The political cost of letting Djokovic stay was too high for Morrison
Australians have been barred from visiting a dying parent in hospital, blocked from seeing a new grandchild and forbidden from having a wedding. Should they accept that a tennis star gets the leeway they were denied?
Angering those Australians would have been a huge danger for Morrison when he is only a few months away from an election.
But this is not game, set and match. The entire saga has put Australia’s pandemic dysfunction up in lights. It was a national embarrassment and may continue through the courts.
> Angering those Australians would have been a huge danger for Morrison when he is only a few months away from an election.
This has been the entire strategy for the government's handling of the pandemic - national interests be damned, as long as it favours the party being re-elected.
I don't think that national interests really mattered anytime in any country. That is just a tool to keep power. Maybe it's important for some politician, but focusing on power grab is way more beneficial at the top.
There's no need to be so pessimistic. Plenty of people go into politics with good intentions, and some even stay that way after some time there. Some want to be remembered, some genuinely want to fix things. Some just want power.
Skepticism is healthy, full on pessimism "everything is just a power grab" is extremely unhealthy.
>Skepticism is healthy, full on pessimism "everything is just a power grab" is extremely unhealthy
I agree but lets extend this same treatment not just to Westerners but to Eastern people too, otherwise it is just hypocrisy. I say this because the top comment on a previous post about Djokovic claims that his PCR test is genuine not because he was really positive with Covid, but because his family is influential with the Serbian government. This sort of prejudice and discrimination is plain disgusting
He actually flew back to Sydney to visit his kids during the middle of a lockdown when people couldn't visit dying relatives, because it was fathers day!
Meta-thought: I have started to pay attention to just how often courts strike down executive decisions because they are unlawful, and strike down new laws because they are unconstitutional or in conflict with international agreements. People tend to blame activist judges, but most of the time the judges are just trying to interpret the laws as they are written.
There seems to be an interesting dynamic at work where societies ossify through accretion of laws. As more international agreements are signed and laws are put on the books, the web of constraints that new policies must adhere to grows more complicated, and the ability by the public to get a new executive decision or a new law stricken through the court system grows greater. When a great reset happens (a revolution) you tend to see a nimble government immediately after, but also often accompanied with widespread civil rights violations, and as the laws and deals and civil rights start accreting the pace of change slows down.
Looking at my own country for example (Belgium). Back in the 60's the government could just decide to build nuclear power plants, without consulting the public at all, because there was very little in the form of environmental legislation or international agreements to bind them. Nowadays we can't legally decide to keep the plants open past 2025, because the work necessary to keep them open can't start without changing the law, and changing the law cannot legally be done without an EU-wide consultation and environmental impact study process. Any attempts to do these things anyway would quickly get blocked by the courts.
I find this increasing level of legal ossification endlessly fascinating in a somewhat terrifying sort of way. It makes me wonder whether democracy inevitably leads to incapable frozen government that needs a non-democratic great reset to wipe away the accreted laws and unlock the government's ability to get things done.
Non-democracies don't exactly have a great track record of legal nimbleness and enlightened decision making either.
The root cause here is ideology, which can occur in both democracies and dictatorships. The two are orthogonal - democracies can both regulate and deregulate, as can dictatorships.
There's also the issue of the immigration department seemingly not properly scrutinizing the application, as well as Djokovic lying on the application forms.
But most likely this is all an intentionally concocted distraction from government's failings in the current outbreak.
So how did he win his first court challenge? Why aren't those institutions being scrutinized? Where's the proof he faked his documents and why isn't that alone cause for Australia's institutions to not have issued a visa?
Why did it take a last-minute act from a minister to revoke his visa?
Some of the proof that he faked his visa application is claiming he is vaccinated when he is not, and claiming he had not travelled in the week before boarding the plane when he had documented a trip to Spain while COVID-positive. The Spanish government is now investigating whether Novak Djokovic travelled to Spain illegally, so there’s more legal shenanigans waiting for him when he eventually gets home.
The reason none of this resulted in his visa being refused in the first place is that the Australian tennis folks are buddy-buddy with the Prime Minister’s folks, and the unofficial ministerial guidelines are that if there’s an event associated with government cronies then all stops are pulled.
"event associated with government cronies then all stops are pulled."
No doubt very true for the first round. On the second when things go belly-up, as here, they'll scatter like wildebeest being chased by a lion. The second time usually brings unwelcome exposure and much else.
No, this lot have learned that there are zero consequences for being openly lazy and corrupt. They broadcast their intent to pork barrel and people vote for them because of that.
Correct thing to do at this point is really to exclude Australian Open from future glam slam. Just drop entire Australia from it. I get that they have the right to deny anyone in but they making this entire scene due PURELY as political brownie points. Sports should stay neutral. They (entiee Australia) should be punished for dragging sports into this. Better yet deny entire Australia from any world tennis events for 3 years. Now, imagine, every country using their political clout to score their brownie points. The Aussie is really angry at their leaders incompetent handling of pandemic...Djokovic is just a trigger point of their accumulated disatisfaction.
When a clothes code is required in a club and you don't wear they don't let you enter , Djokovic knew the rules but lied and tried to go over them. But as he is famous you want us to let him in. I think that all the people that want to kiss Djokovic ass are free to do it but not everybody wants.
Dress code is nothing like a vaccine requirement. Two completely different things.
The government admitted the reason his visa was cancelled was because they're worried about public perception. In a country with already 95% fully vaxxed, they're worried about "anti-vaxxers" drawing inspiration from tennis players! It doesn't add up unless you allow for an embarrassingly irrational government.
His visa was cancelled because they found inconsistencies (lies). He outright lied filling the papers, any other person would have been kicked out without a doubt. He later blamed his assistants for it. In the same case you would be in jail but as is a famous person he gets an special treatment. He brought it on himself. He thought he could get away with it but it looks like it wasn't the right moment. The funny thing is all the people defending him like he's a freedom fighter when he's just a spoiled brat. and now let's see France and USA.
Right again, Australian politicians have fucked up their response to COVID on multiple occasions but so have other many countries—name one that hasn’t! And I include Serbia in that lot, it having only 50% of its citizens vaccinated; currently, it has one of the worst vaccination records in all Europe.
Leaving Australia aside for the moment, there are principles at stake here that are beyond Djokovic's case. Firstly, Djokovic brought these troubles upon himself:
1. He was fully aware of Australia’s tight COVID vaccination requirements and visa requirements long before he arrived in Australia—as his visit was a point of discussion in the world’s press weeks beforehand, yet he chose not to be vaccinated well ahead of the time of his visit. The question is why.
2. The fact that he had COVID previously is a lame excuse for thinking that he could disobey or ignore Australia’s immigration rules (no one really believes that, as he and his team would have known them to an absolute tee). It is very clear that he arrogantly and blatantly violated immigration requirements and it's widely accepted among many that he really doesn't have a valid excuse. His excuse of making a mistake simply doesn't stand up.
3. He lied about his travel status prior to traveling to Australia. To blatantly lie on any county's immigration form and one is playing with fire, especially so when the lie is easily found out (as here). Even idiots know that this is the quickest way of being refused entry to a country. Why Djokovic chose to lie and risk everything is open to question, however my opinion is that it was sheer arrogance and the fact that he is so used to getting his own way that he thought he could wing it or bullshit his way into the country.
4. Irrespective of Serbia’s position upon vaccination, Djokovic is a person of substantial means and he could have easily had himself vaccinated well ahead of time yet he deliberately chose not to. Moreover, if he is an anti-vaxxer or conscientious objector then he should have told the whole world ages ago but he chose not to. The same goes for any medical exemptions he may have had.
5. As a person on the world stage, he would have known that being unvaccinated would bring strong controversy for the very reason that he was setting a very bad example—a bad example that if followed by many—would lead to increased deaths from the pandemic. There is no doubt that among his huge followers and fan base there would be some, perhaps even many, who would follow his example and not be as lucky with COVID infection as he was. Therefore, many, many others view his stance as being selfish, self-centered and ill considerate of the lives of others. There is also the fact that Djokovic has never bothered or taken the time to explain his position. To many, this implies that he has something to hide. Moreover, it is fanciful to believe that both he and his team would have been unaware of this and the potential damage to his reputation because of his stance. Frankly, it's hard to understand why he has been so silent on the matter, perhaps he thought that the controversy would bring even more attention to himself.
6. Australia's bad treatment of Djokovic upon entry and the fact that those involved in detaining him did not afford him procedural fairness has essentially nothing to with the revocation of his visa by the Minister; they are separate issues except for the notoriety that they've brought.
7. Djokovic and his team must have been fully aware of the heightened tensions in Australia over COVID, as they've been world news for months. It is even more relevant that his destination was Melbourne, which has been the world's most locked-down city for all of the time that COVID has been active. It just isn't possible to believe that he was unaware of the political implications of this, which are that Melbournians (and many other Australians) have been hit hard by COVID and that many citizens have been trapped overseas during the pandemic and unable to return—and that the Government making an exception for him and his bad behaviour was very likely out of the question due to political fallout. Frankly, it beggars belief why he has acted the way he has.
For the record I couldn't give damn if Australia/the Australian Open was excluded from future world tournaments. My interest in tennis is minimal, thus I've based these comments on what has actually happened, not how I feel about Djokovic per se.
It seems to me that all the noise and brouhaha over this matter would be helped if Djokovic and other tennis fans would take a moment to be objective and not lose sight of the fact that millions of people have already died of COVID and despite the Australian Government's many fuckups, that there is real reason for why these COVID rules are in place. Must I actually say it: they're in place to save lives!
Djokovic ought to have known this and complied accordingly.
But not all lives. The whole population does not need to get vaccinated. Not everyone's life is under threat. Not even close.
Omicron spreads regardless, as is clearly observable. Australia has very high vaccination rate, but the virus is everywhere. Yet, they're still worried about unvaccinated sentiment?
It's important for vulnerable and elderly people to get vaccinated because their lives are the ones that can be saved.
Novak's life is not under threat from the virus. He chose not to be vaccinated for himself. Only a fool would get vaccinated for reasons of "perception".
The WHO chief warned countries recently that "you can't boost your way out of the pandemic". The AstraZenic scientist said recently the focus for vaccination should shift to elderly and vulnerable, as it's not feasible to vaccinate the whole world every few months.
"Hey man, even though you don't need it, can you please get vaccinated to encourage others to get the jab?".... Novak said no. And now the government believes the opposite is true - that Novak will influence perception in a direction that differs to the government's policy. See, the Australian government operates on what looks good or bad. Actual substance and practicality is down the list.
Now he's labelled an anti-vaxxer icon, a trouble-maker, and then booted out of the country. All he wanted to do was play some tennis. He's an ambassador for sport, fitness, and has done some great work over the years. To see him treated like this is a disgrace.
Everything else you said is irrelevant. End of the day, Novak was treated like crap because a politician wanted to look "tough on borders". Even though Omicron is everywhere down here, spreading among the vaccinated, there's an irrational and popular response that the 5% of unvaccinated people are somehow driving the pandemic.
"The whole population does not need to get vaccinated. Not everyone's life is under threat. Not even close."
That's a sweeping statement, so where's your evidence - as most of the world disagrees with you - so too does the science.
Presumably, you also disagree with the health experts at the WHO? When WHO experts say that "you can't boost your way out of the pandemic" they are NOT saying "you don't need to get vaccinated." They are quite separate issues altogether.
"Novak's life is not under threat from the virus. He chose not to be vaccinated for himself. Only a fool would get vaccinated for reasons of "perception."
What gives you special insight to say that if he got vaccinated then it would be only for a 'perceived' advantage? I cannot see how you would know this - even Djokovic's Dr wouldn't know that without extensive tests. If such tests were done then he has never offered them as evidence or for public examination.
Whether your assertion is correct or not is immaterial. The real issue is that Djokovic is a leading world figure in sport so he should have lead by example but he failed to do so (for many decades, as long as we've had mass media or even longer, it's been customary and even expected of athelets to set a good example to their followers).
...And the example he should have set would have been to get vaccinated whether he needed to do so or not - as that's what celebrities do! After all, the very vast majority of the world's population accepts vaccination as a normal medical procedure - one from which everyone benefits.
As a celebrity, Djokovic failed to live up to the time-honored conventions expected of him. The fact that he deliberately bucked the system and disobeyed convention has to be one of the worst PR exercises in the history of sport for many decades and he's now paying a very heavy penalty for doing so. It's damn shame his advisors hadn't been more politically astute otherwise it's likely that it wouldn't have ended up so badly for him.
(Really I don't particularly care if Djokovic gets vaccinated or not, I'm simlpy just stating what has actually happened to him.)
"Everything else you said is irrelevant"
I'm only an unknown HN poster so what I say hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. The fact is that much bigger players with real influence think very similarly to me and to millions of others - and in the end that's all that really matterd. They have real teeth with real biting power which I don't. What's more they've shown that they are capable of exercising that power and that they've actually done so.
I've a sneaking suspicion that Djokovic was gambling that they wouldn't given his celebrity status, unfortunately for him it's a gamble he's lost.
Blaming me for what has happened won't change anything.
> That's a sweeping statement, so where's your evidence - as most of the world disagrees with you - so too does the science.
The sweeping statement is yours: that "everyone" needs the vaccine. You're trying to shift the burden of sweeping statements to the person who disagrees with your original sweeping assertion.
Nowhere does "science say" that everyone needs the vaccine. You're confusing policy decisions which turn into "rules are rules", which turn into "what the science says".
Are you forgetting that last September, the UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization recommended against vaccinating children? If that wasn't "science" what was it? This is merely one example of science-based objection to the "need" to vaccinate everything that crawls or walks.
> "their risk of severe COVID-19 disease is small and therefore the potential for benefit from COVID-19 vaccination is also small. The committee underlined that the vast majority of children had mild or no symptoms. It also pointed out the very low risk of heart inflammation with mRNA vaccines, noting that the long-term effects of this were unknown."
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-committee-healthy-kids-ag...
Sounds like science and reason formed their opinion. But they were overruled by the higher-up policy makers and politicians.
> "And the example he should have set would have been to get vaccinated whether he needed to do so or not - as that's what celebrities do!"
Wow. "That's what celebrities do". It amazes me how easily people slip into a fabricated signalling world, where mandating "solidarity vaccination" and towing party lines is normal behaviour, even expected and mandated because "keeping people safe"!
Novak had Covid, recovered, and does not want the vaccine for himself as his symptoms were obviously mild, which is the norm for his health profile. That's his business.
If you aren't defending the right of anyone to make their own choice on that basis, it's sad. Omicron spreads regardless. The Australian government acknowledged he was not an actual risk, but they were worried about "anti-vax" sentiment from his presence in the country. The sad irony is Novak wanted to keep his vaccination status private. He would have been happy not to discuss it at all, but the media did not allow it, and a tennis villain was forged in the outrage fires.
It's interesting that down-voters never seem to have the fortitude to explain themselves. That they have down-voted I take as a compliment, as it means that I have succeeded in getting my point across.
Explanation: pretty sure almost nobody read that wall of text, just downvoted and moved on. How long did it take you to write that? Downvoting takes one second and can be done while rolling ones eyes.
Sorry, we live in different worlds - correction, universes.
FYI, I expected flack from disagreeing diehards so I watched the voting with interest. The split in voting being almost even with the earliest ones being upvotes. I know diehards won't agree or believe what I am saying but at least I know that many others do so and that they have actually read the post despite whatever you may think.
Moreover, you've only criticized, what you have failed to do is provide a contrary opinion or debate the issues exactly as I have noted above. Nor it seems have you actually read the many other posts that agree with my opinion. QED!
In this situation they cannot do that for reasons that to acquiesce or do nothing would be seen by the Australian public, many of whom have been already shabbily treated by COVID restrictions, as favoritism towards Djokovic. I'd be political suicide (see point 7 in my earlier post).
Politics aside, the entry requirements for Australia explicitly require full vaccination with a WHO approved vaccine or a valid medical exemption. Prior infection is explicitly not sufficient for an exemption.
Djokovic did not meet the entry requirements, he knew he did not meet the entry rquirents, but he boarded the plane anyway.
The earlier visa cancellation was overturned on procedural grounds only. This ministerial intervention is a bit heavy handed, but only produces the same outcome that would normally apply to anyone in Djokovic's situation.
He had followed all the rules apparently. He had been granted an exception reviewed by two independent panels as required by Australian authorities. Decision backed by the Victorian Dep. of Health. The process is blind so supposedly the authorities didn’t know it was Djokovic behind the application. He boarded the plane with the papers in order:
My point is that he had followed the stablished process to request an exemption and it was granted. He didn’t get special treatment because the application process is blind.
It was an exemption to State Covid-19 rules, not an exemption to enter the country. Him and his team are purposefully muddying the waters with this exemption in an attempt to bully the country into letting him in, even though he's violated their laws and is not following their regulations.
I don’t consider leaving 10,000s of your own citizens stranded abroad for up to 18 months a good metric by any means. That’s suspending citizenship, and will have done irreparable damage to rights.
They of course also prevented people from leaving
This is before we get in to the whole topic of quarantine “hotels” and the force with which people were escorted to them and the conditions there
"This is before we get in to the whole topic of quarantine “hotels” and the force with which people were escorted to them and the conditions there"
The truly disgraceful aspect of all this is that Australia had a proper quarantine system in place and it abandoned it. When I was a kid, everyone knew of Australia's quarantine system and its past history as it was so public. Anyone who'd traveled on Sydney Harbour back then would have seen Sydney's quarantine station (I used to pass it every time I went to the beach): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Head_Quarantine_Station
The fact is Australia was unprepared for COVID because of government funding cutbacks and other political BS. The country has no one else to blame except itself.
BTW, this was the ideal site of a quarantine station, it was easily accessible (near all incoming shipping, etc.) and yet it was properly isolated geographically from the rest of Sydney (see aerial photo in wiki link), thus people who were quarantined there would not have been able to infect others as they have done in the idiotic 'hotel system' that now exists.
In slovenia, more people have died from smoking related illnesses than covid (even in the last two years), but somehow "corona lives matter", peoples personal choices to go out, get ill, and risk the 0.5% chance of death don't matter, governments take more and more power, because "every life matters", but on the other hand, you can still buy cigarettes everywhere.
If every life matters, then ban cigarettes, tax the shit out of sugary sodas and junk food, if you're willing to sacrifice basic human rights, also force people to exercise, and more lives will be saved than from corona. If all those lives don't matter, but corona lives do, someone is doing something very very wrong.
So we should only pay attention to whatever illness causes the most deaths and ignore the rest?
You're free to get ill if you choose (from smoking, covid, whatever) but it's really hard to believe people don't understand you don't have the right to endanger others, be it with tobacco smoke or covid.
That's also why we have speed limits. If you want to endanger yourself driving 250Km/h that's fine. But you can't, because you'd endanger others.
I mean... you probably shouldn't ignore the thing that kills the most people, to deal with something that kills less people than that. And yes, we basically do the calculation (deaths vs convenience) all the time.. look at speed limits for cars, they're just a calculation of traffic deaths per year vs time losses due to lower speed limits.. a few deaths is ok, because everyone can get to work faster, but a lot of deaths is not ok.
Especially now, with vaccines... if someone doesn't want to vaccinate, who exactly are they endangering (except others, who also chose not to vaccinate)? Thinking the vaccinated won't get in contact with omicron from other vaccinated people who got infected is stupid, but we still don't let unvaccinated people go to the bar, while I can go there, even infected (and with omicron, i could be infected right now, but noone tests us, the vaccinated ones).
> I mean... you probably shouldn't ignore the thing that kills the most people, to deal with something that kills less people than that
Smoking isn't ignored ... I don't think any illness is ignored in favor of any others. Doctors have been insisting people do not postpone medical procedures and checkups because they're worried about covid in hospitals (which has been happening, and causing more deaths).
One of the main reasons to get vaccinated against covid is specifically so hospitals don't get overwhelmed to the point where patients have to turned away, regardless of what they're suffering from.
> look at speed limits for cars, they're just a calculation of traffic deaths per year vs time losses due to lower speed limits
I doubt that speed limits have anything to do with "time lost". The difference in covering 30Km at 150Km/h vs 120Km/h is 3 min, negligible. Wake up earlier :)
Faster driving doesn't cause more accidents, but it does cause greater injury (complicated subject with lots of research, no time to dig all this up).
> with vaccines... if someone doesn't want to vaccinate, who exactly are they endangering
You're also endangering vaccinated people. The risk of serious illness is greatly reduced but you're not guaranteed not to die. A vaccine is like a seat belt (works super well but doesn't make you invincible).
And it's not just 1 or 0. People die from covid and survivors can have long lasting afflictions from it. I think the statistic is for every person that dies, there's 5 that will be "marked" for life by covid. Not "long covid" or whatever, but life long problems with reduced lung capacity, problems with kidneys, heart etc - things they will suffer from in varying degrees for years to come, burdening the healthcare and social welfare system and the economy in general (global cost is already in the trillions of dollars).
And it's still not ok to endanger those who aren't vaccinated because they can still end up in hospital, using up valuable resources. So if you want to have your covid parties that's fine if you sign a contract saying you'll receive no medical help whatsoever should you get infected. Anything else is morally wrong.
It's extremely tiring having to explain all this basic, obvious stuff to people. I'm sure if you thought it through you could figure it out for yourself.
> Smoking isn't ignored ... I don't think any illness is ignored in favor of any others. Doctors have been insisting people do not postpone medical procedures and checkups because they're worried about covid in hospitals (which has been happening, and causing more deaths).
Doctors have been saying that, but then rescheduling procedures. Some have even been stopped for some time. Here in slovenia, they even caught doctors, giving their timecards to a security guard to check them in/out out of the government hospital (so they get covid benefits) while they worked in private practice, because their government-hospital procedures (whole programme) was stopped.
> I doubt that speed limits have anything to do with "time lost". The difference in covering 30Km at 150Km/h vs 120Km/h is 3 min, negligible. Wake up earlier :)
But if we lowered the speed limit to 10km/h, there'd be almost zero deaths. And yes, we have speed limits lowering the speed from 130km/h to 110km/h in many places, because it loweres the chance of accidents there, while an accident at that both of those speeds are pretty bad anyways.
> You're also endangering vaccinated people. The risk of serious illness is greatly reduced but you're not guaranteed not to die. A vaccine is like a seat belt (works super well but doesn't make you invincible).
But vaccinated people also get ill and spread covid, and with omicron it's pretty much guaranteed that everyone, vaccinated or not, will get in contact with covid. The vaccine is basically helping only the vaccinated person, and has pretty much no effect on the spread itself (which is pretty much logical at r0=10 or whatever it is for omicron).
> And it's not just 1 or 0. People die from covid and survivors can have long lasting afflictions from it. I think the statistic is for every person that dies, there's 5 that will be "marked" for life by covid. Not "long covid" or whatever, but life long problems with reduced lung capacity, problems with kidneys, heart etc - things they will suffer from in varying degrees for years to come, burdening the healthcare and social welfare system and the economy in general (global cost is already in the trillions of dollars).
Again... we'll all get it, and you either trust your immune system, and take the risk for yourself, or you trust the vaccine+immune system, and take a lower risk, or you well.. stay at home, because vaccines won't prevent the spread of a virus so contageous as the omicron variant.
> And it's still not ok to endanger those who aren't vaccinated because they can still end up in hospital, using up valuable resources. So if you want to have your covid parties that's fine if you sign a contract saying you'll receive no medical help whatsoever should you get infected. Anything else is morally wrong.
Should we expand this to smokers and obese people, and extreme sportists? I mean.. getting covid is a one time "mistake", getting morbidly obese is years and years of self abuse, same with cigarettes, those take many years to destroy your lungs.
> It's extremely tiring having to explain all this basic, obvious stuff to people. I'm sure if you thought it through you could figure it out for yourself.
It's also exremly tiring to take away peoples basic human rights in the name of a disease that (with vaccines) kills less people than the flu (and who cares if someone doesn't get vaccinated, it's their problem).
> But vaccinated people also get ill and spread covid, and with omicron it's pretty much guaranteed that everyone, vaccinated or not, will get in contact with covid
Well yes, vaccines don't stop the spread but it will reduce it (definitely with Delta, maybe less so with Omicron). And then you have other problems like mutations happening more among non vaccinated.
And even with omicron, a vaccine will prevent serious illness.
Even if it just makes a 1% difference, among the almost 8 billion people in the world that's still a huge number. So why not get vaccinated?
It seems to me people are either scared for irrational reasons or just want to be different and think they know it better than the medical establishment.
> Should we expand this to smokers and obese people
Yes, I definitely think you could make a case for that. If people could reduce their craving for McDonalds by receiving a yearly injection and they refuse then yeah, you'd be in the same situation. But things are more complicated, being related to addiction, socio economic status etc ...
> It's also exremly tiring to take away peoples basic human rights in the name of a disease that (with vaccines) kills less people than the flu (and who cares if someone doesn't get vaccinated, it's their problem).
Again, nobody is forced to be vaccinated and it's not just their problem if they don't. You may be refused entry to bars & restaurants but that's not a basic human right, afaik.
> vaccines don't stop the spread but it will reduce it (definitely with Delta, maybe less so with Omicron).
Not with omicron, atleast not really.
> And even with omicron, a vaccine will prevent serious illness.
So, it's like smoking, the vaccinated get lesser chance of serious illness, and the unvaccinated have themselves to blame.
> Yes, I definitely think you could make a case for that. If people could reduce their craving for McDonalds by receiving a yearly injection and they refuse then yeah, you'd be in the same situation. But things are more complicated, being related to addiction, socio economic status etc ...
I mean.. they could reduse mcdonalds by just not eating at mcdonalds.
> Again, nobody is forced to be vaccinated and it's not just their problem if they don't. You may be refused entry to bars & restaurants but that's not a basic human right, afaik.
But curfews (restriction of movement) is a basic human right, that was taken away from us. And again, if vaccines only help the vaccinated, why not let the unvaccinated ones into bars (or mcdonalds)?
The limitations are there, so that hospitals don't get flooded with people. Without the limitations the healthcare system would collapse. If that were to happen, doctors would have to decide whether to help you because you had an accident or to treat somebody else with covid or somebody else with some other emergency.
Unhealthy diets affect only the people who follow them, not their peers. Smoking is different because passive smoking does affect others - that's why there have been government interventions (higher taxation, public campaigns) to reduce smoking in many countries in the last decades.
Your argument is besides the point anyway: just because there are other factors in life that can make you sick, that does not mean that we should not fight COVID.
But if lives (number of lives) matter, and we're unwilling to ban the sale of cigarettes to save lives (which is, lets be honest, not a very impactful thing on normal life of normal people, especially if you do it the new zeland way, by a cutoff year), we basically let all those people die, and we don't care.
Considering we have vaccines available for some time now, and considering we've dealth with contageus diseases before covid, getting unvaccinated is basically a lifestyle choice, and non-believers can still stay at home and not do the stuff we've been restricting to people who actually want to do that.
> But if lives (number of lives) matter, and we're unwilling to ban the sale of cigarettes to save lives (which is, lets be honest, not a very impactful thing on normal life of normal people, especially if you do it the new zeland way, by a cutoff year), we basically let all those people die, and we don't care.
I don't know if you can compare smoking to covid, smoking related diseases take years and more likely decades to be deadly.
But in saying that, one way to look at this is via economics. When you are born, you have a potential life expectancy and a potential to earn society money (taxes). Smokers quite often die younger overall and not reaching their value to society, however this is general with many other diseases. Obviously reducing preventable forms of deaths such as those from smoking are to the benefit of society. Whenever you hear that smoking costs the "country" $X billions a year, that is not only the direct costs but also the indirect costs.
I believe in Australia the direct healthcare costs of treating smoking related illness was pegged at some number around 110 million a year, which is substantially different to the promoted cost of billions.
The difference with Covid is that it is an anomaly, perfectly healthy individuals have an increase chance of dying, as well as those who do have other health factors. This number maybe small but it has a large impact on the economy on society in general. Not only is a persons economic value reduced by the direct costs to society are increased.
An example of this, might be, you build a hospital knowing that X amount of smokers will die a year as well as other illnesses. You can calculate this, and work out what type of hospital you need to build. But what you cannot do very easily is calculate an additional 5 million people a year dying over an immediate time. It also takes considerable time to build hospitals, and years to train doctors, as such it is difficult to ramp up quickly to deal with anomalies. Then you must also consider the amount of productivity which is lost when a person is sick, this is also a factor which is calculated in regards to society, and then the publics spending, fear etc.
You can also look at the cost increases in the supply chain, which will affect the economy for years to come. Smokers for example are unlikely to influence the price of wood, but covid has.
So while we should take a pro-active stance against smoking (and when I was smoking I used to say the same), the pandemic is a real-time disaster which cannot be dealt with over 20 years like smoking. People will continue to die from smoking for decades even if you banned it today, but people will die today and potentially from related issues for decades from covid. The effects of covid are immediate, substantial and impactful to society not only right now but likely for some time.
Given the multiple 'X lives matter' references I think this response is probably more loaded than the question could ever have been.
The thing with COVID is that it's a contagious and deadly disease. The thing with smoking, fizzy drinks and junk food is that they're not contagious and deadly diseases, they're lifestyle choices.
I'm not an american, and I don't really care about your internal issues. Our phrase is "vsako zivljenje steje", which is literally translated to "every life counts", but "matters" makes more sense in this context.
It’s not true.
In all the world covid caused way more deaths than smoke related diseases.
If in Slovenia it’s not the case then they are massively undercounting covid deaths.
And the covid mortality is 1%, not 0.5%. Stop spreading dangerous misinformation.
> Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
Two years, 16+mio deaths. Total covid deaths, a bit over 5 mio.
The thing is that tobacco deaths are usually from several years of use. I don't think most of the dead people who died from tobacco have begin smoking this last two years meanwhile covid killing is quite faster.
Let's be honest here... covid is really bad for old and already ill people. For young and currently healthy, the impacts of lockdowns will be worse than covid, especially for younger children (imagine just going to first grade, unable to rad and write yet, and you're put infront of a laptop with Zoom running, no real-life contact with friends, parents having to quit their jobs to take care of you, and all that to "save grandma", even with vaccines already available).
Two years, 16+mio deaths. Total covid deaths, a bit over 5 mio.
I don't get it. You're arguing against government interventions because of relatively low fatality numbers. Yet, the fact that these numbers are not higher is a direct outcome of the world-wide vaccination campaigns. Don't you think you got it backwards?
I'm saying that we violated many basic human rights because of a disease that killed 5 mio people, citing those deaths as reasons to violate all the basic righs, while we're unwilling to violate a relatively minor right (to smoke), to save even more lives.
If you're saying we need a cufrew, because covid killed X people, but are not willing to ban the sale of cigarettes, even though they kill 3.2*X people, you're doing something wrong.
Covid kills X people because of the restrictions, otherwise it would kill N*X people, where N would be a lot higher number than 3.2 because of the secondary problems like hospitals overflowing.
An often ignored fact is that many of these restrictions and the fear many governments have stoked (e.g. fear of going to the doctor, fear of going out, interruptions in work) have caused many deaths. We won't know what the net cost is until many years from now.
Well we'd all like to think that but if you plot cumulative world deaths on a graph there's no inflection point in 2021. The graph just keeps going up and to the right at exactly the same speed as it always did:
It's really hard to explain this. I admit to being baffled. If vaccines are saving lives then there should have been a clear bend downwards in the trend line of the graph but if any such bend exists at all you have to squint to see it. If anything there looks like a slight acceleration in the first months of 2021 (but it's small enough I can't say for sure by eyeballing it).
Lots of people don't understand the numbers around total COVID deaths, by the way. In the past week alone I've seen internet comments saying that over 20 million have died of COVID, that vaccines have saved "millions of lives" when COVID overall since the start has only claimed (or rather, been temporally associated with) millions of lives, and VE lasted only months due to Omicron and when it rolled out. So it's impossible for vaccines to have saved millions of lives.
But this is understandable when you consider what people tell opinion polls. Lots of people, including people who think of themselves as well informed and educated, mis-estimate the dangers of COVID by orders of magnitude :(
What I see in this graph is a more or less linear growth instead of an exponential one. That's good news.
But a more tangible insight into why you're wrong and why vaccines do work is to look at statistics for hospitalization in intensive care: these days, the vast majority of ICU cases of COVID are unvaccinated patients. Given that most people are vaccinated, it should be the other way around if there was no difference between vaccinated or unvaccinated. This is a much stronger argument than speculating what a growth graph should or should not look like with or without vaccines.
Why would deaths increase exponentially over a period of years? That would not be expected and was not occurring even before vaccines.
The point I'm making here is that the data is contradictory, which means there is a need to investigate. Trials didn't show any impact on hospitalization or death (because it's so rare, they were too small to get significance). That means the data on them is confounded. For example, in the UK the data shows that pregnancy makes you more likely to be admitted to ICU with COVID but less likely to die. A biological effect? No, of course not. Rather, hospital staff have a lot of discretion on who they send to ICU or not, and they prefer to spend resources on women who are pregnant.
The expected curve without intervention would have an S-shape: initially, you see exponential growth which will flatten out later on when you reach a point of saturation.
In many countries, the intensive care units have not been in the situation where they had to triage, so the selection effects you report have not been necessary there. And even if, no hospital would make the decision on who to assign to an ICU based on their vaccination status, but based on the medical needs. The fact that we see dramatically less vaccinated people in ICUs is most plausibly explained by the effectiveness of the vaccines.
Logistic growth (S shaped) is observed in any specific epidemic regardless of intervention. But what we're looking at here is the sum of all COVID epidemics together.
"no hospital would make the decision on who to assign to an ICU based on their vaccination status, but based on the medical needs"
Your beliefs about hospitals and doctors are romanticized and I already gave you evidence of this. Albeit I didn't cite it, so let me do that now with this analysis of UK ICNARC data:
Pregnant women get admitted more and survive more because they weren't being admitted based on true medical need but rather the subjective feelings of staff that [currently/very recently] pregnant women should get higher levels of care due to having a baby.
This also affects other decisions. Doctors aren't always rational well informed calculating machines:
"We see a similar admissions bias when we examine the hospitalization fatality rates between the fully vaccinated and unvaccinated under 50s with PHE hospitalization data for 218,784 confirmed Delta infections – which show that whilst the 1.7% hospitalization rate of the unvaccinated is almost 2X that of the vaccinated (0.9%), the HFR in the vaccinated is 3 times higher (7.4%) than the unvaccinated (2.4%) and the case fatality rates is also lower in the unvaccinated."
Why does this happen, well, the population has been terrorized for years into believing things that are wildly untrue. The average Australian believes an unvaccinated person has a 33% chance of dying if they catch COVID. They think it's as deadly as smallpox or the plague. 40% of American Democrat voters believe half of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized with COVID! Half!
It'd be great if all the people who believed this nonsense were somehow excluded from the health system but of course they aren't. Quite the opposite: those who understand the true numbers and severity rates are much less likely to want to get vaccinated than those who think it's literally the plague and they're all being fired.
Covid is rampant at this point. An aggressive testing path and allowing him to play would absolutely be in the public's best interest.
It's clowns on both sides here but the risk of letting him in is definitely not high enough to balance the public benefit of him being allowed to play. Once he plays the special public benefit ends and so should his visa.
> The political cost of letting Djokovic stay was too high for Morrison
> Australians have been barred from visiting a dying parent in hospital, blocked from seeing a new grandchild and forbidden from having a wedding. Should they accept that a tennis star gets the leeway they were denied?
This is bizarre logic. "I got screwed, so someone else should get screwed too!"
He got the exemption. It was challenged in court. He won that case.
Now a minister's "personal discretion" (why is this even a thing?) timed perfectly so that even if Novak wins the court case, it would be too late for him to participate in the Australian Open.
The first visa cancellation was overruled purely on the grounds that it was issued too quickly and did not give him enough time to respond. It has nothing to do with whether his exemption was valid (which it clearly isn’t).
Djokovic won the original challenge on procedural grounds that the process was incorrect, not that his exemption/documentation was valid. He was never exculpated. And let's not forget that Djokovic screwed this up for himself.
> This is bizarre logic. "I got screwed, so someone else should get screwed too!"
Not at all.
The government sets a bunch of strict rules with no exceptions and tells people it's very important that they obey the rules.
It's entirely reasonable for people to take that at face value - if these rules are important, they should apply to the rich and famous just like they do to everyone else.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Australians - and I speak as one, now thankfully living elsewhere - but "I got screwed, so someone else should get screwed too!" is a big part of the national psyche, along with "How dare someone get something that I'm not getting!".
Sorry, but no. Expecting consistency in the application of law is fundamental to democracy. It's not Australian to think that celebrities and the rich receiving a different set of laws and treatment is unfair.
...which Djokovic still received, by the way. There are people in his detention centre that have been waiting for 10 years to receive half the time of the courts that Djokovic has received in a week. If Australians were as you described, then Djokovic would be held for 3 years in his current facility then sent to Nauru for a further five years of off-shore processing.
I want to address the continuing misinformation
about my activities and attendance at events in
December in the lead up to my positive PCR
COVID test result.
This is misinformation which needs to be
corrected, particularly in the interest of
alleviating broader concern in the community
about my presence in Australia, and to address
matters which are very hurtful and concerning
to my family.
I want to emphasise that I have tried very hard
to ensure the safety of everyone and my
compliance with testing obligations.
I attended a basketball game in Belgrade on 14
December after which it was reported that a
number of people tested positive with COVID 19.
Despite having no COVID symptoms, I took a
rapid antigen test on 16 December which was
negative, and out of an abundance of caution,
also took an official and approved PCR test on
that same day.
The next day I attended a tennis event in
Belgrade to present awards to children and took
a rapid antigen test before going to the event,
and it was negative.
I was asymptomatic and felt good, and I had not
received the notification of a positive PCR test
result until after that event.
The next day, on 18 December I was at my
tennis centre in Belgrade to fulfil a
long-standing commitment for a L'Equipe interview
and photoshoot. I cancelled all other events
except for the L'Equipe interview.
I felt obliged to go ahead and conduct the
L'Equipe interview as I didn't want to let the
journalist down, but did ensure I socially
distanced and wore a mask except when my
photograph was being taken.
While I went home after the interview to isolate
for the required period, on reflection, this was an
error of judgement and I accept that I should
have rescheduled this commitment.
On the issue of my travel declaration, this was
submitted by my support team on my behalf -
as I told immigration officials on my arrival - and
my agent sincerely apologises for the
administrative mistake in ticking the incorrect
box about my previous travel before coming to
Australia. This was a human error and certainly
not deliberate. We are living in challenging times
in a global pandemic and sometimes these
mistakes can occur. Today, my team has
provided additional information to the Australian
Government to clarify this matter.
While I felt it was important to address and
clarify misinformation I will not be making any
further comment out of utmost respect for the
Australian Government and their authorities and
the current process.
It is always an honour and a privilege to play in
the Australian Open. The Australian Open is
much-loved by players, fans and the community,
not just in Victoria and in Australia, but around
the globe, and I just want to have the
opportunity to compete against the best players
in the world and perform before one of the best
crowds in the world."
> This is bizarre logic. "I got screwed, so someone else should get screwed too!"
Or, I had to follow the law, so everyone else should too. I'm getting upset if the law is only for the simple people like me, but not for big sports stars and other hotshots.
No, it’s not bizarre at all.
If he really was positive in December and attended several events while knowing that he was positive without taking any precautions it’s a criminal behaviour and they have all the rights to ban him on these grounds.
If he wasn’t positive then it means that he forged his test certificate, that is equally bad.
I don’t see any issue in banning someone that has been proven to be an health danger for the general population.
in the first case he's on the hook in Serbia, not in Australia
in the second case, these documents resolve to an official Serbian covid certificate web page and it's the country of Serbia responsibility to explain to other countries in the world how that was possible to happen and to find out who did it
now, the fact that Novak visited Spain and his agency "forgot" to mention it in the PLF that's a leverage that could be used
> Australians have been barred from visiting a dying parent in hospital, blocked from seeing a new grandchild and forbidden from having a wedding. Should they accept that a tennis star gets the leeway they were denied?
No, they should not have accepted being barred perhaps. When you are oppressed just insisting no other one is treated justfully (the way the court decided in accordance with the law) is not a morally right solution. Also expelling a person who has already got in the country physically and attended a courts makes no sense from the epidemiological point of view - he has already brought the virus in if he had it.
And by the way attending a wedding or a family meeting where people stand close, often in a small room, is quite different from just visiting a country or playing tennis (which doesn't require you to stand close to anybody, let alone in a room).
But what if most accepted those limitations, and while personally a disaster, found it on the other hand right to follow common sense and obey rules applying to everyone for the greater cause of society?
Rules applying to everyone the same is one of the basic foundations of a just society...
> Also expelling a person who has already got in the country physically and attended a courts makes no sense from the epidemiological point of view - he has already brought the virus
No matter what you argue beyond, the epidemiological aspect is now not really the point here anymore. He faked stuff for entry one or the other way (I think it is even more likely he wasn't positive at all, but that the second test was just created so he counts as recovered, which was the requirement to get in if not vaccinated..) - so its good to see consequences on that.
> obey rules applying to everyone for the greater cause of society?
Sounds like communism. No cause can be considered greater than freedom.
> No matter what you argue beyond, the epidemiological aspect is now not really the point here anymore. He faked stuff
He should be investigated for faking then and expelled/imprisoned/fined by a court if evidence proves him guilty.
> second test was just created so he counts as recovered, which was the requirement to get in if not vaccinated
Just test him antibodies/T-cells + PCR and you know if a person used to be sick and recovered. No necessity for speculation here. Presence of immunity (which one only get through overcoming the sickness or a vaccine) is an objective thing. Is it not?
I would also suggest introducing a law sentencing people who falsely claim they are immune or expose others to a risk of being infected any other way to serve a sentence aiding in a hospital taking care of infected people.
> Sounds like communism. No cause can be considered greater than freedom.
Are you a 10 year old American from the Cold War? What you're saying is so comprehensively stupid I'm not entirely certain you're a real human.
No, that's not what communism is. If you want to know what it really is, go read "Das Kapital" and the "Communist Manifesto", you might learn a thing or two.
As for freedom... it's subjective. Absolute freedom is obviously incompatible with living in a society with other humans. And as we've seen time and again, most people value many things over freedom. Just look at Singapore and Rwanda, people there are happy with the prosperity and stability even if they're really not free on a lot of levels.
I see, but it's hard not to see a pandemic as a legitimate emergency and "higher causes"-invoking situation. It's not just a leader inventing a paper foreign subversive enemy out to get us, it's actually a thing which isn't hard to see and comprehend for oneself. I don't think any country's experience under communism is in any way applicable to the current situation.
There can be legitimate higher causes and situations when such are painfully obvious like overcoming pandemics. Nevertheless politicians (let alone masses incompetent in relevant subjects) can never be trusted as actually pursuing such as their primary aim. Appealing to such to justify anything always is a huge red flag (pun intended).
Politicians apparently are driven by the game theory and will do/say anything they believe will help them maximize their own power and safety (elections already mentioned) rather than sustainable wellbeing of the people.
Masses are driven by even more chthonic energies like unconscious xenophobia and value the chance to unite by any attribute to attack anybody they can (especially those enjoying a benefit they don't or trying to achieve a benefit they enjoy) above everything and will use any excuse they are given.
Simply saying politicians have already made a too many of suspiciously inefficient (and logically obviously futile even before proven such) decisions to trust them competent and benevolent and the mob will believe and shout any nonsense you tell them as long as this justifies them carrying torches and pitchforks.
Imagine president Trump, seeing himself loosing the elections and actually facing a real prison sentence risk, would have said nuking China is going to end the pandemics and we need to do so to make the whole world great again. I would bet the number of people supporting him would be way far from zero, all over the world.
Yeahyeah, freedom over all, and everything natural is also good, right ? :D
Please also reflect on the rhetorics you bring up here :D This is black and white painting, there are a lot of levels between..
> The Yerkes–Dodson law refers to an inverted U-shaped relationship between performance and arousal, where performance increases with arousal, but only up to a certain point.
The quest to discover and apply "laws" like this courts disaster or disruption because people are neurodiverse. ADHD people respond to deadlines in a completely different way to non ADHD - sometimes inversely, sometimes obversely, and so require different management. Same but different with autistic spectrum people, introverts, extroverts, bipolar, insomnia, sleep apneates, diabetics and long covids.
It may be tempting to dismiss neurodiversity as a fringe consideration and just assume most people are "normal", but their circumstances, both in the workplace and beyond it, may complicate Yerkes-Dodson as much as neurodiversity whilst evading detection by managers and systems.
The cookie policy is explained as if there is some semblance of user choice, but actually there is none. You have to accept performance cookies, functional cookies, and Targeting cookies because they don't offer opt out at all, despite offering what looks like a UI tier. But they only offer this guidance:
> We have divided the Cookies we use into the following categories: Strictly Necessary, Performance, Functional, and Targeting. Under each category heading below you will find a general description of the Cookies in each category. You can change your browser settings to block, delete, or alert you to Cookies. The Help menu on the menu bar of most browsers will tell you how to do that. However, if you do, you may have to manually adjust preferences every time you visit a site and some features may not work as intended.
The article itself has a headline that seems to suggest cellular death processes have been found to be reversible, or at least, not irreversible. But the text reveals that the research finding is not anything to do with reversibility. Rather, it is about interruptibility.
When they install an optogenetic switch in the organism to trigger the process, it functions as an On/Off switch. But there is no reverse switch, in the same way that there is no On/Off switch for the tracking cookies.
TFA, on one level, is an exercise in creating expectations for switches that don't exist.
Companies are certainly able to proactively raise salaries based on future inflation expectations, and many do that for CEO salary packages. They just don't do it for workers.
People generally have this expectation that companies are just made out of money and greedily keeping it all for "themselves", whoever "themselves" may be, but in the real world, a company that makes a 5% profit margin is doing pretty well and a 10% profit margin is amazing. Being in the tech industry can really skew your perception of profit margins because we are in one of the handful of odd industries where that would be mediocre.
Having to proactively raise salaries 10% across the board can easily be the difference between profit and loss for a year. Raising a salary for one person is easy. Raising it across thousands and thousands is not.
It is very difficult for a company to look ahead and say "Hey, maybe inflation is going to be 10% this year so we should raise salaries by a huge amount", especially when all the official numbers are themselves much smaller than that. It was literally only three months ago the Fed was promising up and down that inflation was only going to be transitory. I didn't believe them for a second, but I'm observably faaaar more cynical about governments telling the truth than the average businessperson, and for that matter, the average HN denizen. (At the time, the modal HN position at least by comment posts was indeed that the Fed was correct and anyone who questioned otherwise was wrong at best and possibly a conspiracy theorist.) Do you seriously expect companies to be second-guessing every official news source about inflation?
Not raising a salary for one person is even easier.
I'm referring to this ancient concept of solidarity. If your workers are struggling, you don't reward yourself. You struggle with them. In fact, as CEO you should take a pay CUT, because you're the one that can afford it.
It's pathetic how we normalized executives robbing companies, we truly are morally bankrupt and even defend the behavior.
Instead of doing 10% raises across the board, companies should do raises bottom up and use dollar amounts instead of percentages. 10% of 50k is way less than 10% of 400k, it's not a "fair" raise.
> The semantic web will never happen if it requires additional manual labor.
Is manual labor the reason things turned out the way they did, with google spending whatever it took to index and monetise the whole web the way it did?
Since there are many dimensions and units involved in characterizing HN users (we hate just using 4 colors I learned recently), I guess we should say that there is only a "most average HN user", pretty small chance she lies on the exact average values along all those axes.
If we keep improving the whole animal, refining its physiology, appearance, personality, behaviour, judgement, presentation skills, longevity and resilience, the USA will eventually have the opportunity to elect a leader who can heal and unite a divided nation.
Fascinating research into the question of how the first eukaryotic cells arose from prokaryote antecedents.
The ancestors of the mitochondria organelles you see today in every cell in your body were once free swimming bacteria, in a world where there were no animals, and no eukaryotic cells. Planet earth then, and for its first 2 billion years, was populated exclusively by bacteria, or single celled organisms. These cells were about one hundredth the size of the cells in your body.
How did life on earth become more complex?
Billions of years before the Cambrian explosion, when the number of animal species exploded into the millions, something much more basic happened at the cellular level. Cells became more complex.
How?
Maybe cells engulfed other cells, and the engulfed cells survived, forming a partnership or a colony.
Or maybe different types of cells hung out in close proximity, in colonies, which eventually merged into a network of DNA exchanging nodes that keep growing in complexity and interdependency.
We don't know.
This new effort to grow and study archea in vitro gives us something to study and experiment with.
I very warmly recommend the book "Sex, power, suicide" which explores different theories on how we came to have mitochondria and their impact and role. Dense reading but I learned something on every single page.
The author more or less concludes (highlighting also limitations of the science and current knowledge) that our cells were arachea which absorbed a methanophile bacterium that became both our today's mitochondria and a parallel process for the chloroplasts in plants (with possibly a common ancestor if I remember well).
This made perfect sense to Lyn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who was once married to astronomer Carl Sagan. She put up with decades of skepticism and derision from older scientists before Woese and Doolittle identified the genetic data in chloroplasts that confirmed the theory.
The History of Evolutionary Thought → 1900 to present → Endosymbiosis: Lynn Margulis
Already said in another comment, but I recommend the book "Sex, power, suicide" which explores the history of mitochondria and their evolutionary and todays role. The author also discusses Lyn's theories and partially absolves her (in particular on the symbiosis) but also highlights where her further theories don't hold up.
No, these are cell organs that also exist in simpler lifeforms, and they don't hold DNA. Key is that mitochondria have their own DNA and multiply independently of the host cell.
https://archive.ph/Ohx6d
The political cost of letting Djokovic stay was too high for Morrison
Australians have been barred from visiting a dying parent in hospital, blocked from seeing a new grandchild and forbidden from having a wedding. Should they accept that a tennis star gets the leeway they were denied?
Angering those Australians would have been a huge danger for Morrison when he is only a few months away from an election.
But this is not game, set and match. The entire saga has put Australia’s pandemic dysfunction up in lights. It was a national embarrassment and may continue through the courts.