Originally Posted by
percysmith
Make no mistake, I too would like it to happen.
Ideally, everyone who can take the vaccine should take it.
There are certain exclusions - my mother has cardiac problems and her cardio told her to wait. She legitimately belongs to the 30%.
So what do we do with the remaining 70%? The sceptics, the anti-vaxxers and frankly, the lazy?
a) throw everyone in jail who doesn't take the vaccine by 30 June 2021, PAP style?
b) open the border, regardless of uptake ratio, and tell the residents of Australia to fend for themselves?
I find both of these options un-Australian and less preferable to keeping the borders sealed until enough residents of Australia take up vaccines of their own free will, or the closed border strategy fails, whichever is earlier.
Vaccines will always be voluntary, but by rejecting the opportunity to take independently-verified mass-produced drugs that drastically increase your immunity to the virus, then you are taking matters into your own hands ergo agreeing to fend for yourself. That's not
telling them to 'fend for themselves', that's giving them the choice to do so. Australia is living in anything
but a normal world. The country is in a parallel universe and, as others have raised above, it can't go on forever, and that's why places like HK (as I'm sure you know) are already reducing quarantine requirements for the vaccinated.
Besides, it would be un-Australian to wait for the closed border 'policy' (if you can call it that? Frankly it's an attempt to reject the existence of a highly contagious virus that will exist in some form for decades to come) to fail and, frankly a failure of utilitarian policy-making. The hardships the maintenance of the closed border policy will bring to Australians far outweigh those that COVID will bring to the tiny minority who will actively choose
not to take the vaccine and end up with COVID...
Frankly the whole thing is pathetic.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...still-popular/
Those of us overseas don't matter anymore. We're entitled for expecting to be able to return to our homeland in a manner that isn't nonsensical and ridiculously expensive (and apparently we're all rich and can afford it anyway...)