Australia and New Zealand were frequent objects for criticism when it came to authoritarian pandemic policy, so I admit that this comes as a surprise. “The South Australian Employment Tribunal has found that employers who mandated their staff to take the COVID-19 vaccines can be held liable for injuries caused.”
It found that the injury arose “as a result of both [the government’s] vaccination mandate and the applicant’s employment.” Employment, the tribunal said, does not have to be the “only or most significant cause”; it is only necessary that it be a “significant contributing cause of a work injury.” The implication is that employers cannot shift the blame; they, too, are responsible.
The potential fallout looks epic as the Medical Industrial Complex, aided and abetted by politicians and government agencies, wrestles with job creators who zealously took them all at their word. On one side, you’ve got institutional pressure to comply, and on the other, the “if they told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” The answer was yes, primarily because if it was no, there were immediate consequences, and not just in Australia.
I’ve no doubt the government will refuse to accept responsibility for forcing businesses into a corner where they may now find themselves faced with – if not a class action, then an endless train of individual lawsuits to address side effects from vaccine mandates that incapacitated injured, or killed employees who only got them because the alternative was to get fired.
The other fun bit, not for the vaccine injured or the families who lost loved ones, is that a Western Court has documented as a work-related injury any debilitating consequence of job-related forced vaccination. From 30,000 feet, we expect insurance companies to balk. At the same time, future mandates may now need to cross a new set of hurdles erected by business owners who have every right to question everything if they are to be left on the hook for any consequences.
We now need that to spread faster than the Wuhan Flu to the rest of the so-called Western world and, from it, a line of responsibility to government agents, NGOs, bureaucrats, politicians, colleges and Universities, and everyone else. If you made them do it and caused harm, you are liable with the caveat that it is the government who is responsible if the employer was acting under threat from it.
With another caveat. Employers could have come together and pushed back, given the sketchy emergency use authorizations and absence of fully informed consent.
Peaceful resistance works, but you have to choose it before you lose it.