Compulsory Covid-19 Vaccinations

One more thing I'd like to clear up that regular flyer keeps bringing up. I feel he is either trolling or has a comprehension problem. His comments were deleted on the New Zealand article hence why I'm bringing them up here.

Mandatory masking on domestic flights in the USA was first rolled out in May, with all airlines eventually following suit by roughly June, or maybe it was July at the latest for some of the last few holdouts. The latest order by Biden changes nothing, since masks have been mandatory for over half a year already on ALL domestic flights.

Mandatory masking came into force at all Australian domestic airports and flights, in early January. So his experience of not needing to wear one on a flight to Queensland last year is irrelevant. As he made several comments on the ET article about that just a month ago, I'm amazed he forgot this important detail.

I don't understand his insistence on going around in circles. He knows I'm 100% right but keeps arguing for no reason. So there. Just to set the record straight.

Apologies I misunderstood/misread, but I can see compulsory vaccinations being required in some/many contexts after most are vaccinated probably by October this year. Transport in confined places may be one of those. Private transport providers will certainly have their own rules for liability reasons. If everyone is vaccinated it won’t be a big deal but for many countries it won’t be until well into 2022 that most are vaccinated.

It is clear that there are many Vaxx Fanatix who would love to see vaccinations/medical procedures made mandatory. But it is extremely unlikely for all the reasons posted by contributors on this blog. My view is that it will never happen because there are so many different countries with so many different vaccines that are indicated and/or contraindicated for different groups. For example, Italy does not recommend Astrazeneca vaccine for those over 55 years. So how is a country going to be able to force an Italian visitor to get such a vaccine when he/she arrives. And so on and so forth. Way too difficult and a political and legal minefield for the Australian government to want to step foot into.

GoRobin, precisely. Thank you for your continued rational analysis. I don't see it happening either. Patrick's insistence that vaccines will become compulsory not only for flying but in all the other settings mentioned by October 2021 is both extremely unlikely and overly optimistic. Such a radical change in our way of life in such a short space of time has never before been seen, nor would it be accepted by anyone but fanatical extremists and those that benefit from it, such as pharmaceutical companies. Prior to 2020, such talk would have had people like him calling us "conspiracy theorists" but now your average Joe is saying such things and insisting they're right. It's laughable. I look at things from a more rational perspective without resorting to conjecture, fear mongering, alarmism or hysteria.

Many will say that what we're experiencing now is unprecedented, and they would be largely correct, although a little over 100 years ago now, the Spanish flu that ran from 1918 to 1920/21 also featured mandatory masks, lockdowns/closed businesses and at least some border closures (including the closure of the Victorian/NSW border). Virtually no one alive at the time to experience it would still be alive today and of course they didn't have mass travel with flights connecting all corners of the world, and buses, trains and cars to take us across the country or land borders like we've gotten used to in recent decades. In any case, there is that parallel to today and the world did eventually go back to normal after the Spanish flu, didn't it?

Therefore, I think it's highly likely the same will happen this time round. So far we're not even really one year into this and the Spanish flu lasted around 2, so it's probable that we're looking at another 6-12 months of restrictions before some semblance of normality does resume. I mean, real pandemics don't go on forever and this one is far from being bad, it's mostly over-hyped.

I've been burned before on the question of when normal travel will resume, though that was mainly in the early days before I could assess what was really going on. Using the past to predict the future however yields more useful information. That's why I believe we're probably looking at the aforementioned time frame for a return to relatively normal travel and restriction free life, but it will take much longer to repair the economic damage and put planes back in the sky to levels we saw back in 2019/early 2020.

Freq people have to vaccinate children for childcare places, so having vaccination to enter Australia not to mention other settings where there is a high chance of transmission is is not widely out of the question. I can remember carrying a yellow vaccination booklet on my travels, I can remember compulsory TB screening for the population) so what the Australian prime minister is suggesting is not that radical, and I still get asked about yellow fever vaccination status for certain countries. The Spanish flu killed 50 million over three years and of course this doesn’t match it (but it is getting into the millions and the growth is exponential); but your suggestion that not being able to get access to hospital care is far from being bad, then we have quite different views on what a health crisis looks like. I’m not sure where you are but the Australian economy and those countries that brought the bug under control early (so we do have access to good-ish healthcare) are recovering much faster than those that didn’t.

BREAKING NEWS. So you heard this from me. Let's put the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and the Covid Flu pandemic of 2020 into perspective. In 1918 the world population was about 1.8 billion and today it is about 7.8 billion. So about 4.3 fold increase. During the Spanish Flu it is estimated that 50 million died from the disease. If we extrapolate that to todays population (4.3 X), it would be about 215 million deaths. During our Covid Flu pandemic to date we have seen 2.28 million deaths. So our "pandemic" death rate equates to just 1% compared to the Spanish Flu. Come on World, get real. Why such a massive panic so out of proportion? JUST 1 PERCENT as bad as the Spanish Flu. If you don't believe me, do the maths yourself. When it sinks in and you start to breathe a sign of relief, then tell your friends, and please give me credit for bringing this to your attention. Just remember, after the Spanish Flu the world population went on to grow more than 4 times over the next century.

fully agree GoRobin and yes you can take the credit for those figures, as you made the same point more eloquently than I but as I said is living in a world with no hospital access really, where we want to go on with severely restricted movement. Where I am we are not in a panic (let alone a massive one) as the health authorities jump on any outbreak quickly. Our restrictions are relatively mild and short lived. I can fly anywhere across the country where I am. I prefer this than no health controls then we would have much larger numbers.

Thank you to everyone for expanding my original post into a very interesting discussion. I questioned the power of a large corporation, and by extension an industry, to mandate which customers will be accepted and which will not. At the end of the day I think a line must be drawn. Rules about conduct, standards of dress etc fair enough. Further along the spectrum, rules about having on board conversations about certain political or moral topics? Not OK, and won't happen: probably a breach of the freedom of expression taken to exist in our nation even without constitutional guarantee. Rules about certain health conditions that might impinge on the safety or comfort of other passengers? You decide, but for me a matter for central government not airlines themselves. Rules about vaccination? Again, for me, a matter for central government only: there are issues here too of certain express (think treaties and U.N. resolutions etc) and implied freedoms. The argument that mitigating liability favours rule-making by corporations alone? It's powerful, but should it be dispositive? You decide.

@patrickk - FACT CHECK. You said in reference to the covid death rate that "growth is exponential". I am going to call you out as a liar. Anyone can check a number of websites online to see that the worldwide daily mortality rate from covid is not growing exponentially, and far from it!

Sorry again GoRobin, yet another error on my part, which you presciently picked up. Death rate is not growing exponentially because in some place such as the US and Western Europe the use of some drugs has managed that, but infections (and related hospitalisations) are growing exponentially as you would expect. Worth noting many if not most countries prefer to under report Covid related deaths, so the death rate is probably higher, due to low testing rates, among other things including politics. The former US president pushed the argument for not reporting covid related deaths, the same with Brazil, and I know places like Bangladesh is similar. The real death rate is largely hidden. It will be a few years before we get a more accurate picture.

Go robin on Johns Hopkins has a graph on cases since last April (on the BBC website) and it is a classic exponential curve. Not sure it is quite a lie.

@patrickk..you referred to deaths. Perhaps you don't understand what exponential means and you just want to use it because it sounds good. A lie is a lie. You must have some sinister agenda?

GoRobin as I said and apologised for the error. I said ‘it’ when I should have said ‘cases’. I would call it an honest mistake. If you go to the reference I mentioned to the graph of cases over the last 10 months is classic exponential. I note some of your posts about vaccine testing levels falls into the ‘mistake’ category. I’m not sure how reporting on public health issues is ‘sinister’ but to each their own.

Thanks GoRobin for adding those figures to illustrate your point. It also helps to expand on mine. I also remember there being 50 million deaths from the Spanish flu at a time when modern allopathic medicine was far less advanced than it is now. So we are in an infinitely better position to deal with pandemics many times worse than the Spanish flu, but with Covid-19 we have a death rate that is just a fraction of the Spanish flu, 99% of those who test positive make a full recovery and the majority of these individuals already have pre-existing conditions. Before 2020, the elderly, sick and infirm, especially those suffering from serious co-morbidities died from a simple cold or flu. That's no different to 2020 and 2021.

There is really no justification for all these authoritarian measures. The sky isn't falling. We'll be back to the good old times in no time at all, provided governments don't try to advance their unwanted agendas. Let's hope common sense will prevail. In the meantime, be patient, because we're not going back to normal just yet. More than likely we'll have to ride this out for up to another year or so.

Rabbie the latest data suggests they do reduce transmission by reducing viral load, of people with the bug, and this has been published. They are all being tested to look at transmission but one would need a few weeks after the two jab protocol to get sensible data. Masks plus a jab seems to be the best option. Note as many have said masks stop the spread, so masks plus a jab makes perfect. And not sure the medical risk is as trivial as you suggest given the data coming out of the UK and other places.