By Carl Beswick-
A third Covid vaccine dose will be compulsory for school staff in Victoria, Australia, it has been revealed.
James Merlino- the deputy Minister of Education in Australia announced on Sunday that Victorian school and early childhood staff will be required to get a booster shot by 25 February or within three months and two weeks of their second jab.
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Merlino said he thought the workforce would “enthusiastically respond” to the new mandate given that 99.7% of staff had been double-vaccinated by the end of term four in 2021.
The mandate means that all school staff who do not have a booster jab on top of a double vaccination, will be prohibited from working as teachers and will consequently lose their jobs. Most teachers in the town are double vaccinated and boosted , but there are a number that are still vaccine hesitant and haven’t been boosted.
Total death rates in Australia is 3,173- low by world standards, but Australia is one of the most risk averse countries in the world when it comes to Covid-19.
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NSW chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant also warned parents not to send their symptomatic children to school even if they have tested negative for Covid-19 on a rapid antigen test.
“Even if they have a negative test on the first day, please keep them home and do a repeat test. Only send them back if there is an alternate diagnosis,” she said on Sunday.
The Eye Of Media.Com has heard that some teachers who have been double vaccinated have refused to be boosted on the grounds that they were not informed in advance of their first vaccination that a booster will be required. They have objected to being boosted on the grounds of mistrust, meaning they will now lose their income.
NSW teachers federation president Angelo Gavrielatos has called for the government to go further by mandating primary school students also wear masks in the classroom, and opposed the government’s plan to have teachers who are asymptomatic close contacts return to work.
Australia has become a bit of an authorian government , dishing out mandatory policies to wide sections of its workforce, without much consideration for those who genuinely have private concerns about both the safety and efficacy of these vaccines. The expulsion of Novak Djokavic from the Australian open provides a perfect example of dictatorship, in light of the subsequent decision of the Australian government to permit him to participate in 2023. It begs the question what the fuss was all about.
The line of the Australian government has been that those who object to vaccination are endangering the health of others, a position that doesn’t fully hold up to scrutiny in terms of certainty of fact.
Vaccination shields the vaccinated individual from infection to a large degree but not a perfect one, but provides no assurance of protecting other vaccinated individuals, who should be relying on their own vaccination, from being infected.
The mandatory vaccination programme imposed on employees in various industries has in itself been a source of increased anti vaccination sentiment among many groups of people and professionals mainly due to a lack of dialogue from the authorities as to the level of protection it actually offers others from being infected once the vaccinated individuals become infected.
Particular vaccines have their benefits in affording high degree of protection to vaccinated individuals, but persuasive studies pointing to the efficacy of the vaccines protecting others are scarce. Such studies are in existence, but work remains to be done in the area of adequate convincing and persuasion before compulsion.
The NSW premier, Dominic Perrottet, and the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, outlined their state plans on Sunday acknowledging they had collaborated so the two biggest jurisdictions were in sync.
Perrottet said that some students had spent a quarter of their schooling at home.
“What is most important about this approach is that it allows students to enjoy all aspects of their schooling in a safe and sensible way,” he said.
Both states will provide staff and students with enough rapid antigen tests to facilitate twice-weekly surveillance testing during the first four weeks of term one.
In NSW, Perrottet announced the state government would provide more than 12m RATs to over 3,150 government and non-government schools and also early childhood centre staff.
Schools should receive the first 6m tests by Wednesday ready to be distributed to parents.
In Victoria, Andrews said a total 14m RATs would be delivered across the coming weeks. He said 6.6m tests will be at school by the time classes start back next week.
In contrast to NSW, Andrews said that there will also be enough RATs to allow students and staff at specialist schools to test for the virus every day to better protect medically vulnerable children against severe illness.
Andrews warned that there will be cases in schools but he said surveillance testing was about “finding as many cases as we can and shutting down those chains of transmission”.
“We have to get schools back. Once they get back, given how much Omicron is in the community, there will be cases,” the Victorian premier said.
The Victorian deputy premier, James Merlino, told reporters “the approach in schools and kindergartens will be in line with any communicable disease”.
One has to wonder what will occur once new variants evade the current vaccines in existence.
Perhaps fourth and fifth boosters will be mandatory for many professionals to feed their families.
Carl Beswick is a freelance writer from Melbourbe Australia
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