Beijing (pop. 24 million) was the site of an absolutely remarkable happening. This may very well be a first in the history of communist China.
Beijing’s city leadership had rolled out a first-in-China COVID vaccine mandate. The policy made boosters mandatory for some professions, while entry to busy public venues like movie theaters and gyms was restricted to the vaccinated. This was all in line with China’s Zero COVID initiative.
Adam Minter reports:
The public reacted quickly, with many residents turning to social media to declare the mandate an illegal usurpation of their rights. Beijing’s response was just as quick: Less than 48 hours after announcing the policy, the city government rescinded it.
The Chinese government backed down in the face of public pressure? This is a government that welded doors shut during the early stages of the COVID spread and actually starved people to death. This is a government that attempts to tightly control any and all information that appears on the Internet. This was a government that crushed dissent in Tiananmen Square in 1989 by having tanks roll over people.
When my wife and I visited there several years ago, access to Internet sites outside of China was abysmally slow. This was undoubtedly due to information firewalls that parsed what data was being accessed. Despite this, we saw that information does seep into the public discourse.
China may be ruled by a communist hierarchy but China has become more of a capitalist society. Again my wife and I saw that when we were there. Such loosening of the reins by the communist leaders has created a populist dilemma where the people want the better things in life and are less likely to submit to arbitrary dictates of government authorities.
The beginning of the end for all communist regimes has been the rising expectations of the populace. Is this the beginning of the end for China’s communist leadership?
One last thought here. The Chinese people in Beijing got a ridiculous mandate reversed in less than 48 hours. There are still cities in this country employing these same measures. What does that say about the citizens of this country?
News from Australia, another outpost of COVID dictatorships. The need to coerce the people into getting jabbed is never more obvious than the reports from New South Wales about COVID.
The Covid report from New South Wales Health for the week of July 10–16 said: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly overrepresented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19.” Just two pages later, the same report gave the number of unvaccinated people admitted to hospital and ICU as zero.
The sentence is repeated verbatim in the latest weekly report for August 7–13, with the number of unvaccinated people admitted to hospital just one and to ICU zero. By contrast, of those whose vaccination status was known, 98.7 percent of Covid patients admitted to hospital and 98.2 percent admitted to ICU during the week (and 84.8 percent of the dead) had received two or more vaccine doses.
Even by the standards of public health authorities across the world gaslighting the people in order to nudge them into docile – and often performative – compliance with official edicts, this level of internal contradiction of narrative with data is breathtaking.
Thakur is being extraordinarily polite in his description of the contradictions present in these government reports. The statements about those who are not jabbed are bald-faced lies. These statements are little more that fake news. They are a fraud being perpetrated on the Australian public.
New Zealand health officials are seeing double the number of people feeling cough, fever, illness, this year over last year.
And the country is SEVEN TIMES sicker than in 2019 before the pandemic!
Maybe all the masking, isolating, social distancing, and pushing the garbage vaccines didn’t work?
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enacted the most draconian restrictions in the world last year.
Will Jacinta Ardern ever be held accountable for all the damage she has done to her country?
The dictators in Australia (yes, there are more than one) have continued to impose their will on the people regardless of what the law says. In the Australian state of Queensland, hundreds of teachers face incremental pay cuts over the next 20 weeks for refusing to obey a mandate to get jabbed.
This comes in the face of mountains of evidence that show that the COVID jab is useless. It does not stop transmission. It does not stop infection. And it makes the illness worse for most people who are unfortunate enough to contract COVID after being jabbed.
Education Department assistant director-general in human resources Anne Crowley penned a letter telling hundreds of teachers who refused to get the jab that they would face incremental pay cuts over 20 weeks.
“Your conduct in failing to comply with the direction posed a risk to the health and safety of your co-workers, students and members of the public which was mitigated only by the steps taken by the department to suspend you from duty.”
The woman is looney tunes. Boosted people are putting the public at risk if a serious risk actually exists. It is proven that they carry higher viral loads and are more likely to be asymptomatic for longer periods of time.
This action also appears to violate the Public Services Act which provides for full pay in these kinds of situations.