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Bonus Rant: Vaccines & Lockdowns, Oh My! · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Good day humans, how you doing?
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How you feeling?
0:07
How you fairing?
0:08
I'm chipper this week, at least as chipper as you could be expected to be whilst in lockdown.
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I'm chipper for a few reasons, one, we are smashing it at vaccinations.
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Australia is vaccinating at a higher rate than the UK and the US ever did, significantly
0:27
higher in terms of the proportion of the population each day who are getting vaccinated, so Aussie
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Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie go us and secondly, I feel sort of the same way
0:39
that I did in March of 2020.
0:45
In a strange way, a certain piece came over me as the pandemic truly erupted in the sense
0:51
that I was early on the pandemic train.
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I knew what was coming before most of my peers and certainly significantly before everybody
1:02
else did, not because I'm a soothsayer or a prognosticator extraordinaire but simply because
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I was a little bit tuned in with data wonky people and journals and epidemiologists
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and it was clear to me several weeks ahead of everybody else that this Wuhan thing was
1:20
not something to be messed with, this was going to change the whole world.
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And while I knew that and most people were treating it still as a bit of a joke, it was
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frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, isolating, anxiety inducing and then when the whole
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world began to fall apart in March and we entered a lockdown and everybody was shitting
1:48
themselves at the supermarket and people were disinfecting every apple before they put
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into their mouths and we didn't know what the hell was going on.
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A certain sense of palm descended on me and I felt like okay, this is it, I knew the
2:05
train was coming, the train is here, now at least we're all on the train together, we're
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going somewhere, I know not where but at least we're on, we're on board, I'm not the
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crazy person standing on the train platform screaming at the heavens anymore, like the
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train came and now we just have to ride it together.
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And there was a certain peace in that and similarly at the moment, the fact that New South
2:30
Wales's coronavirus outbreak is completely unendable and we are not going to be able to get
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back to COVID-0 no matter how much we want to and that elimination is now off the table,
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gives me a certain sense of tranquility.
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I say this with all of the necessary humanitarian caveats that every person who gets sick from
2:55
coronavirus in New South Wales is a tragedy, every death is a tragedy, etc., that being said,
3:02
there are other values in the world such as people's mental health, such as people's
3:07
ability to make a living and not have the businesses that they've poured their life, their
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life's work into disintegrate before their very eyes because they're in lockdown.
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And I do feel like the train has arrived in which Australia will be dragged whether it
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wants to or not into dealing with COVID and the naysayers who would have held us back
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and turned us into a, well, not turned us into maintained our status as a hermit kingdom
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in perpetuity now don't have to be argued with because they can't make their case because
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there is no going back anyway because even if we wanted to, we couldn't.
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Up until this latest outbreak, I've felt somewhat dejected and depressed that I'm going
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to have to have arguments with people who will always sound like they have the moral
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high ground because they'll always sound like they care about saving lives more than I do
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because I'll always be able to say if even one person dies as a result of your reckless
4:04
policies of reopening the international border, the blood will be on your hands.
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Now I don't have to give a shit about such nonsense.
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I can just say, well, you can live in your fantasy world in which Australia will remain
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insulated from a global pandemic forever.
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Meanwhile, I will live in the real world where coronavirus is here and is not going away.
4:27
Another bit of confusion about last week's rant.
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If you haven't heard the first 25 minutes of last week's episode in which I interviewed
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James Matheson, before I got to the interview, I did 25 minutes talking about lockdowns.
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You should go back and listen to that.
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It's worth hearing.
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I was not incredibly articulate but I think I was passionate and channeling a sense that
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a lot of Australians have that we need to get out of this extreme knee jerk lockdown
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mindset that clamors towards safety, the safety of having zero cases without putting into
5:11
context the vaccination rate, the hospitalisation rate, the fatality rate and the impact on all
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the rest of our lives that a pursuit of COVID-0 can have.
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Many of you have hit me up on Twitter and elsewhere saying, well, I think you're being
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a little bit dramatic.
5:32
The official plan in Australia that national cabinet has signed off on, national cabinet
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is the collection of state premieres, which are like governors, like American governors,
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and the prime minister, it was a body that was only created specifically to address the
5:48
coronavirus pandemic, but now seems to be with us to stay.
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I think that's a good thing.
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It's a good way for state and territory leaders and federal leaders to get on the same page
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about big issues that cross borders.
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The plan that national cabinet has signed off on says that once we get to 70 or 80% vaccination,
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we will start opening up and that we will transition from phase 1 to phase 2 in which COVID-0
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will no longer be the goal and lockdowns will only take place in very localised areas
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and extreme situations, so what you're calling for, Josh, is really what the plan already
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is.
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Yeah, I don't buy it.
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I don't buy it because although that's the plan on paper, that is not yet the plan in
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the brains of the majority of Australians.
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If you pulled someone up on the streets of Tasmania or Western Australia and you said,
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are you aware that the plan is that within the next few months you are going to be open,
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your state is going to be open, your community is going to be open to having thousands of
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new coronavirus cases a day and that's going to be okay.
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I don't think the average Tasmania or West Australia or really any Australian is either
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aware that that's the plan or certainly not supportive of that being the plan and would
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be totally freaked out because they haven't yet made the connection between our case
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numbers don't necessarily mean illness and death as long as you can get vaccination
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numbers high enough.
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And that's certainly not the language that you're hearing from the premieres of states
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like Tasmania and Western Australia.
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And I should also hasten to add here that that is not actually the plan even on paper.
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If you actually read the Doerty plan which is what national cabinet has based its assumptions
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on, there is no sudden freedom day that kicks in at 70% or 80% vaccination.
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It's a very slow, very gradual de-escalation of lockdowns that begins around 70% vaccination.
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And the assumption in the plan was that we would have very low case numbers in Australia,
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case numbers in the 20s or 30s a day, not the 800 plus or 700 plus that we're currently
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seeing.
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Whether or not that changes the plan as a matter of some debate, I'm not enough of an epidemiologist
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to know.
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The prime minister was on insiders on ABC TV over the weekend and was asked this by the
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host David Spears.
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He said, look, where where you start doesn't make any difference to where you end up.
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So the Doerty plan is about ending up at a place where you're not having lockdowns
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anymore because you've got 70 to 80% of the eligible population vaccinated.
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It doesn't matter whether you start at 800 daily cases, 2000 daily cases or 30 daily cases.
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But then I hear from other epidemiologists and infectious disease experts who say, well,
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it does matter because one of the other assumptions of the Doerty report is that the contact
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traces are on top of community spread.
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At the moment, New South Wales is just busting against the seams.
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I mean, our contact traces are like they've been stuffed into a fat man's pants.
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The buckle is straining.
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They're holding it together.
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We don't seem to be going up, certainly not at the exponential rates that you would expect
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to see given the infectiousness of the virus, the contagiousness of the virus.
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By the way, this is another thing that I should add as an aside, which is I hear a lot of
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people in Sydney saying, I don't understand it.
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Well, lockdown, we're obeying the rules and the numbers keep going up, up, up.
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Maybe, honey, sweetie, you do not understand exponential growth.
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The numbers are not going up, up, up, the way that coronavirus or pandemic infections
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go up, up, up, up.
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This virus has a 1.3X infectiousness, which means that if you're going with 1.3, then
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after what is it, two or three days, you've doubled and then the double has doubled after
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another two or three days, and then the double, double has doubled after another two or
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three days.
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So if you started at 400 cases a day, pretty soon it's 816, 132, 164, 12,800 a day, we're
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not seeing that.
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And so the lockdown is working in that respect, masks are working, social distancing is working
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and contact tracing is working.
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And all of those things have to be humming along and working in the background for the
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assumptions of the Doherty Plan to make any sense.
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And when I see people saying, oh, you're attacking a straw man, Josh, you know, this
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is all in the report anyway, there are no premieres who want zero COVID forever.
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They're just following the national plan, like I've got a tweet here from someone who
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says, there's a war going on against premieres who see COVID zero as a long term strategy.
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Problem is, there are no premieres that see COVID zero as a long term strategy, to which
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I would direct the kind gentleman back to perhaps the words of John Maynard Keynes talking
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about the best economic policy for the long term when he says, in the long term, we're
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all dead.
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Yes, what is the long term strategy?
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Okay, maybe COVID zero isn't the official long term strategy for the West Australian
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Premier.
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If by long term, you mean when my grandchildren are old, but it's certainly the indefinite
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strategy within the only term that I care about, which is the short to medium term in
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which we all actually live our real lives.
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So my concern is that a plan that leaders don't defend and the public don't really understand
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and certainly don't support is not much of a plan, especially in an environment in which
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goal posts are constantly changing.
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I mean, Delta has upended everything.
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Delta is not going to be the last variant.
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There'll be new variants coming along all the time and the less vaccinated the globe
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is, the swifter, more virulent or more contagious variants will be to arrive on our shores.
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And it strikes me that until we start thinking more maturely about aggressively abandoning
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COVID zero and finding ways to live with the virus, there will always be a temptation
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for the more parochial insular and fearful premiers, like the West Australian Premier,
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to find reasons to misinterpret the plan, to fudge the plan, to postpone the plan.
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I mean, you have to be tough at some stage to actually willingly allow people to get
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infected with a pathogen that could make them really sick or kill them.
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I mean, that takes that takes a politician of enormous courage.
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And luckily, we kind of haven't had to have that courage in New South Wales.
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That's sort of what I mean about being somewhat tranquil and optimistic.
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We haven't had to muster the strength of will to do what it was clear that countries
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like Australia and New Zealand would need to someday do, which is a laucarone virus into
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the community.
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New South Wales has in a strange, crazy, perverse, inverted paradoxical way benefited from
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the fact that we didn't have to take a tough choice because it just happened to us.
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In states like Western Australia, which is still at COVID zero, they are going to have
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to take a massive moral, bold decision to open up to the pandemic.
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And if it would have been tough for someone as economically rationalist as the New South
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Wales Premier to do, it's going to be impossible for someone as spineless as the Western Australian
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Premier to do.
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Anyway, that's why I still have worries about this sort of, I suppose the creeping
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soft authoritarianism that's going to have to accompany an ongoing COVID zero approach
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in places like Western Australia and Tasmania and especially Victoria.
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I mean, the images that you're seeing relayed of Australia in other countries around
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the world are shocking and embarrassing.
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There is a lot of misinformation in the states and elsewhere about what's going on in Australia.
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I mean, I saw a tweet, oh my goodness, let me find this, I saw a tweet from the entering
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chief of a newspaper called The Times of Sweden, which sounds very important, but when
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you go to the Times of Sweden, Twitter account it only has 2,351 followers and the articles
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are all sort of fairly alt-righty kind of things like parents, citizens of a rest, pedophile
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who sexually attacked their 11-year-old son with a photo of a young man of colour with
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his face blacked out.
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What does the Bible say about immigration is another article?
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Swedes turn up to defend statue of famous botanist from being destroyed by far left extremists,
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so this gives you a sense of the Times of Sweden.
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Anyway, the entering chief of the Times of Sweden, his name's Peter, well, Peter Emanuelson,
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and he tweeted, Australia is building a quarantine camp, sending dissidents to 8 months jail
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and tear-gassing children.
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They went from a democracy to full-blown dictatorship in one year.
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If it can happen there, it can happen here, warning for us all.
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To which I replied, what are you talking about, you strange man, I'm in Sydney, I just
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worked out in the park and I'm about to go shopping, who are the dissidents being jailed.
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Turns out he's talking about the jail sentence in Victoria for the organiser of the Victorian
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anti-lockdown protest.
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Eight months was the maximum term that the guy received.
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It was a minimum period of three months, so he'll actually serve three months.
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In addition to inciting unrest, which was one of the charges, he also broke a swag of
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health orders.
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He travelled across a border that was closed between Queensland and New South Wales.
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He apparently lied to police.
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Anyway, I don't agree, I don't think a person should do jail time for disobeying health
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orders or organising protests in a free society, but go from that to say that Australia has
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gone from a democracy to a full-blown dictatorship is a little bit exaggerated, I think maybe
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Peter of Sweden.
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He should maybe sit down and have a little cup of elderberry tea.
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Did they have elderberry tea in Sweden?
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He should have a little elderberry tea in some herring.
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Anyway, he's tweeting, Australia is more free when they were founded as a prison colony
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than they are today, and the most important tweet that I want to bring to you, which I
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think he's not alone in thinking, is all of a sudden he tweets, I've lost any interest
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in ever travelling to Australia.
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I think that's actually a sentiment that a surprisingly large number of people outside
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Australia are feeling.
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There is shock, I hear it from friends in the States about what Australia is doing.
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If you are shocked as a non-Australian by the severity of Australia's current lockdowns,
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let me just remind you of one thing, which is that Australia hasn't had the first wave
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of deaths from coronavirus yet, and hopefully never will.
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One person on Twitter did a pretty sick burn to this bloke from Sweden saying he's in
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Sweden.
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They just let all their elderly die last year, that's why he's so bitter about Australia
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and low death rates among the elderly and vulnerable, they're vaccinated now in Sweden
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and people are starting to wear masks.
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So yeah, I have friends in the United States where their children have not been to school
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in more than a year, their school-aged children.
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Australia has had schools open almost the entire time until this latest outbreak.
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My kids are still going to daycare, life was normal for 13 months in New South Wales.
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There are strict lockdowns now, not because we're more hysterical than the rest of the
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world, because we're out of sync with the rest of the world.
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We are doing now the things that the rest of the world was trying to grapple with last
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July when we had exited lockdown successfully, and we're starting to go back to normal life,
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and the rest of the world was still in a state of total calamity in chaos.
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So it's almost, there's something almost parmic about all of this, or like, you know,
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coronavirus is going to get you one way or another, it's just a question of when it's
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going to get you.
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And I think Australia was obviously right in hindsight to try to let coronavirus get
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us as late as possible when significant proportions of the population have vaccinated,
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and we understand a lot more about how to treat the disease and how to prevent the disease
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and the impact of masks and so on than the early days.
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So I mean, you'd much rather be Sydney grappling with an outbreak in August of 2021 than
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Lombardy in Northern Italy grappling with an outbreak in February of 2020.
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That was the policy, just postpone the inevitable as much as possible, and that was a wise one.
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So if you're outside of Australia scratching your head a little bit in bafflement about
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why we're being so heavy-handed, I'm the first person to say that the more heavy-handed
19:34
aspects are too heavy-handed, I think Victoria has gone a little bit cuckoo, clearly.
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I mean, if you listened to my rant last week, I'm clearly in favor of it being time now
19:45
to gradually open up and to focus more on what the future is going to look like than
19:50
on suppressing the virus right now, eliminating it, crushing it today with no heed for what
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we're going to do in two months' time.
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Nonetheless, the policy of trying to ensure that as few people get it as possible and using
20:06
a lockdown to do so is entirely consistent with being in a country where 30,000 people
20:12
are currently alive who would be dead had we had the fairly Lucy Goosey policy that most
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of Europe and the United States took towards the pandemic.
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So it's less a difference of really severity of policy.
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I think more of a difference of timing.
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We're just out of sync.
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I don't think it's more free to have no students in New York going to school for a year
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than it is to spend a year without the virus and then crack down on it for a few months
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as you race towards the vaccination finishing line.
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Speaking of the vaccination finishing line, I have two very useful tidbits of information
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which you can share with any vaccine hesitant friends if you wish that came across my desk
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this week.
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The first is that epidemiologists now agree that if there was ever, if there had ever
21:07
been a chance of eradicating coronavirus off the face of the earth through a mass vaccination
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program, that is now impossible thanks to Delta.
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So coronavirus is going to stay with us forever.
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That doesn't have to be a terrible thing.
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It will gradually get more and more contagious and it may gradually get a less and less
21:29
severe and certainly once you've either had the virus or been vaccinated, it will just
21:33
be something that circulates a bit like a cold or a flu and with booster shots that doesn't
21:38
need to be terrible at all over the longer term.
21:42
What it does mean though is that you are going to get coronavirus.
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You are going to get coronavirus.
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It's going to enter your nose, it's going to enter your lungs at some point.
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If you're vaccinated and strong, it might just, you might just breathe it straight out
22:02
and it won't infect you.
22:04
If for whatever other random reason it does infect you and you're vaccinated, it'll give
22:09
you a little cold probably and if you're unvaccinated, it will give you COVID and it will most
22:17
likely make you very sick for two weeks and it might kill you but it probably won't.
22:24
I say all of this which sounds fairly obvious.
22:28
Just to reinforce for vaccine hesitant people that if they're concerned about the vaccine
22:35
is that they don't want to introduce something unnatural into their body, they are going
22:40
to introduce something unnatural into their body.
22:43
You can see they're going to be a little tiny inert fragment of the virus that has been
22:50
designed by the world's most brilliant scientists to protect you and that has now been given
22:58
in billions of doses to hundreds of millions of people all over the world and it's worth
23:04
noting that no vaccine side effect has ever emerged more than two months after the
23:10
dosage was given.
23:12
Vaccines aren't things that have side effects that show up years later, they're things
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that you get side effects from in six to eight weeks, every other vaccine ever.
23:23
We've now been on a mass program of vaccination worldwide for at least six months places
23:29
like Israel and the US and UK even longer and billions of doses given no major side effects
23:37
are showing up just the usual ones that you would have expected based on the clinical
23:41
trials.
23:42
So if you have vaccine hesitant friends or if you're a bit vaccine hesitant and you're just
23:49
you sort of base it on a general sense that you're kind of want to want your body to be
23:54
a temple and you don't want to be ingesting weird unknown things into your body, you don't
24:02
want to be injecting yourself with all of these bizarre, this bizarre stuff, you want to
24:08
remain pure.
24:09
I've got some bad news for you, you're going to get coronavirus and coronavirus is not
24:13
natural, coronavirus is not pure, coronavirus doesn't honor your body as a temple, 10%
24:20
of people who get COVID end up with long COVID and many, many months later and most likely
24:25
years later.
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In fact, some for some people it is already more than a year, they're complaining of fatigue,
24:31
brain fog, muscle aches, massively reduced lung capacity, a horrible condition to have and
24:38
in roughly 10% of people who get COVID, they do start suffering these longer term symptoms.
24:42
So if your body is a temple, you don't have the choice of keeping it a temple, okay?
24:47
You're going to get one of two things either you're going to get something that the most
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brilliant people in modern science have calculated to make you as strong and resilient against
24:57
the virus as possible or you're going to get a crazy viral pathogen that's been vomited
25:05
out of the ass of a bat in China and you're going to ingest that into a respiratory system
25:10
and that's going to go and do its number on you.
25:13
There's nothing beautiful or natural or honorable about a coronavirus, about a mindless piece
25:21
of RNA that's just bouncing around through disgusting wild animals in the hills of China
25:27
or maybe designed in a lab who blay knows and then when it gets inside you, makes you incredibly
25:33
sick and might kill you and might give you devastating symptoms for the rest of your life.
25:40
There is no third option.
25:42
There is no I'm not going to get coronavirus and I'm not going to get the vaccine.
25:46
The science is in, the epidemiology is in, the virus is here, you're going to catch it.
25:52
You're either going to catch it or you're going to get the vaccine or you're going to get
25:55
the vaccine and catch it.
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Those are your only options, okay, temple princess.
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So next time you're talking to a temple princess, just be sure to remind them if we ever had
26:05
any idea that we might or any aspiration that we might get rid of coronavirus altogether,
26:10
you can park that now.
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We've looked at Delta, we're all going to get it.
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You're either going to get it after having the jab or you're going to get it after not
26:17
having the jab.
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Oh, but the jab is really new.
26:21
The jab is untested.
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I don't know what's going to happen if you get the jab because it was just made in a
26:25
weekend by some crazy scientist who works for an evil drug company and Bill Gates last
26:31
year.
26:32
Well, that was the second piece of information that passed over my desk this week that
26:36
I thought was really interesting.
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This comes from Eric Topol who if you don't follow on Twitter, you absolutely must American
26:42
scientist.
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Look, he has been very critical of drug companies in the past.
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This man is no sure for drug companies.
26:48
So can I just can we just put a can we just address the whole big farmer thing?
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Oh, who would trust big farmer?
26:55
Big farmer.
26:56
Yeah.
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Fine.
26:58
Don't trust big farmer.
26:59
Trust the data.
27:01
Trust the billion billions of doses that have already been provided and the absence of
27:06
any side effects.
27:08
Trust the hundreds of millions of people who have got the vaccine and are fine.
27:14
Trust the case numbers in the UK and the US in places that are vaccinated versus places
27:20
that are unvaccinated.
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Just look at the fatality rates in comparison.
27:24
Just look at the real world that that is what you should look at who cares if the drug
27:29
companies are motivated by nefarious profit making evil, empire bullshit that's irrelevant.
27:37
They might still have produced a good vaccine.
27:39
So anyway, this question about it being so new that you can't necessarily trust it.
27:43
I sort of believed that too.
27:46
I mean, I would I never quite knew how to respond to that because it is true that they were
27:49
made very, very quickly.
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I mean, the mRNA vaccines were apparently put together in like a weekend or a week basically.
27:56
I mean, I knew they already had the technology for the vaccines and the way they had to do
27:59
was slot the correct bit of the fragment of virus into it so that your amuse.
28:04
Oh, this is the other thing.
28:06
People I heard someone saying I want I want to be able to defend myself against the virus.
28:11
I want my body to do it.
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I don't want to be injected by something that's going to do it for me.
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I don't want to be injected by something artificial that's going to make the virus go away.
28:19
I want to be I want my natural defenses to protect me from the from coronavirus.
28:25
Hello, do you not know how a vaccine works?
28:30
The vaccine doesn't fight off the coronavirus.
28:35
The vaccine is an inert piece of coronavirus so that it can train your temple goddess body
28:44
to effectively respond to coronavirus when it sees it again.
28:48
It's not that the vaccine is coming in and interfering with your immune system in order
28:53
to take the virus on by itself.
28:56
It's training your immune system.
28:58
It's helping your immune system.
28:59
It doesn't undermine your immune system.
29:01
It bolsters your immune system in assists your immune system and understanding this thing
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that's completely novel and new that your immune system has never seen before.
29:09
That's what a virus does.
29:11
So it's not like either you are going to be resilient enough to stave off the virus
29:16
or you're going to have to be a wimp and accept some assistance from this vaccine, which
29:22
is going to do it for you.
29:23
The vaccine doesn't do anything to the virus.
29:24
The vaccine does something to your immune system.
29:26
It trains it.
29:27
It gives it a heads up.
29:29
So anyway, the mRNA vaccine, all they were all made in a weekend last year, Eric Topel
29:34
tweeted a timeline of mRNA research, which I will retweet, going all the way back to 1961
29:43
with the discovery of mRNA and its function.
29:46
And all the way up to today, as long ago as 2009, a dozen years ago, there were clinical
29:52
trials of mRNA therapeutics.
29:55
And in 2014, new clinical trials for cancer immunotherapies of mRNA, it really heats up
30:01
in 2017, then there are inhuman tests of personalized mRNA cancer vaccines.
30:06
So in the field of cancer research, these mRNA vaccines are not new.
30:11
We've had at least four years of them and more and about a dozen years of their use in
30:17
clinical trials and about four years of them being actually used in practice.
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It's just the one that actually happens to be the coronavirus vaccine that's new.
30:25
And there's nothing magical about that that we don't already know from looking at the
30:28
way that other vaccines impact on the human body.
30:32
And again, all of this is kind of moot because we've had a real world experiment of these
30:37
vaccines and they're being used successfully and safely all over the world.
30:42
But I just thought that those two facts might be helpful with your vaccine hesitant friends.
30:46
A, they're going to get coronavirus because we're not getting rid of it.
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So you're going to be putting something in your system.
30:52
You're going to be a vaccine or it's going to be a crazy virus that was just spewed out
30:56
of nature in some deranged way that is harmful to you.
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And B, the vaccine is not as new as everybody says it is.
31:06
Last thing I'll touch on here is hotel quarantine in Australia.
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Part of the opening up strategy is for the hotel situation in Australia to be replaced
31:20
by home self-isolation.
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At the moment, we still have the regime in place that was introduced last March 2020,
31:29
which is no foreigners can come to Australia.
31:32
No foreigner has arrived in Australia unless they got a special exemption since last March.
31:38
There's been some frustration about the fact that Hollywood celebrities managed to get
31:44
exemptions in order to come here and shoot movies and so on.
31:47
But I think that that's misguided frustration and it's totally legitimate for big money-making
31:53
enterprises to continue to be able to function in this country.
31:58
And the expectation has been that hotel quarantine system, which is for returning Australians
32:04
only and returning permanent residents only, where you are literally met at the airport
32:10
by federal police escorts and taken in a shuttle bus to a quarantine hotel where you have
32:17
to spend two weeks regardless of your vaccination status and regardless of where you're coming
32:21
from.
32:22
But that will be replaced by some less onerous system as Australia begins to open up.
32:28
Well, the good news is, follow the good news this week, see?
32:32
The good news is that new system is beginning to be trialled in South Australia.
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Initially, this week, it's just for people who would be going into the quarantine system
32:44
because they're coming from New South Wales and Victoria.
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But that's being expanded soon to international arrivals as well in South Australia.
32:51
It's a small scale thing.
32:52
They're going to be using some technological solutions, including apps and who knows what
32:58
to make sure that you're actually at home.
33:01
They'll be randomly calling the people to make sure they can prove that they're at home
33:05
and so on.
33:06
Anyway, this will be something that has to get worked out technologically about how you can
33:09
make sure that the people who are isolating at home are actually isolating at home.
33:15
But that heartens me because we are now in a ridiculous situation where we have many
33:24
hundreds of people getting infected with coronavirus every single day in Sydney.
33:29
And those people who are largely unvaccinated and definitively COVID positive are simply
33:39
told to stay at home for two weeks.
33:43
But another cohort of Sydney Ciders who are returning from abroad, if they are fully
33:50
vaccinated and they are tested and proven to be COVID negative, they still have to go
33:57
and be incarcerated in a hotel for two weeks before they can be released into the community.
34:03
So you've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Sydney Ciders who are unvaccinated and
34:08
COVID positive who are trusted to stay at home.
34:13
And another bunch of hundreds of Sydney Ciders who are vaccinated and COVID negative and get
34:20
locked up for two weeks in a quarantine hotel.
34:22
They might even have been coming from jurisdictions abroad where the background rate of coronavirus
34:27
is lower than it is in New South Wales.
34:30
You might have people coming from a pool, a community of infection that is less infectious
34:37
than New South Wales and they are vaccinated and they get tested in their negative and they
34:43
still have to spend two weeks in a hotel and they have to pay for it.
34:46
This is crazy.
34:47
Clearly, in New Zealand there's an outbreak of Delta and a big hello and my thoughts
34:54
are with you if you're in New Zealand because everybody's locked down in a serious, serious
34:59
lockdown there.
35:00
They go hard in New Zealand.
35:01
They do a full on Victorian style lockdown, not like you're in New South Wales.
35:07
And New Zealand, apparently, when you test positive, you don't just isolate at home.
35:13
You get moved into a facility.
35:16
Like talk about dictatorial stuff.
35:18
I mean, they are taken this absolutely serious.
35:20
You get moved.
35:21
I haven't read into this enough to be able to pine on whether or not it makes sense
35:24
epidemiologically to me.
35:26
But when you're positive, you get moved into a facility so that you're properly, quote
35:31
unquote, taken care of, but in reality, separated from the rest of the community.
35:35
So you can't infect anybody.
35:37
That would make at least some sense.
35:40
Like if people who support the current system of hotel quarantine for Australians who are
35:45
returning from abroad.
35:48
If they also said, well, OK, everyone who tests positive in Sydney should also be moved
35:53
into some kind of a quarantine situation.
35:56
I would oppose that policy because I don't think it respects human rights, but at least
36:00
I would understand the consistency of their position.
36:03
By contrast, it's completely inconsistent to say that very low-risk people coming from
36:08
low-risk places like Singapore and Taiwan and Fiji, who are coming back to Australia,
36:14
who are vaccinated and who are COVID negative have to be locked up.
36:19
But people who are unvaccinated and COVID positive who are in Sydney don't need to be.
36:24
That makes no sense at all.
36:25
The last thing I'll say is get vaccinated, get vaccinated, get vaccinated as fast as you
36:29
can wherever you can.
36:31
If you can't find a vaccination appointment, just try harder.
36:34
There is always going to be a way.
36:35
GPs have it.
36:36
They're a vaccination hubs.
36:38
Big borrower steel of vaccination.
36:41
Which has a 1 in a million chance of giving you a blood clot, apart from that, everything
36:45
is basically safe, apart from minor side effects.
36:49
Just do it.
36:50
It's not going to hurt you in the end.
36:51
The option is either live in permanent lockdown or get sick from coronavirus or get vaccinated.
36:58
Getting vaccinated is definitely the better of those three options.
37:03
I do want us all to remember that there is a risk in Australia of our desire for minimizing
37:14
the health consequences of coronavirus.
37:17
To lead to a soft authoritarianism where semi-dictitorial premieres surround themselves
37:23
with police chiefs and the military to make sure that they enforce rather arbitrary
37:29
and capricious public health orders that they deprive us of our right to protest, there
37:36
is a lot of bullshit outside of Australia in the rhetoric about how Australia has turned
37:40
into a dictatorship.
37:42
But that doesn't mean that there isn't a risk that is worth heating and that is worth
37:47
being mindful of as we try to stick the landing from phase one of the pandemic to the future
37:54
of Australia's relationship to the pandemic.
37:56
There is a very real risk that we will sleepwalk into a kind of soft authoritarianism that
38:03
is safe from a medical point of view but fundamentally illiberal.
38:08
So go and get vaccinated and in the meantime, obey the rules of the lockdown.
38:12
See you next time.