I’ve heard from my contact in Australia, and can now make some corrections in the reports that came out yesterday (“Australian government to seize and vaccinate 24,000 children,” etc.). An article in today’s Wall Street Journal confirms what I’ve been told (https://www.wsj.com/articles/australia-vaccinates-thousands-of-high-school-students-to-stop-delta-11629288000). I would like to stress that everything I posted here yesterday came from several news sources.
Here are the corrections.
This is happening in Sydney, not Melbourne.
The focus is on “only certain suburbs where the outbreak is at its worst.”
Only 18-year-olds will be vaccinated. They are preparing to take their high school final exams, which is why the vaccinations are en masse.
The shots are not compulsory.
There are no fines for non-compliance.
Well, that does paint a very different picture. My contact says “the hysteria is still pretty bad here.” That may account for the over-the-top initial news reports.
According to Thucydides–and he knew!–hysteria is the bane of democracies. Athenian hysteria caused them to make fatally bad decisions in the Peloponnesian War. Like invading Sicily for no good reason and getting wiped out.
Our world is not having a nice time, these past two years. Hysteria will make it worse. We’re carrying on as if COVID-19 were the Black Death of the Middle Ages–and I have no idea why our, ahem, leaders are presenting it to us as if it were. “Do everything we tell you, no matter how arbitrary and unreasonable, or you’re all gonna die!”
Governed by hysteria–not a nice prospect.