Over the Covid Top, Northern Territory, or is it the Northern Terror? By James Reed
Here is the Northern Territory’s Covid mandate. First an outline, then I rip into it.
“Essential workers in the Northern Territory will be subject to one of the strictest Covid-19 vaccination mandates in the world to begin in just a month.
Chief Minister Michael Gunner said employees who interacted with the public needed to get least one Covid-19 jab by November 13 or they wouldn’t be allowed back to work and faced a $5000 fine.
The new directions apply to:
- Employees at all jobs that involve interacting with members of the public. For example: hospitality, banking, retail, supermarket, receptionists, hairdressers and beauty therapists
- Workers who come into direct contact with people at risk of severe illness from Covid-19, like Aboriginal people or those who can't be vaccinated
- Employees who work in a high-risk setting where there is a known risk of Covid-19 transmission or outbreak
- People who perform work in essential infrastructure, food or essential good security or supply, or logistics
The direction also includes a provision that mandates booster shots for those workers in the future.
Employers will be allowed to request proof of vaccination of staff and will be required to keep a register of the vaccination status of all employees.
Some exemptions will be available to those who have legitimate reasons not to be vaccinated. It must be supported by medical evidence.
“If your job includes interacting with members of the public, then you need to get the jab,” Mr Gunner said.
“If you work in hospitality you need to get the jab. If you work in retail or in a supermarket, you need to get the jab.”
“That is the deadline to keep working in these jobs,” he said.
While the chief minister said the overall vaccination numbers were “pretty good” he pointed out there were some “worryingly low rates” in remote communities.
He said he was doing everything possible to get everyone vaccinated.
“You know I am passionate, sometimes aggressively passionate about the importance of the vaccine and I want as many people as possible to be vaccinated,” he said.
“At the end of the day with all the best information, with all the goodwill, with all the repeated attempts, there are some people and some communities who have said no to the jab and could keep saying no.
“At some stage, Covid will get in. Complacency terrifies me (as well as) the idea that we will just stay at Covid-zero. It will come in. There is an invisible clock ticking on this.”
NT Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker said a commonsense approach would need to be applied.
“We’ve alerted everyone to a 30-day notice period to try and get their house in order,” he said.
“The trade-off is my people literally walking around collecting bodies who passed away from Covid and that’s a very real conversation that the chief health officer and I have had about what our worst case scenario looks like. I don’t want that.”
NT Chief health officer Hugh Heggie said people needed to know that vaccines were safe.
“I've got to make a plea. Our health staff are already working really hard and we’ve seen the exhaustion that others are feeling at the moment, not just related to Covid,” he said.
“This is a chance for us to save ourselves.”
Talk about moral panic and hysteria! For example, the NT Police Commissioner is quoted above saying: ““The trade-off is my people literally walking around collecting bodies who passed away from Covid and that’s a very real conversation that the chief health officer and I have had about what our worst case scenario looks like. I don’t want that.” Well, the bodies in the street scenario, as seen in the 1918 flu has not occurred with Covid in any advanced Western country. There were some instances in India and South America, but this has occurred with other diseases too, where people suffer from malnutrition, and live in unsanitary conditions.
I believe that the approach is completely unjustified and set to be undermined when Covid breakthrough infections occur, as in the highly vaccinated Israel, or Sweden, as reported here:
“Vaccine specialists listed several reasons for the spike in breakthrough infections, including that it’s been a while since the earliest vaccinations were administered, the increased vaccine coverage, the removed restrictions, and the incidence of the more contagious Delta strain.Given the high inoculation rate, the share of those vaccinated among confirmed COVID-19 cases has risen is Sweden, which according to researchers is seen as a signal of waning vaccine protection.
The Swedish Public Health Agency reported that between 1-24 September 7 out of 10 COVID-related deaths were fully vaccinated individuals.
According to Farshid Jalalvand, a researcher in clinical microbiology at Lund University, there are several reasons why the proportion of fully vaccinated among the deceased has increased.
“The main reasons are probably that it has now been quite a while since the oldest ones were vaccinated, that the vaccine coverage has increased, that the restrictions have been eased, and that the Delta strain has taken over”, Jalalavand told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.The Delta strain is known to spread more easily among both vaccinated and unvaccinated than the Alpha strain. According to Jalalavand, though, fully vaccinated people “generally have good protection”.
Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, professor of vaccine immunology at the Karolinska Institute, said it is not unexpected that vaccine protection decreases over time.
“The mRNA vaccines are fantastic in that they could be developed so quickly and they reduce the risk of serious illness significantly. However, they don’t produce as high antibody levels as protein-based vaccines. The higher the antibody concentration in the blood after vaccination, the more robust and lasting the protection will be”, Karlsson Hedestam said.
At present, there are currently no protein-based COVID-19 vaccines on the global market, but Novavax and Sanofi Pasteur have both filed for approval by the WHO and in Europe, respectively.
Nevertheless, Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam called the idea of completely vaccinating yourself free from SARS-CoV-2 “overly optimistic”.
“We know that the COVID-19 vaccine reduces the risk of illness and death, which is very important, but at the same time we must accept that the breakthrough infections will increase and that we must continue to live with this virus, at least until we have an even better vaccine”, she mused, calling on her compatriots to avoid “certain risk situations” to keep the spread of infection down.
State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell confirmed that no vaccine offers 100-percent protection. “Therefore, there will be mild cases where one dies with COVID-19, but not because of the disease. That proportion will get bigger and bigger the more people who are vaccinated”, Tegnell said.
At the same time, age is also seen as a factor, as the median age of those fully vaccinated who have died since 1 July has been over 80 years old. Yet, cases of infection in elder care have recently increased to their highest levels since February, and the proportion of the elderly among those infected has risen to some of the highest levels since mass testing began. Since the start of the pandemic, Sweden, a nation of over 10 million, has seen 1.16 million cases with nearly 15,000 fatalities. Nearly 65 percent of the Swedish population is fully vaccinated.
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