By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Ramesh Thakur's book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power.

Is God a djoker? First, we've had the historical irony that during the cowboy days of the Wild West, banks feared masked robbers. Over the last two years they've called the cops on maskless customers. Then we had the sleight of hand by Big Pharma where for the first time in history, the failure of a pharmaceutical product was blame-shifted on those who never took them.

This was followed by the insistence that people who feel well must be tested and if the result is positive, they must self-isolate and all close contacts be tested also.

Now we have the surreal inversion of the drugs in sports equation. The reigning champion, world No. 1, among the greatest tennis players of all time, one of the greatest contemporary athletes across all sporting codes and quite possibly the healthiest human being on the planet, is being prevented from defending his Australian Open crown because he refuses to take a drug with an unknown long-term safety profile.

An astonishing 445 athletes, by definition the fittest people, have suffered cardiac arrest or serious injuries and 261 have died following Covid vaccination. EU regulators recently warned that frequent booster shots could adversely affect the immune system.

The claim that Djokovic poses a threat to Australia's public health is false to the point of being risible. With Australia experiencing one of the highest infection rates in the world, the failures of its current Covid policy settings pose a threat to Djokovic's health, not the other way round.

A new study supported by the CDC in the US concluded: "clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons." In remote Antarctica, two-thirds of 25 staff at a scientific research station caught the virus from one infected person. All were fully vaccinated, passed multiple PCR tests and were quarantined before entry to the station.

Professor Ehud Qimron, a leading Israeli immunologist, wrote an excoriating letter on 6 January calling on the health ministry to admit failure: "a respiratory virus cannot be defeated."

The nine-time champion was invited by Tennis Australia to defend his title. He cooperated with them and the Victorian government to ensure his exemption was valid to get an entry visa. The Byzantine rules and jurisdictional confusion between regulators, state and federal governments, tennis authorities, and airlines created an unseemly mess that reflects poorly on the government's competence.

Denying Djokovic a visa would have been unfortunate but a clear-cut decision that would have averted this sorry fiasco. The government didn't want to own the opprobrium of that decision, so they allowed the situation to drift into an international PR disaster. Concerned more about the disaster at the voting booth in a few months' time, they have whipped up a hysteria and climbed so high up the moral high horse that they cannot dismount for fear of falling flat on their face.

Tennis players seem to believe they can comply their way out of tyranny. Shame on them for not speaking up in defence of a champion of champions of their sport. Pace Martin Niemöller, someone should ask them: When they come for you, will anyone be left to speak for you? Maybe they just fancy their improved chances of adding a major title with the defending champion absent.

Problem is, victory sans Djokovic in these circumstances will see the halo displaced by an asterisk, the trophy tarnished and the tournament diminished.

Shame on the Professional Tennis Players Association and the International Tennis Federation for failing to stand up for Djokovic. Both should have made it clear that banning Djokovic would mean the end of the 2022 Open and call into question its future.

The foun...