Land Rover, the prince of vehicles
The unfortunate Lucy Maino controversy

Yama’s vaccine case is ‘idiotic, laughable’

Peter Yama
Governor Peter Yama - off to the supreme court to try to stop people who want to receive Covid vaccines from getting them

BRYAN KRAMER MP
| Kramer Report

MADANG - Last week, Madang governor Peter Yama announced he would file a Supreme Court reference challenging the decision of the Marape-Basil government to provide vaccines to Papua New Guineans who wished to receive them.

Yama said that, after studying a recent US Supreme Court ruling overturning universal vaccination, he had instructed his lawyers to file the reference to stop the vaccine for being provided to ‘his’ people in Madang.

He goes to state that ‘his’ people will not be used as ‘Gate’s guinea pigs’.

Gates being a reference to Microsoft founder Bill Gates who has spent billions of his personal wealth to save lives, reduce poverty and help vaccine children around the world against threats of epidemics.

So what US Supreme Court ruling was Yama referring to?

Yama shared an article, A Big Victory for Freedom in the United States, which had been circulating on WhatsApp.

The article claimed that “US infectious disease specialist Bill Gates, Dr Fauci and Big Pharma lost a Supreme Court case failing to prove all their vaccinations over the past 32 years were safe for the health of citizens.”

Was there such a US Supreme Court ruling?

The short answer is ‘no’, the article was fake news.

What I found laughable was Yama’s claim that after he studied the ruling he instructed his lawyer to file a Supreme Court reference in PNG.

So how does one study a ruling that doesn’t exist?

The only US Supreme Court ruling concerning universal vaccination was in 1905, where the court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws.

The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines in the US and in PNG is not universal. Vaccines are only for those who want them.

It appears the only people who would benefit from Yama’s nonsensical proceedings are his lawyer who is being paid from public funds and Yama himself, hoping to profit from the idiotic publicity.

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Ian Anthony Kewa

ohh Yama, "studying a recent US Supreme Court ruling".

really????. I support you but you got your researches wrong..

Philip Kai Morre

Social media is promoting fake news and conspiracy theories to confuse the people.

Even politicians and educated people regard such false information as true. Anything associated with Bill Gates is regarded as false and a conspiracy to destroy.

Bill McKibben

The more anti-vaxxers, or whatever they profess to be, the better.

This makes the line for getting the Covid vaccine shorter for old guys like me who will take the vaccine as soon as it is available.

Bernard Corden

The following article was published on Counterpunch back in May 2020 but is well worth reading:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/01/corona-capitalism-and-its-coming-collapse/

Chris Overland

Across the democratic world, many of our so called leaders have been unable to reconcile the personal freedom demanded by some of their citizens to refuse vaccination with the urgent and pressing social need to achieve a critical mass of vaccinated people and thereby achieve the elusive "herd immunity" to Covid 19.

Aided and abetted by misinformation and mischief making through various social media (such as false reports of fictional US Supreme Court decisions), this has resulted in inept, inconsistent and incompetent management of the pandemic. It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct consequence of this ineptitude.

The contrast with authoritarian regimes like that of China is striking. There, social needs always take precedence over personal freedom and the state has moved determinedly and forcefully to vaccinate the population. The results speak for themselves: a rapidly recovering economy and the resumption of a close to normal life.

The pandemic has exposed major flaws in the democratic models of governance in many countries, as well as the intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy of the prevailing neo-liberal economic model (as distinct from what we call capitalism). It also has revealed that far too many of those who find their way into positions of political leadership in the democratic world are alarmingly incapable of exerting effective leadership in a crisis.

Far too many have been blinded by ideology or, frankly, their lack of intellectual capacity. The latter has rendered them incapable of correctly understanding the situation, much less formulating an effective strategy to deal with it. Instead, their response is either a shrug of indifference or a series of panicky, ineffective, poorly thought efforts that sometimes even manage to make the situation worse. The President of Brazil is an exemplar of this class of politician.

It is very sad that Governor Yama appears to have succumbed to misinformation spread by libertarian activists in the USA, where the inability to reconcile social needs with often irrational notions of what personal freedom means has been especially acute and damaging.

Make no mistake, as the world staggers out of the worst of this pandemic (which may not yet have been reached), those of us living in the democratic world need to take a long, hard look at the political and institutional failures that have caused immense harm. Whether we are willing and able to do anything about them remains a moot point.

Meanwhile, China will emerge more rapidly and more strongly from this experience, thus helping consolidate the Chinese Communist Party's belief in the fundamental superiority of their authoritarian system. This will be yet another step on the road to the war that is clearly looming, just when democratic powers are at their most confused and weakest since World War 2.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

Your Information

(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)