Antivaxx Groundhog Day

The Harold Ramis comedy Groundhog Day is considered one of the greatest comedies of all time, and was one of the most successful films of 1993. In it, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a self-absorbed weatherman sent to Punxsutawney to cover the Groundhog Day festivities there. He finds himself caught in a time loop, forced to live Groundhog Day over and over again, until he learns to become a better person. Some people have tried to estimate how long he was in the time loop. Estimates vary, but the best appear to be around 30 years.

We appear to be stuck in a antivaxx time loop, where things repeat over and over. I’ve mentioned Theresa Mulderij, who was dismissed for refusing to be vaccinated. Articled Clerk Dale Dryden was fired from Duncan Korabie Attorneys at the end of August 2021 after refusing to be vaccinated. Duncan Korabie, the firm’s owner, has various conditions and introduced a mandatory vaccination policy. Dryden protested, and used antivaccination propaganda in his response. Korabie then issued an ultimatum, and when Dryden refused to be vaccinated, dismissed him.

Dryden was awarded a settlement as Korabie failed to follow procedure, but his dismissal was upheld.

When Betty White and Bob Saget passed away earlier this year, antivaxxers tried to link their deaths to COVID vaccination. White had suffered a stroke six days prior to her death, and an autopsy has now revealed that Saget had fallen and banged his head, leading to a fatal brain bleed. Undeterred, antivaxxers are now trying to connect the death of Shane Warne from a heart attack to COVID vaccination.

Warne’s death is undeniably sad for his fans, friends and family. However, he was an overweight smoker in his fifties who lived a sedentary lifestyle and followed an unhealthy diet. He was thus a prime candidate for the heart attack that killed him.

Last year, I wrote about Schalk van der Merwe, an antivaxx lawyer who filed papers to get mask and vaccine mandates overturned. He’s now facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder.

Finally, and most Groundhog Dayish of all, Rolf Hazlehurst has lost another Court Case about vaccines causing his son’s autism.

Rolf Hazlehurst is an attorney and the father of Yates Hazlehurst, one of the test cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceedings in Vaccine Court. As a quick refresher, numerous families were seeking compensation before Vaccine Court, believing that the MMR had caused their children’s autism. Yates Hazlehurst, Michelle Cedillo, and Colten Snyder were the three children used in the first test cases. All lost. All three appealed the verdicts, and lost again. The Hazlehurst and Cedillo families appealed to Federal Circuit Court, and lost yet again. Recently, Rolf Hazlehurst reactivated his suit against the physician who vaccinated Yates, alleging that by giving him a vaccine, the physician was responsible for giving Yates autism, and was guilty of malpractice. The jury rejected the suit, and the case never even assessed the causation question.

I understand Rolf’s pain. And yet I want to grab him, shake until his teeth rattle, and tell him to stop. His crusade to prove that MMR is responsible for Yates’s autism is not only futile, it is now causing significant harm to his family. He needs to drop it.

Integrity and Hypocrisy

There is a huge fight going on at Spotify.

Joe Rogan is a successful podcaster with whom Spotify signed a lucrative contract. He is also an antivaxxer. And now, several other people who have deals with Spotify are saying either Rogan goes, or they go.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were the first. Both contracted polio as children and still have sequelae from their illnesses. They have been joined by, among others, David Crosby, Young’s bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

I hope that Spotify will listen, although I’m sceptical it will. Having said that, I have the greatest respect for the artists who are boycotting Spotify and potentially losing out on money.

And on a related note, despite myself, I have a lot of respect for Novak Djokovic.

But Jungle, I hear you say, you condemned him for being antivaxx. Yes I did, but Djokovic has decided he will not attend any tournament that requires him to be vaccinated. His ranking has dropped and he is potentially losing a lot of winnings.

One of the vices I can’t stand is hypocrisy. Djokovic has shown he’s prepared to live up to his values and pay the price, not just figuratively, but literally as well.

I respect anyone who lives their values, even if I know they’re wrong, and even if I find those values abhorrent, like here. Djokovic has shown integrity. And I respect that, no matter how idiotic I find his beliefs.

Profanity alert – antivaxxers fucked around and are now finding out

When some idiot suffers the consequences of their dumbfuck actions, the response can be sadness, or gleeful schadenfreude. I’m feeling a fair amount of the latter, and some of the former for antivaxx shitheads.

Czech Folk Singer Hana Horká didn’t want to get vaccinated but needed an immunity certificate, so she deliberately contracted COVID.

And died.

Jan Rek, her grieving son, is now urging people to learn from his mother’s mistake and get vaccinated. He is also furious with the antivaxxers whom he holds responsible for misleading her and causing her death.

Singer Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) also doubted the vaccine and has also died of COVID complications.

On a local note, a woman who refused to get vaccinated had her lawsuit against her employer dismissed at the CCMA. According to the verdict, Theresa Mulderij “refused to participate in the creation of a safe working environment”.

The facts of the case are as follows: Theresa Mulderij was a business and training officer for the Goldrush Group, which implemented a mandatory vaccination policy. Mulderij did not want to get vaccinated, and initially approached her doctor to get a medical exemption, but was turned down. She then applied for an exemption (Goldrush’s vaccination policy had this provision) but this was also refused as she interacted with co-workers daily. She lodged an internal appeal and was denied again. She still refused to get vaccinated and was dismissed. She then went to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) to either be reinstated or get a settlement.

At the CCMA, Mulderij advanced several typical spurious antivaxx claims. Commissioner Lungile Matshaka rejected them all as the bullshit they were. He ruled that Goldrush’s mandatory vaccination policy had followed all required steps and was sound. He also took into account a memo by Deputy Judge President Roland Sutherland to other Judges:

There has been, as yet, only mild protest that this (no vaccination no entry policy) violates freedom of choice … in my view, this is the wrong question. The proper question is whether or not an individual is sufficiently civic-minded to appreciate that a duty of care is owed to colleagues and others with whom contact is made to safeguard them from harm. If one wishes to be an active member of a community then the incontrovertible legitimate interest of the community must trump the preferences of an individual.

From Sutherland’s memo

Companies have a right to demand that their employees be vaccinated. Mulderij found out the hard way.
An article by Charles Webster sums up the selfishness of the antivaxx perfectly.

They’re not asking for choice. They’re fighting for special privilege on the basis of poor science. They want the privilege associated with the driver’s licence/vaccine without having to take the test/vaccinate.

Charles Webster’s article on the EWN website

Quite right.

On antivaxxer vileness, and consequences

The vileness of antivaxxers knows no boundaries.

They are claiming that the deaths of Betty White and Bob Saget were both due to the COVID vaccine. Betty White’s agent has now stated that White had a stroke six days before her death. Saget’s death is currently being investigated.

On a more positive note, Novak Djokovic lost his appeal against the cancellation of his visa and has been deported. He is also likely to be barred from entering Australia for the next three years. He had a report claiming he’d caught COVID and didn’t need to be vaccinated — a report that indicates both manipulation of the results and false statements concerning when the tests occurred. You should have just got vaccinated, No-Vax (his new nickname).

Another misbehaving sportsman is Antonio Brown, who lied about getting vaccinated, potentially exposed everyone around him to COVID, and was dismissed from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (but not for the COVID stuff). You would think that sportsmen would know that vaccines are essential to prevent disease and that their health is essential to perform at their peak.

It is good to see consequences for dishonesty.

Three more news stories from the planet Antivaxxia – updated

Firstly, an antivaccine dentist in Italy was busted trying to use a fake arm to get out of being vaccinated.
The nurse was suspicious as the arm didn’t match the skin tone of the rest of his body, and the fake arm felt cold and not like flesh to the touch. The dentist has apparently had a change of heart and now supports vaccination, but the fake arm was a ridiculous idea.

Secondly, and far more alarmingly, German Police report they thwarted an antivaxx plan to assassinate Michael Kretschmer, the state premier of Saxony.

Thirdly, an employee of O&M Pty Ltd, a construction and maintenance company based in Gippsland, Victoria, had his claim of being unlawfully stood down thrown out by the Fair Work Commission, after he sent the Commission “proof” of his vaccination status that included a link to a fake certificate website.

The Victorian worker had taken his fight to the workplace tribunal after he stopped getting shifts with O&M Pty Ltd, a construction and maintenance company based in Gippsland, Victoria, earlier this year.

But things went awry for the employee mid-conference as [the adjudicator] asked to see the proof he had sent to O&M, discovered the website, and declared his certificate may have been a fraud.

From the linked article

Two news stories from the planet Antivaxxia

Maori Tribe tells COVID antivaxxers to stop using the Haka

Now there’s a sentence I never imagined reading.

“Haka” means “chant” in Maori. There are numerous hakas, but the most famous is “Kama Te”, the one performed by the All Blacks at the start of their international Rugby Tests.

The Ngati Tribe of the Maori Nation is recognised as having the rights to “Kama Te”, and they have demanded that antivaxxers stop using it during protests. Not only that, they have declared their support for vaccination and reminded everyone that pandemics have killed literally thousands (if not millions) of Maoris in years past.

In South Africa, an antivaxx lawyer named Schalk van der Merwe has filed papers to have vaccine and mask mandates overturned.

Van der Merwe said it all started with a video on social media about 3 700 jab injuries reported in Secunda.

“There are already about 5 000 people now whom we know of with jab injuries. It’s everything from headaches through to people who have organ failure,” he said.

From the linked article

Oh boy.

I’ve seen this nonsense before, and I know exactly how it’s going to end. The Judges are going to demand that van der Merwe bring forward these “vaccine injury victims”, and then they’re going to demand proof that the vaccines caused these injuries. And then…

Crickets

Every single time antivaxxers have made these claims, it has ended with them having egg all over their faces. This is going to be van der Merwe’s fate if the Courts agree to hear his case.

An open letter to the numbskulls at the SABC TV Licence Department

Dear Brain Injury patients,
Earlier this week, I received a letter from you dated the 13th of September* stating that there was no television licence for my physical address. I was both astonished and angered to receive it. Astonished, as I have an email from you dated the 6th of September, confirming your receipt of my payment and renewing my licence to September 2022, and angered, as yet again I am required to sort out the issues caused by YOUR thundering incompetence.

I moved into my flat in October 2008. I knew I would have to take out a television licence to purchase a television, so I did so at the store where I bought my furniture. Since then, I have paid the renewal fee every year and have the payment records to confirm it. You even originally sent renewal letters to my physical address, so I am utterly bewildered as to why my address was not in your records.

Most exasperatingly, this is not the first time I have had to fix matters caused by you peabrains. Back in 2009, lawyers’ letters began arriving for the previous owner of my flat over his licence nonpayment. At first, I returned them with a note that he had emigrated, but when they persisted, I wrote the lawyers’ offices notifying them he had emigrated. The letters then stopped.

And started again a year later.

I had to send a very irritated letter back before they stopped for good.

Finally, in 2014, after I had been living here for six years, a letter from the SABC arrived for the previous owner. Given that, by 2014, I had paid my licence fee six times, I would have thought you morons would have by then worked out that he no longer lived here. I guess that was hopelessly optimistic of me.

I understand that less than a quarter of households pay their tv licence fees, and that you want to increase that number. However, antagonising someone like me who has been diligent in paying his licence fees is not the way to do it. It just leads me to wonder why I bothered. It also suggests you’re inept, and unable to catch those who don’t pay.

Kindly get your act together, you herd of braying jackasses. Before you alienate even more honest payers.

*The South African Post Office is absolutely terrible, but that’s another matter.

A vaccine against malaria has been approved.

Throughout our species’ existence, the deadliest animal has been the female anopheles mosquito. Malaria spread by its bite has killed many times more people than all other animals (including other humans) combined. Now, that is about to change.
Last week, for the first time ever, a vaccine against malaria (RTS,S/AS01) was approved for use by the World Health Organisation (WHO). It has the trade name Mosquirix and its development was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

“Compared with other childhood vaccinations, RTS,S has only modest efficacy, preventing about 30% of severe malaria cases after a series of four injections in children under the age of five.”

From a news article.

For millenia, the only defence against malaria was to have one copy of the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia. People with only one copy would not develop sickle-cell anaemia, but if the oxygen level of a red blood cell dropped below a certain level, because, say, it contained a malarial parasite that was using it all up, it would sickle. This would kill the parasite. The price of this was that some people would inherit two copies of the gene, one from each parent, and develop full blown sickle-cell anaemia.

For the last few centuries, quinine has been used to treat malaria. Extracts from the bark of the cinchona tree were used as far back as 1632 to treat malaria. Even before then, the South American Quechua tribe used it to halt shivering. Quinine was isolated from the bark in 1820 by Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou. It remained the main medicine against malaria until the 1940’s, when other anti-malarial drugs like doxycycline, artemisinin, Pyrimethamine, Proguanil, Sulfonamides and Atovaquone/proguanil were developed, among others.

I have twice had to take a course of chloroquine tablets. They are utterly revolting and I don’t understand why they weren’t wrapped in gelatin to spare people’s tastebuds. Quinine also gives tonic water its bitter flavour.

Although the effectiveness is low, the hope is more research and development will increase its effectiveness.

Such. Utter. Stupid.

Is anyone else as done with COVID antivaxxers as I am? If at all possible, they have made things even worse in the last few months than they already were.

The refusal of antivaxxers to take the vaccines has seen thousands of them wind up in ICU’s around the World. And now, this has started to harm others.

Because there are so many people in ICU’s and hospital beds with COVID, hospitals have been forced to turn away patients as they have no room. And now people are dying. Ray DeMonia is one. He suffered a cardiac emergency but was unable to get treatment in time. 43 hospitals were contacted before one with an available bed was found.

Forty three hospitals.
That means forty two hospitals had no space.

Daniel Wilkinson is another. He had gallstone pancreatitis, and would have lived had there been space available at nearby hospitals. But again, there were no empty beds close enough to him.

If instead of bitching and moaning about their rights to be disease vectors, antivaxxers and antimaskers had kept up their end of the social contract, DeMonia and Wilkinson would still be alive. I doubt they’ll be the last to die because no hospital beds are available.

Adding another irritating wrinkle, some pillocks have been using ivermectin to treat/prevent COVID. Not only is there no good evidence it works, some of these morons have wound up in hospital from ivermectin overdoses, putting an additional strain on an already overloaded system.

Nicki Minaj, in a massively ignorant tweet that has earned her a suspension from Twitter, claimed that a friend of her cousin was due to get married but his testicles swelled up from the vaccine, leading his fiancée to call off the wedding. When asked about this, medical experts including Doctor Fauci pointed out that that was not plausible, and that a Sexually Transmitted Infection is a much more likely explanation. It also explains why the fiancée called off the wedding.

Stick to rapping, Nicki. At least you’re good at that.

The vaccines reduce breakthrough infections, hospitalisations and deaths. There is no longer an excuse for those who can get them to do so.

Dear antivaxxers and antimaskers

I am tired of your entitlement and your idiocy. You have got so much wrong, on so many levels, you have gone through wrong and out the other side, then looped round and crashed into wrong again.

First things first. Demanding you be vaccinated to take part in certain activities is not a violation of your rights and it is ludicrous of you to claim otherwise. Ditto wearing a mask. The Court Case Jacobsen vs. Massachusetts confirmed that governments are allowed to mandate vaccines. That was in the U.S. in 1905. There is no reason to suppose it would be different anywhere else in the World.

Comparing yourselves to jews under the Nazis or black people under Jim Crow would be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive. They were unable to change their ethnicity. You are choosing to risk others by refusing to take actions that prevent the spread of diseases. In fact, when one group made that argument in Court, the astonished and disgusted Judge correctly rejected it as “reprehensible”. I would have gone a lot further than that Judge and used much stronger language.

Wearing a mask can be unpleasant at times. In fact, I had to shave my beard off because wearing a mask over it felt too itchy. But stating you are unable to breathe while wearing a mask? Please. I have seen people at gym working out with masks on. I don’t buy that for even a millisecond.

You say you’re healthy and won’t get infected? How do you know? You can be infectious for days before you show any symptoms.

Me, holding my COVID Vaccination card. I was vaccinated on the 11th of August at Discovery Place

You say you refuse to get vaccinated because you don’t want to be part of a medical experiment? You are doubly wrong.
Firstly, all the vaccines have gone through several rounds of trials. They can no longer be termed experimental.
Secondly, you are part of an experiment. You are in the control group. And you are getting the worst of it.
The results in the field are coming back, and the vaccines are working. The vaccinated are far less likely to get breakthrough infections, far less likely to need hospitalisation, and far less likely to die. In the past few weeks, I’ve read numerous stories of people who refused vaccines getting COVID and dying. Near the end, almost all bitterly regretted their antivaccine stance and urged others to not repeat their mistake. Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, has fought bitterly against mask and vaccine mandates. He is now infected, and Texas has a frightening per capita rate of COVID infections.

Ultimately, though, this isn’t about you or your rights. It’s about a disease. A disease that cares nothing for rights. A disease that has killed thousands and will kill thousands more as long as fools like you refuse to hold up your end of the social contract and take precautions to prevent its spread.