Covidistan Annals XIV: facts--dropping VE--notwithstanding, Mückstein wants to force-jab even the homeless; 320K Austrian's don't want a 3rd jab | #UNACCEPTABLE

Nehammer: 'we’ll do whatever is necessary'; Kogler: 'the principle behind all [vaxx mandates] must be upheld at all costs'. Speaking like tyrants, they have lost whatever legitimacy they once had

It’s been a few days since my last piece on current developments in Covidistan, the country formerly known as Austria. Since around mid-November I’ve been using the moniker ‘Covidistan’ to refer to that particular Alpine republic due to the strange twists and turns of events (see here and here for an introduction), and events since then have been, well, quite a rollercoaster of government crackdowns, marred by increasingly absurd distortions by the self-declared Committee of Public Safety (the government), and aided and abetted by their willing camp-followers in legacy media.

Sidenote: yes, I’m using 19th-century terms such as ‘Committee of Public Safety’ and the like to draw out the distinction between pre-Covid affairs (however tenuous the realities of ‘popular sovereignty’ since EU accession have become) and the more recent past. If you’re new to this newsletter and/or Austrian affairs, you might wish to start with my early-December three-part piece (here, here, and here) or use the search function and look for ‘Covidistan’. Finally, as to myself, there is a bit of information in the now sticky-again ‘open thread’.

So, what’s happening in Covidistan these days?

For starters, the much-discussed vaccine mandate is making its way through parliament and will be formally voted on by the upper chamber on 3 Feb. 2022 and enter into force on 15 March 2022.

This piece of garbage legislation—which, let’s not mince words about it—is a kind of enabling legislation (Ermächtigungsgesetz) that affords the Health Minister the final say in determining ‘the necessities of public safety’, the number of injections that residents must get, the kind of biologicals that residents must be injected with, and the state-of-research (see here for particulars, and keep in mind that these issues have not been amended by parliament).

Sidenote: to illustrate the all-encompassing ambition of the crackpot-wannabe health dictator Mückstein and his ilk, a personal anecdote. For a variety of reasons, and despite me having left Austria in 2010 for work-related reasons, I maintained a secondary residence registration at my parent’s address. The vaccine mandate envisions that all ‘residents’ are subject to the mandate (§1.1 and §5.1 lit. f), which prompted me to enquire about whether or not the mandate—and the potential fines—also applied to citizens living abroad. I have that answer now: the law speaks of ‘residence’ only, which, according to personal communication I received from the competent authorities (oh, the irony), ‘applies to all kinds of residential registrations’. As can be seen below (and, if you’re able to read German, this grammatically and stylistically much-abused ‘officialese’ isn’t my writing), local administration assumes that the vaccine mandate ‘covers also secondary [non-permanent] residential registrations’ before holding, specifically, that ‘the law even encompasses registrations in homeless shelters’.

You see, if you’re homeless, Health Minister Mückstein and his ilk don’t want to help you, say, to getg a job, a place of your own, or what have you. But they will force you to get injected with a clearly failing shot of gene therapy. Don’t you want to cuddle the caring Health Minister for his sentiments? (If you do get that chance, may I suggest that you do bring something else along like, say, rotting eggs of tomatoes.)

Vaccine Effectiveness vs. Mandatory Jabs

Still, despite vaccine failure as a discussion topic in regime-friendly legacy media—see here for an example from Der Standard, written by known content-abuser Klaus Taschwer. I only bring this piece up to illustrate once more the decrepit state of legacy media obfuscation. While the article by Taschwer is dated 18 Jan. 2022 and thus a bit ‘old’, its topic—‘How well do the vaccines still protect against Omicron?’—is actually very much at the heart of the sad and sorry vaccine mandate. Here’s Taschwer (my emphases):

By now, it is quite likely that most of us know people who, despite boosters, showed symptoms after an infection with Omicron… how good is vaccine protection against symptomatic infections? Exemplary in terms of vaccination and infection data is Great Britain, where the latest report on vaccination data was posted online on Friday. According to these data, vaccine protection against symptomatic Omicron infection is only moderately better compared to protection against infection [against Delta]: shortly after the second dose of vaccine, effectiveness is still around 50%…from about 15 weeks after the second dose, vaccine efficacy against Omicron in terms of infection plus symptoms drops to below 20% (compared to the unvaccinated) for both Vaxzevria (Astra Zeneca) and Comirnaty, the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine.

I kept that link in the piece for you to follow it, if you so choose, for if you do that, you’ll find that the UK document says something else (not entirely, but here’s the relevant paragraph from p. 3, with my emphases, and you’re herewith invited to spot the differences):

In updated population data analysis, vaccine protection against mild disease has largely disappeared by 20 weeks after vaccination with a 2-dose primary course of vaccination. After a booster dose, protection initially increases to around 65-70% but drops to 45-50% from 10+ weeks. It is therefore likely that current vaccines offer limited long-term protection against infection or transmission. Protection against severe disease is much higher—after a booster dose vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation is estimated at 92% and remains high at 83% 10+ weeks after the booster dose.

Yes, there are somewhat mor detailed segments in that UK report (pp. 21-22), incl. the by-now well-known graph of sinking VE, but the numbers are the same as in the summary statement cited above. I’m at a loss as to where Mr. Taschwer got his numbers, but let’s just leave that can of worms un-opened and move on, shall we?

No more House Arrest for the Unvaccinated (sort of)

As a sign of ‘goodwill’, the Committee of Public Safety decreed, three days ago, that ‘the unclean’—i.e., the roughly 25% of the resident population who elected to forego ‘vaccination’ with experimental gene therapeutics masquerading as ‘vaccines’ (source here, as of 27 Jan. 2022)—may now leave their homes again legally.

From 31 Jan. 2022, if you’re ‘unvaccinated’, you may be released from house arrest imposed since (!) mid-November 2021, ‘other mandates, such as the 2G rule, will remain in force’, state broadcaster ORF summarised these changes.

What does 2G mean? I’m glad you asked: if you’re ‘unvaccinated’, you may leave your home now, but to enter any business or restaurant, you’d still have to be either ‘vaccinated’ (geimpft) or ‘recovered’ (genesen), hence ‘2G’. In other words: as ‘unvaccinated’ person, you’re allowed to sit down on park benches and the like, but it’s still impossible for you to participate in normal life.

I’m not making any of this stuff up, by the way, but I will point out the following facts, again and again:

The Committee of Public Safety, led by Covid Puppets Nehammer and Mückstein, has decreed these drastic, uncalled-for, and illegal restrictions on the population’s freedom of movement, association, and expression. For an apt comparison, just imagine Putin did this.

Nehammer himself called the house arrest for ‘the unclean’ as ‘a mandate that affected many, but it was necessary for public health-political reasons’ (my emphasis). I’m unsure this qualifies as a ‘gaffe, but what the chief putschist said on Thursday is really this: it was a political decision, not something rooted in science, reason, and the law.

At the same press briefing, unsurprisingly, Health Minister and soon-to-be tinpot tyrant Mückstein displayed considerable giddiness to apply his new powers, according to the above-referenced ORF piece (my emphasis)

Mückstein cautioned against increasing calls for further relaxation of the Covid mandates emanating from the states. During a visit to a primary care centre in Vienna on Tuesday, he said that the measures should only remain in place ‘as long as it is epidemiologically necessary’.

Good for everyone, right? Who, by the way, decides on this ‘necessity’? Mückstein, of course.

Also, if you’re jabbed and in Covidistan, your 2G status might change early next week: from 1 Feb. 2022 onwards, the minimum number of days between jabs two and three will be reduced to 90 days, down from 120 days. This means, in practice, that as doubly-jabbed person your ‘vaccination status’ will expire after 210 days (c. 7 months); only if you get a booster jab, your Covid Passport will be valid for 270 days (c. 9 months). Don’t ask me how and why, with dropping vaccine efficacy—only 10+ weeks after a booster—this is so, but I’m sure Mückstein and his ilk thought really long and hard about it.

As to this issue, well, the Committee’s civil-military advisory panel convened yesterday and talked about this issue—and didn’t come up with a conclusion. As of early Saturday morning, no determinations were reported by the Health Ministry.

These changes in the ‘validity’ of the Covid Passports affects some 320,000+ individuals (down from almost 1m a month ago, i.e., some 600,000 got jabbed a third time in-between), which, apparently, someone in the Committee realised would be a very, if not too, high number of people to piss off.

On the other hand, my guess is that these 320,000+ individuals haven’t merely ‘forgotten’ about their jab appointments. I think that many of them have decided not to get a third jab.

Still, listening to the Committee of Public Safety, you would be forgiven that this option, or thought, may have played a role in current debates. As exhibit A, here’s current chief putschist Nehammer as cited by ORF (my emphases):

‘I am in favour of working this out, and we’ll do whatever is necessary, but I am not interfering directly with the agenda of the Health Minister’, Nehammer said, adding that if it should come to it, one can ‘still turn the screws [noch an Schrauben drehen]…‘but the principle behind all of it must be upheld at all costs’, said Vice-Chancellor Werner Kogler (Greens).

#UNACCEPTABLE

You see the madness of it all in these statements: these ‘politicians’—whom I refer to as putschists—are so beyond reproach by now. The way they talk is, frankly, not only #UNACCEPTABLE but it displays a contempt for the sovereign people that is beyond anything a citizen of any country should countenance.

Keep in mind that this kind of ‘speech’ is not how elected politicians should ever dare to speak to the electorate.

Furthermore, and to go back to the above-referred loss of vaccine efficacy after 10+ weeks, there is no public debate about informed consent, medical choice, and bodily autonomy.

How dare these putschists to force a one-size-fits-all approach to what always was, is, and must be an individually focused action, such as the art and practice of medicine?

As a thought-experiment, I herewith invite you to contemplate the following: what would you do if the public health bodies recommended that everyone has his or her left lower leg amputated because there’s a serious problem in some parts of the population? Would you think that this is idiotic, absurd, and illegitimate? (Well, I’m glad you brought this up: Covid risks are highly stratified by age.)

Let’s return to Covidistan right now: if you paid any attention to the utter disrespect the régime displays for the sovereign people, look no further than the Committee of Public Safety. This isn’t something new, as I’ve documented earlier, but it should not be done.

These people—Schallenberg, Nehammer, Kogler, Mückstein, and their ilk—are no public servants. They are abusive tyrants of limited cognitive abilities and mental flexibility. They are the last individuals who should be anywhere near positions of power.

Keep their names.

Put them on a list.

A day of reckoning is coming before too long.

And when that day arrives, name these criminals and put them on trial.