Daniel Andrews wants them excluded from the economy. Scott Morrison wants one in particular excluded from Australia and from an iconic tennis tournament.

The LA Times journalist Michael Hiltzik suggests that mocking their deaths from COVID is “necessary”.

UNDERCLASS

They have been described as a “global underclass”. We don’t even need to mention “granny killer”.

Two academics of very different political hues reckon they should be punished via the tax system, since they are “free riders”.

They are taking up all the ICU beds. Even COVID “liberals” like Dominic Perrottet want them excluded from certain classes of public service, including teaching, seemingly unaware that children are as close to being at nil risk of catching COVID as is humanly possible.

Oh, and they are a tiny minority (not at all true).

Of course, I speak of the fate of the anti-vaxxer. In the words of substacker Michael Wayne, the current vilification of the unjabbed amounts to “moral condemnation” of the enemy by those engaged in a propaganda war. Worthy of a Dantean circle of hell, probably.

Shamelessly bagging anti-vaxxers has become quite the sport, to go along with their exclusion from non-deplorable society and the evisceration of their rights.

They are at the coal face of the papers-please society embraced by Australian and other governments of all ideological persuasions.

They are especially loathed when they dare to bring up Nazi Germany and concentration camps. Just ask (soon-to-be-ex-MP) George Christensen.

Conveniently, jab-refuseniks are conflated with conspiracy theorists, anti-lockdown protesters and COVID deniers for the purposes of castigation.

There would be many examples of opponents of COVID vaccine mandates who are none of the above.

Some are even world renowned, highly published medical scientists. One is even an inventor of the mRNA vaccine.

Characterising the anti-vaxxers as stupid might be a bit of an own goal.

Presumably both Bob and Sir Tony are unaware of the recent study by Carnegie Mellon University that found the highest represented educational cohort of vaccine opponents to be those with a PhD. No matter, keep the vitriol coming.

SHALLOW

That journalists would join in the brutal and shallow attempt at mass extinction is perplexing. They are meant to be truth-seekers, and so neither brutal nor shallow.

Yet here we have it. Jack the Insider remains best in breed among the scribblers, but he has robust competition.

There is casual discrimination as well as the more savage attacks.

For Steve Waterson, the unjabbed are “foolish”. For Douglas Murray, they are “misguided”. Probably picked up their whacky ideas from “dodgy internet sites”, as one of the hit-squad opined.

Even The Spectator’s own Rod Liddle suggests that the anti-vaxxers (who seem to amuse Rod greatly) might only occasionally “teeter on rationality”. Praising with faint damn. And even Liddle concedes that bagging them won’t change their minds.

Yes, it’s true that corporate media’s well-documented financial dependence upon Big Pharma advertising dollars propels most news outlets towards reflexively pro-vax propaganda.

Then there are the university institutes, especially those whose medical research or pandemic modelling is well-funded by Bill Gates or Beijing, or both.

And there are many of these in Australia. Mostly they advise governments to vaccinate or perish.

Following the money has never been a sounder instinct than when trying to unpack cause and effect in the age of COVID.

And like everyone else employed by a corporate, now house-trained journalists and academics follow orders from above.

CANCELLED

The scholar and filmmaker Julian Vigo recently noted two things that should perturb us all.

First, she suggested that “journalism has all but disappeared”. Second, she argued that “the messages we are receiving from media are wiped clean of facts, often wiped clean of science…”.

In the age of cancelled COVID sceptics, who would disagree?

COVID has thrown up many anti-heroes, almost too many to count.

Here are just a few – petty dictators, curtain twitching Stasi-like Karens, unelected and self-interested public health gauleiters, censors, propagandists, lying politicians, fascist police bullies who shoot protesters and whack old ladies, politicians who build concentration camps for the unvaccinated, media not doing their jobs, shills for vaccine manufacturers who are on the take, the medical establishment which strikes off doctors who question the BS they and we are constantly fed, borderline child abusers who want to jab the young and healthy, fact checking gnomes (those who are actually human) who silence world experts in epidemiology and cognate disciplines simply because they dissent from the Orwellian narrative delivered by the Big Tech-Big Pharma-Big Government industrial complex.

The anti-vaxxer, endlessly and conveniently ill-defined, and often with made-up characteristics, seems a very odd COVID era type to pick on, you might think. Why is it happening?

There are myriad possible explanations for the no-holding-back attacks on the unjabbed.

One is pride, man’s great, continuing sin. Once you (as a politician or COVID acolyte) have bought into the vaccines as COVID’s silver bullet, it is a mighty backdown to cave into those who say over and over again, they don’t work as intended, they are not needed by most, they are unapproved and experimental, and (for many) they are dangerous.

Better to silence them, to censor them, to bag them.

Another explanation for the unrelenting attacks is that, if the anti-vaxxers are correct, well they are the ones who are the simpletons. Defend your own personal decisions by attacking others.

SCAPEGOAT

A third explanation is that a scapegoat is always needed to deflect attention from one’s own deficits. Those on the Left, and possibly others, are attacking the anti-vaxxers because they are, well, deplorables.

Trump supporters, most likely. Prone to planting Aussie flags in their front yards. Easy targets.

A fourth explanation is that the increasingly shrill attacks on the unjabbed are a feint to distract attention from the fact that even the ocularly challenged Freddie can now see that mass vaccinations do not stop the spread of COVID, or illness from COVID, or deaths from COVID.

Even if you don’t keep up with the latest studies from Israel, Iceland, Gibraltar, India, or just about anywhere else.

Or listen in to the pronouncements of no less than the CEO of Pfizer who just admitted that two jabs aren’t sufficient to stop you getting COVID, or the UK’s Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, who suggests that we simply cannot keep taking boosters every few months for the rest of our lives.

A fifth explanation is that those who do the gaslighting of the unjabbed are simply in the pay of the COVID State.

It is their duty to belittle those not playing ball. It is their job.

A sixth explanation is simple laziness. Why bother to find out – a. why the unjabbed remain so, b. whether they are all alike, and c. whether their arguments have merit and whether, therefore, it is they who turn out to be on the right side of history – when you can simply dismiss them as intellectual and moral club foots.

A seventh explanation, and a supposed motivation, for attacking anti-vaxxers is to shame them into getting the jab, so as to propel the vaccination rates even higher.

Alas, if true, this is utterly misguided. I suspect that the non-vaccinated are anything but hesitant, and in no way susceptible to cheap, unalloyed propaganda.