath. To Karina! To David! L’chaim!