‘Three evangelical pastors, along with several Jewish congregations, have filed a joint lawsuit with the Australian Federal Government, seeking an injunction against the New South Wales and Victorian Government’s current COVID-19 lockdown measures.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in the Federal Court, argues the state governments have selectively discriminated against religious groups in denying citizens the ability to congregate in Houses of Worship by arbitrarily deeming them “non-essential,” while allowing the public to gather elsewhere, such as in supermarkets and liquor stores.
The lawsuit will argue that Houses of Worship provide significant spiritual, psychological, and emotional support for communities, especially those who are suffering financially and psychologically from the impacts of the state government’s lockdown policies.
Furthermore, it will be argued that the governments’ indiscriminate selection of “essential” and “non-essential” venues under the Public Health Order is not supported by robust scientific or medical evidence.
According to the complaint, neither the NSW nor Victorian Governments have the constitutional or common law power to deny citizens their religious freedom which includes their ability to fulfill particular religious obligations and practices in their designated House of Worship.
Internationally renowned COVID-19 expert, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in California has also provided an independent expert report in support of the action brought forward by the plaintiffs.
Lawyer Tony Nikolic said his clients were forced to appeal to the courts after the matter had been repeatedly ignored by the NSW state government, in particular.
“My clients have attempted to engage with the NSW and Victorian Premiers and their Ministers as well as various NSW, Victorian, and Federal Parliamentarians to have their grievances addressed in a diplomatic and respectful manner.
“Unfortunately, in the context of NSW, the NSW Government has been unwilling to engage with my clients in any meaningful dialogue. As a result, our only last venue for relief is the courts.”
Pastor Robert Ayoub, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said they have exhausted other options to no avail.
“Now we have. a legal option, where we take the matter to the courts and have it heard by a court,” Pastor Ayoub said in a recent interview. “We believe this is a respectful way to do things, and importantly, a legal way to do things.
“We’re not here to be vindictive, or dishonouring towards the government, we’re just seeking to be able to practice our religion freely, and we’re appealing to our government to allow. us to love our God and also love our neighbour, to love our community.”
The plaintiffs in the case have also backed The Moses Statement, an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the State Premiers, urging a reopening of churches across the nation.
The following is from an email sent out by Qantas. This is health apartheid!
‘We’re all dreaming about the day we can fly away to see family, friends or enjoy a long overdue holiday. Getting vaccinated is an important step that every Australian can take to bring us that little bit closer to life as we knew it.~
If you’re a Qantas Frequent Flyer who has been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, we want to say thank you for protecting yourself and the community, with your choice of reward, and the chance to win a fantastic major prize.*’
‘Host Christine Dolan speaks with Angelia Desselle on the life-altering health problems she experiences after taking the Pfizer ‘vaccine’. Desselle also details the absolute lack of help from the government, or drug companies.’
I had Covid. I had an antibody test to prove it. Am I protected (and do I need to get the vaccine)?
Let me start with the usual disclaimer: THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A PHYSICIAN.
But the answer is now increasingly clear: natural immunity from Covid following infection and recovery is HIGHLY protective against future Covid infections. Rates of reinfection are very low.
Perhaps natural immunity eventually wanes, but we don’t know when. In fact, a little-noticed paper from June suggests it may actually strengthen for at least a year – and provide plenty of protection from Delta and other variants.
I am not going into the problems with vaccine-generated protection today or with our political unwillingness to recognize natural immunity. (Remember, GOOD NEWS – we could all use it).
Let’s just look instead at why natural immunity works so well.
You immune response comes in two forms: “humoral” and “cellular.”
When you are infected with Sars-Cov-2, your body’s “B-cells” – part of the immune system – quickly pour out “antibodies.” These antibodies attack the viral particles circulating in your blood and other fluids, hoping to keep the virus from entering your cells and replicating itself.
This is humoral immunity. Your B-cells make antibodies in many different shapes. Some are better at sticking to the virus. Scientists call these “neutralizing” antibodies because they neutralize the “antigen,” the foreign body attacking you, keeping it from entering your cells.
Amazingly, your B-cells quickly figure out which antibodies neutralize most effectively and make more of them, while cutting back on those that don’t work.
At the same time, another part of the immune system – killer or CD8 T-cells – attacks cells that the virus has already infected. You destroy your own cells to prevent the virus from using them to make more copies of itself. This is cellular immunity.
For a few days after you are infected, your immune system is in a race with the virus. If you win the race, defeat the virus, and recover – as the vast majority of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 do – within a week or two you should have no measurable levels of virus in your body.
With no invader provoking a response, your B-cells will stop making antibodies against the virus. Over time, the antibodies you have made will slowly degrade – a change scientists can measure.
Antibody levels are measured as “titers” – how much the part of the blood that contains antibodies must be diluted before it stops neutralizing the coronavirus (or any antigen).
The details of how scientists measure titers are complicated. But the takeaway is simple – higher titers mean more antibodies in the initial sample. Higher titers are better, unless they are so high they indicate an overactive immune response. Over time, titers will decline.
But your immune system has not forgotten the virus. Both B-cells and T-cells are now trained to respond to it, should it reappear. (Confusingly, the immune system includes two types of T-cells, CD4 and CD8, and many subtypes of both B- and T-cells.)
This “adaptive” response explains why people remain immune to some viruses for their entire lives after being infected once – or inoculated with an effective vaccine.
Scientists have different ways to measure your immune response.
They can measure how tightly your antibodies bind to an antigen (the virus), how many different parts of the antigen they attack, how quickly your B- and T-cells will ramp up to make new antibodies or attack infected cells, and even whether those antibodies can recognize new variants of the original antigen.
In June, Rockefeller University researchers published a paper in Nature examining how antibodies changed up to a year after coronavirus infection and recovery.
The authors found that even “in the absence of vaccination, antibody reactivity to the receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-Cov-2, neutralizing activity, and the number of RBD-specific memory B-cells remain relatively stable between 6 to 12 months after infection.” (They also found that vaccination of previously infected and recovered people could boost those responses further.)
However, in a second paper published in late July, the authors found that vaccines did NOT produce a similarly powerful response in the B-cells of people who had not previously been infected. (But we’re not going to talk about that today. Good news, remember?)
In July, another group of researchers published similar findings in Cell:
Again, the authors offered reassuring findings:
Here, we evaluate 254 COVID-19 patients longitudinally up to 8 months and find durable broad-based immune responses. SARS-CoV-2 spike binding and neutralizing antibodies [have] an extended half-life of >200 days suggesting the generation of longer-lived plasma cells… Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients.
T-cell immunity was also durable, the authors found, and the killer T-cells could recognize not just the coronavirus’s spike protein but other parts of the virus.
(Again, the paper offered reasons to believe vaccine immunity was inferior, but we won’t talk about that, not today.)
A paper from Israel released Sunday reported that antibody titers in people who had recovered from infection fell only 5 percent a month (titers in the vaccinated fell 40 percent a month, though from a higher baseline).
Even better, between four and nine months after infection, the percentage of people with low titers remained roughly flat, at 10 percent.
All these papers should increase our confidence that natural immunity is durable and powerful. But what about real-world data?
Fortunately, we now have several studies examining large groups of previously infected people. In perhaps the most striking, the Cleveland Clinic reported in June a reinfection rate of zero among 1,359 people with natural immunity:
Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.
(The political pressure for vaccination is such that the Cleveland Clinic then issued a press release basically pretending the study didn’t say what it did. But we won’t talk about that today, good news, etc.)
And this week, Israeli researchers looking at a much larger group of people also found very, very low reinfection rates. Only 19 out of 16,215 people with natural immunity had a second infection from June 1 to August 14 (far fewer than the number of vaccinated people who were infected in a matched group).
These findings are particularly important because the Delta variant accounted for nearly all coronavirus infections in Israel by this summer. In other words, natural immunity remained protective against Delta.
So there’s your good news. Both the theoretical bench work and the real-world data suggest that natural immunity is long-lasting and protective even against Sars-Cov-2 variants that can evade vaccines.
Here in New South Wales Australia we continue to be in lockdown because the politicians say they are listening to the HEALTH EXPERTS! Well, I wish they would listen to ‘A Stanford University Medical School epidemiologist and public health expert reiterated in a recent interview his conviction that Covid lockdowns have been horrendous for public health and affirmed that they have killed more people than they have saved.
“I say the lockdowns were the single biggest mistake in public health history. I still believe that. I don’t see how anyone can look at lockdown and say there was successful policy,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said.
“We have had lockdowns in country after country after country,” he continued. “I don’t think by any measure you can call them a success.”
From the beginning of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has advocated for a public health action plan of “focused protection,” a policy wherein creative measures are enacted by public servants to shield the most vulnerable from infection and the rest of society is allowed to carry on with regular life.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Bhattacharya and numerous other medical professionals formally outlined this idea in the Great Barrington Declaration. In part, it reads:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Regarding this approach, Bhattacharya said, “The idea was to give people resources to protect themselves as they saw fit, that they could make trade-offs in their lives based on what they valued.” He added, “You have to think differently about what the goal is. If the goal is focused protection, then adopt a different set of policies than if the goal is testing, tracing, identifying, and quarantine.”
Bhattacharya said that many in the medical and public health community have come to think erroneously about herd immunity, which was once identified as the goal for resolving the Covid pandemic.
“Herd immunity is not a synonym for zero Covid. It does not mean the disease has gone away. What it means is that the disease has become endemic,” he said.
“What I do know is that if a government induces fear in a population, if a government formally locks down, that it will take much longer to get to that point where the disease is at a level where we can manage it without having to turn over all of society,” Bhattacharya asserted. “If people are scared to interact with everybody else, it will take longer, even if you don’t have a policy.”
Bhattacharya called the harms caused by lockdowns “extremely multi-dimensional” and traumatic, especially to the poor, children, and those on the margins of society. “It’s not possible to reduce to a single number,” he said. “A child who skips a year of school, the consequences will last a lifetime.”
According to Bhattacharya, dramatic increases of poverty, food insecurity, outright starvation, depression, anxiety, suicide, and death are some of the black fruits of the mitigation measures implemented in lockdowns. Asked directly if “lockdowns have killed more people than they have saved,” he responded, “Yes, I think that is actually true.”
The idea that there are alternatives to lockdowns has not been given minimal space for discussion in the public forum, particularly among the mainstream media, politicians, and public health and medical professionals. Conversely, Bhattacharya asserted that science is, in fact, a “free-wheeling discussion,” one that should be informed by data, not politics. To be against lockdown, Bhattacharya said, was considered “saying something dangerous” and “at the core of this sort of de-platforming effort” by Big Tech companies. Standing against this trend is “something we should resist with all our strength.”
“We have come to think about lockdown as if it were the only possible thing to do,” Bhattacharya said, “But that’s not true. You have to make decisions based on the margins of what is alternatively possible. That requires imagination and requires care about thinking of different people in different parts of society, and the risks they face combined with the values they have and the scientific parameters about disease spread and all of these other things.”
Bhattacharya noted that we have had “enormous Covid deaths despite the lockdowns.” While lockdown proponents may argue that this is because the lockdowns were not strong enough, Bhattacharya insists that reality is a constraint on their model and that in the real world “society could not meet their high standard of what a lockdown ought to look like.”
Here in Australia the politicians continue to push fear of the Wuhan virus with lockdowns and threat of mandatory vaccinations! However, ‘Now that we have had 18 months to “slow the spread” it is time to take stock of the pandemic. We have learned many good things that the media and our pandemic managers rarely report. Most fundamentally, we do not need to be afraid of COVID-19 anymore. The media and some government health authorities are still pushing hysteria and fear, but that should not prevail. Let’s look at the good news that can calm our fears about COVID-19. There’ll be time at a later date to look at the bad and the ugly of the resolving pandemic.
1) Globally, the survival rate for COVID-19 is 99.8%. Under the age of 70, the survival rate for COVID-19 is 99.97%. This is on par with many influenza seasons. Americans younger than 70 do not have to fear COVID-19 any more than influenza and we know how to protect the elderly.
2) Herd immunity for the alpha strain is here. Sixty-seven percent of the American population have had at least one COVID-19 vaccination. The official number of cases is about 10% of the population, but several antibody studies show that the percentage of those with natural immunity is 4-6 times higher. Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins professor, estimates that 80-85% of the population is immune from natural immunity and vaccination. Those who deny this must explain how cases and deaths started to decline in January way before there was a significant vaccine effort. COVID-19 will not go away. Instead, we are transitioning now from a pandemic to endemic status and, indeed, some eminent virologists say vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic is making herd immunity more difficult to obtain through the creation of variants.
3) The average age of death from COVID is 78. The average life expectancy in America is 78. This is not to say, “Don’t worry, only old people are dying of COVID-19.” However, this fact should direct and inform our policies to protect the elderly especially. Children and those under age 70 are at much lower risk.
4) Early outpatient treatment should be adopted immediately for COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine works. Ivermectin works. It has been estimated 85% of COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented were these medicines used early. America’s Frontline Doctors have an excellent compilation of research. The cost of these treatments is $1/day. A new IV treatment, REGEN-COV, has been approved for early use in COVID-19. Don’t wait to see if you will get sick. Treat early.
5) Children are safe from COVID-19 and don’t spread the virus either. A study in the UK showed that the survival rate in children is 99.995%. In the U.S. 335 children have died since the start of the pandemic. A study done by Johns Hopkins and FAIR Health showed that all of the children that died from April 2020 to August 2020 had immune problems or were chronically ill. In that period not one healthy child died. Children have more chance of dying in a car wreck, unintentional drug overdose, or influenza than from COVID-19. Vaccination for healthy children is not needed.
7) Persons who have had COVID-19 infection have a robust and long-lasting immunity. This immunity also is likely to protect against variants. As evidence continues to accumulate that the new mRNA vaccines are neither as effective nor safe as advertised, I would advise not getting the vaccine on top of your natural immunity if you had the COVID-19 infection.
8) There is very little, if any, spread of COVID-19 from asymptomatic persons. This lie was spread early to maximize fear of this new virus. COVID-19 is like other respiratory viral infections—you catch it from being around someone who has symptoms. Like other viral infections, if you are sick stay home, quarantine yourself, and treat yourself. We do not need to quarantine the asymptomatic healthy.
9) The death rate nationally for COVID-19 has been going down since January. Breathless “news” reporters talk about cases, hospital occupation, and contagiousness but never mention the death decline. There has been a small uptick in deaths in some areas over the last week, but not anywhere close to last winter. (There will be some variations in the death rate as we transition to endemic status)
10) The Delta variant is acting like a typical historical virus variant. Typically, variants happen all the time and are more contagious but less deadly. Initial reports show that this is likely true with Delta. A UK report states the Delta variant is likely 20 times less deadly than the alpha strain, but that more data needs to be collected. The media constantly mentions that delta is more contagious which is also true. Other Greek variants are likely to behave in the same fashion.
We do not need to be afraid of COVID-19 anymore. Let’s begin to end the hysteria and fear. The worst is over and we are transitioning to endemic status which means a low level of cases and deaths.
We will have many fewer deaths if we start to treat the infection early now with the available outpatient treatments. We should resist further attempts at lockdowns and mask mandates as neither worked. We know exactly whom to protect—the elderly and those with chronic health problems. That’s where we should concentrate our energies.
Thankfully, children have very little risk and do not need masks at school or vaccinations. Variants will come but will not send us back into a situation like last year.
Can our pandemic managers take some of this useful information and transform it into helpful public health policies from this point forward? Or is there another agenda behind unending hysteria, fear, and the constant push for 100% vaccination? That remains to be seen. For now, let’s celebrate the good news.’https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_good_newsa_covid19_update.html
Australian politicians are talking about injecting these vaccines in the arms of those down to the age of twelve! Here ‘Stew Peters talks with former Pfizer employee and biotech analyst, Karen Kingston. Kingston reveals what the FDA approval really means, and why it’s “game over” for the vaccine manufacturer, and for the inoculation.’
Remember South Africa’s Apartheid? Well, now in New South Wales, Australia we have the Covid Health Apartheid! Our ‘leaders’ have deemed that only those who submit to the government push for these experimental vaccines may have a ‘LITTLE’ of their freedom back. So, ‘Fully vaccinated NSW residents will be able to take advantage of eased coronavirus rules from September 13.
The new rules will be different for people inside coronavirus hotspots and those outside those areas.
But in all areas, those who take advantage of the eased rules must be fully vaccinated with two doses and be able to prove their vaccination status if asked by an official.
For people outside of local government areas (LGAs) of concern, the rule changes will mean:
Fully vaccinated people can gather outside in groups of up to five
All those people must be vaccinated
The gathering must take place in the people’s LGA or within 5km of home
The limit is five individuals whether the people are children or adults
For people in LGAs of concern, the rule changes will mean:
Fully vaccinated adults can gather outside for one hour of recreation per day
The outdoor activity can be a picnic, not just exercise
The rest of the restrictions still apply, meaning there’s a limit of two people unless the people gathering are all from the same household
The one hour of recreation is in addition to the allowed one hour of exercise, meaning each person can be outside for a total of two hours in a day
The gathering must take place outside curfew hours
The curfew in hotspot area is from 9pm to 5am.
The Sydney hotspot areas are:
Bayside
Blacktown
Burwood
Campbelltown
Canterbury-Bankstown
Cumberland
Fairfield
Georges River
Liverpool
Parramatta
Strathfield
Penrith for the following suburbs: Caddens, Claremont Meadows, Colyton, Erskine Park, Kemps Creek, Kingswood, Mount Vernon, North St Marys, Orchard Hills, Oxley Park, St Clair and St Marys.
Under the current rules, hotspot residents can only go outside for one hour of exercise.
People outside the hotspots are already allowed to go outside for recreation, but with only one other person unless they’re from the same household.
“While there are various options we looked at, that was the option that met the mental health needs and wellbeing of our community,” NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
She had previously said her government would announce eased rules for vaccinated people once the state had reached more than six million jabs.
That milestone was reached this week.
Ms Berejiklian also said there would be more rules that would ease once the state hits another target of getting 70 per cent of the population vaccinated against the coronavirus.
There would also be another set of rules that would change once an 80 per cent vaccination level was reached.
However, it wasn’t immediately clear what those rule changes would be.
“I want to strongly message today that NSW is calling on industry and citizens to get ready for when we are 70 per cent double vaccinated, that’s when things will start to open,” Ms Berejiklian said.
“The NSW government will start conversations with industry, but we do say that the condition of you participating and what will be reopening is on you being vaccinated.
“Because when you start opening at 70 per cent, there are certain activities only vaccinated people can do.”
whatyareckon 