PERTH, Australia (LifeSiteNews) – An Australian state will impose a COVID jab mandate on the majority of its workforce.
During a Wednesday morning press conference, Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan announced that his government would be implementing an expansive COVID vaccination mandate. It will be the most drastic jab mandate in the country, affecting more than one million people, 75% of the state’s workforce.
Injection with the experimental COVID-19 vaccines will now be mandatory, not only for “essential workers,” but for a large number of industries in Western Australia. The latest deadline for receiving two jabs is January 31, 2022. Depending on their place of employment, some workers must be fully jabbed by December 31, 2021.
“Employers will be required to keep a record of the evidence, and authorized officers will run spot checks to ensure compliance is occurring,” McGowan said.
“If relevant, employers that have unvaccinated staff working after the deadline run the risk of being fined up to $100,000.”
McGowan added that employees themselves also risk as much as a $20,000 fine for failing to provide proof of vaccination.
The Premier tweeted a chart showing the different industries affected.
Based on the latest health advice, we have just outlined a new overarching workforce vaccination policy – with a phased approach which will cover a majority of occupations and workforces within WA. pic.twitter.com/IC6jEKeyfP
— Mark McGowan (@MarkMcGowanMP) October 20, 2021
McGowan stated that these new measures were “proportionate and reasonable, and aimed at preparing Western Australia safely for the inevitable community transmission.”
“We’re doing the right thing by vulnerable people, particularly those who are unwell, immunocompromised and the elderly, and we’re trying to ensure that we don’t have to close industries or workplaces in the future,” he said.
However, coronavirus vaccine trials have never produced evidence that the vaccines stop infection or transmission. They do not even claim to reduce hospitalization, but the measurement of success is in preventing severe symptoms of COVID-19 disease.
As COVID cases have surged in heavily vaccinated countries like Israel, the U.K. and the US, including among vaccinated individuals, hopes that vaccination would prevent infection or halt transmission have dwindled.
On April 30, 2021 in the wake of more than 10,000 reports of positive COVID cases among the fully vaccinated in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced it would cease counting “breakthrough cases” unless the person is hospitalized or dies, leaving uncounted tens of thousands of vaccinated individuals transmitting virus as though they were not infected.
Western Australia has the lowest rates of vaccination in the country, and it has only 1,112 “cases” of COVID-19. Of these only 9 are said to have been fatal. In Australia overall, there have been over 130,000 “cases.” 1,448 people in Australia have died of, or with, COVID-19.
Mia Davies, the Leader of the Opposition in Western Australia, has suggested that McGowan’s new and expansive public health orders are a panicked attempt to force national vaccine targets upon a hesitant population. Davies wants the public to embrace COVID-19 vaccination, but she intimated that McGowan’s highhanded policy was “all stick and no carrot.”
Australian legal expert Dr. Rocco Loiacono told LifeSiteNews that the new radical public health orders can be understood as McGowan’s attempt to conceal his “incompetent leadership” by “deferring to authoritarianism.” This tactic has been increasingly evident in Australia’s left-leaning Labor governments, such as the state of Victoria led by Premier Dan Andrews.
Loiacono explained that hospitals in Western Australia are already on “Code Yellow”, with record levels of ambulance ramping, as well as staff shortages. He stated that, rather than getting the hospital system ready in the event of an outbreak, McGowan has opted to appeal to “authoritarian policy” and “paternalistic fear mongering” by imposing border closures (WA’s borders will remain closed to some states during Christmas and into 2022), lockdowns in response to one positive case, and now vaccine mandates as a condition of employment.
In September 2020, LifeSiteNews exposed an updated version of the original 2016 Public Health Act, which grants extraordinary powers to Western Australia’s state government. This legislation gives authorized persons the right to use “reasonable force” to apprehend and detain an individual for medical observation, examination or treatments, which include vaccination. Residents of Western Australia can be forcibly stripped of their clothing, including underwear, in order to be forcibly jabbed.