Australian Firefighters Still Subject to Mandates

Australian professional Firefighters in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria are still prevented from working due to workplace vaccination mandates. It is a situation that has become absurd.

In other states in Australia there is no such mandate. Some states had no mandate at all during the pandemic. In fact, besides the differences between states there were differences amongst the emergency services, fire, police and ambulance, including different number of jabs required.

Unfortunately, some have given up on the profession and hopefully have gone on to other fulfilling careers. Others still hope to go back to the profession they have trained for and dedicated themselves to.

Australian Firefighters' Alliance (AFA) Director Steve McDonald was interviewed by Ben Fordham on 2GB radio this week. You can listen to the 5 minute interview with Steve here.

Ben Fordham is the most popular morning talk back radio host in Sydney. He is one of few mainstream media personalities who seems not afraid to call out injustice. He calls out the situation as ridiculous and called on the NSW government to drop the mandate. Also on Sky News yesterday, the NSW firefighters plight was reported

I have been fortunate to get to know Steve and some of his colleagues over the last year. They are a fantastic group of people. An interesting thing about the firefighters is that they often come from other professions. The nature of firefighting work is that they work shifts, eg 2x24hrs per week, and they fit in other work to support their families. In rural areas it is sometimes like a part-time role as the demand is not the same as in the city.

Talking to them you find out they are teachers, scientists, tradespeople, as well as being firefighters. Certainly, this makes many of them “critical thinkers”. They are well aware of the dangers they face on the job. For example, firefighting foam needed for fuel fires in the past contained the “forever chemicals” like PFAS and has led to cancers in firefighters. We hope the newer foams are safer (just like other things that are introduced without safety testing, where we need time to find out if they are safe). If any profession should have the right to say what optional things go into their body it is them.

Steve spoke about the hardships faced by firefighters - particularly from Victoria and NSW who continue to be mandated for Covid-19 vaccines - despite the now widely known adverse effects and questionable benefits for healthy under 65 year olds.

The AFA is taking Fire Rescue Victoria to the Federal Court of Australia to challenge the lawfulness of their vaccine mandate. Over 200 Victorian and NSW firefighters have not worked for around 15 months and remain mistreated by their employers who refuse to budge on mandates.

You can donate to the AFA here to support their legal actions here.

The NSW Fire+Rescue bureaucracy has done questionable things in the past. In 2018 there was criticism over money spent on rebranding the organisation. They spent over half a million dollars on consultants to come up with a new logo, changing the ampersand & in the logo to a plus sign +. This was apparently to make the logo “more approachable”. See video clip on Channel 7 news here

and an article about the farce here.

I was chatting to one of the AFA firefighters about the madness of the last few years and a thing that he said surprised him was the way some people had reacted. An ethos of firefighters is “leave no man behind” (I note that many of the firefighters are female so I should say “leave no one behind”). But COVID madness had made many just look after themselves without consideration of their colleagues.

NSW IRC Ruling this Week

The NSW firefighters took their case, via the Union, to the NSW Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) that deals with workplace disputes.

The commissioners ruling had been delayed and was finally provided this last week. The ruling is found here.

It is 80 pages long and covers many arguments. Unfortunately, the Firefighters case was dismissed. However, the ruling did find problems with the approach of Fire+Rescue implementing the mandate and there may be grounds to continue the fight.

Part of the Fire+Rescue case was the advice of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) on vaccination.

Show us the Data

I take an example from the Commissioners ruling and make some comments.

Item 25

the advice from ATAGI, upon which FRNSW relied and which informed the risk assessments prepared up to 3 December 2021 and the Policy, stated that:

…

4) the benefits to the individual of being vaccinated include avoiding severe COVID-19 outcomes, such as hospitalisation, intensive care unit admission and death, as well as chronic post-COVID-19 conditions (‘long COVID’);

One would like to see the evidence for healthy under 65’s. What about for the firefighters in the photo above?

5) other benefits of vaccination include reducing the risk of passing the virus to close contacts including family, friends and work colleagues, and the potential to help reduce community spread of the virus;

Hmm, we know that due to the “speed of science” that the vaccines did not prevent transmission. See Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few days ago being bailed up by journalists, including one from Australia, not afraid to do their job and ask hard questions.

Bourla’s response: “Have a nice day”

6) when the virus is spreading in the community it is critical that as many people as possible are vaccinated as quickly as possible;

Vaccinating into a pandemic? Better ask vaccinologists with real world experience eg Geert Vanden Bossche.

9) evidence suggests that a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine reduces symptomatic infection and transmissibility, with the protective effect starting to 2- 3 weeks after vaccination;

Based on the Pfizer trials?

10) for both vaccines then available (AstraZeneca Zeneca and Pfizer) completion of two doses is required to attain optimal and durable protection from COVID-19 and its complications;

Durable?

ATAGI Advice

With no sign of COVID going away in Australia, also in this week news there is a report here that ATAGI is considering a 5th dose in Australia.

In the article we find another academic expert on public health advising mainstream media:

“Because of this, he says it's important Australians are topped up ahead of another wave.”

He advises to get topped up? Like filling the car with gas on a long trip when you are not sure where the next service station will be? This is the expert’s advice? One would like to see what evidence there is of any benefit of a 5th shot. There was no evidence of benefit of a 4th shot. In a previous post I have linked to Professor Vinay Prasad’s assessment of the booster data.

Have they looked at the evidence of higher rates of infection with more shots? Perhaps look at the NSW Health data showing hospitalisation and deaths against number of shots. The majority of deaths have been people with 4 shots. We will never know for 5th shot because they stopped reporting this data at the end of last year.

Are they looking at the studies on the down-regulation of the immune system, from the 3rd shot on, to the IgG4 subclass of antibody?

It’s hard to know what more to say.

We wish these brave firefighters all the best in their struggle.

Photo from the NSW 2019-20 bushfires.