Novak Djokovic is not the only person who feels uneasy when they visit the city once affectionately known by all Australians as Marvellous Melbourne. The tennis superstar revealed that he feels nervous every time he goes through Australian passport control, wondering if he is going to be detained. Who can blame him after the way he was treated in January 2022?

Djokovic had complied with Australia’s nonsensical and unethical Covid vaccine regulations – nonsensical because the so-called vaccine didn’t stop anyone from getting Covid, getting sick, or dying, and unethical because nobody should be forced to take an experimental injection, particularly one in which one of the side effects is death.

In his case, he had a valid exemption because he had recently been infected and the public health authorities recognised that it was dangerous to be injected too soon after a Covid infection. They refused to recognise that infection conferred better immunity than vaccination but that was irrelevant in his case.

The fact is that Djokovic complied with the law and his compliance was confirmed in court. But this wasn’t about complying with the law.  It was about punishing Djokovic because he dared to stand up for the right not to be injected with an experimental gene therapy that has caused the deaths of an as-yet uncounted number of people and has compromised the health of even more.

Determined to prevent him from competing in the Australian Open, the then Liberal Immigration Minister Alex Hawke used his powers to cancel Djokovic’s visa, arguing that the sporting star’s presence in the country risked fanning anti-vaccine sentiment. What it really risked doing was showing that a Covid infection was no big deal for a healthy young person and vaccination was completely unnecessary.

The persecution of Novak Djokovic continues. The sledging of arguably the greatest tennis player of all time by a fourth-rate sporting commentator was no accident.  Djokovic fans have recounted how Channel 9 hack Tony Jones staged the event, asking the crowd to chant slogans in support of their hero so that he could use them as a backdrop for his juvenile insults. ’Novak, he’s overrated. Novak’s a has-been. Novak, kick him out’, Jones told the television audience.

Obviously, this was offensive and was meant to be offensive to Djokovic and his fans.  As Jones said to the television audience, immediately after the insults, ‘Boy, I’m glad they can’t hear me’. But of course, they did hear him eventually. And eventually, Jones managed to cough up a grudging apology.

The tawdry set-up exposes why the legacy media is hemorrhaging viewers and so richly deserves the moniker of ‘fake news’, given to it by President Trump during his first term in office. Not only, was the scene orchestrated, it was used to, once again, demonise Djokovic for refusing to be jabbed.

In 2023, Djokovic said he felt like ‘the villain of the world’ in Melbourne when he was detained at a hotel with asylum seekers before being deported. That was no accident either. The persecution of Djokovic was part of a national and international campaign to demonise anyone who dared to say no to the Covid injection.  Hatred of the unvaccinated was whipped up everywhere. They labelled selfish. They were called granny killers. The orchestration came from the top.

In September 2021 President Biden told the unvaccinated, ‘We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,’ in a speech from the White House that made clear that he blamed the unvaccinated for the spread of Covid, claiming, ‘your refusal has cost all of us’.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel said in September 2021, ‘Dr. Fauci said that if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed. I don’t know, that choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right on in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.’

Then in December President Biden said, ‘We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death.’

It was all a lie. In 2022, when Australia opened up after 95 per cent of the population over the age of 16 had had at least one vaccine, there were over 20,000 excess deaths, overwhelmingly vaccinated people judging by the statistics released by the NSW Department of Health.

Naturally, all those who hate Djokovic because he dared not to be vaccinated were quick to condemn him. Senator Jacqui Lambie, who never seemed quite able to grasp that Djokovic had a valid exemption and wanted him banned from playing in the Australian Open, condemned him again. Hardly surprising.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was equally unsympathetic. She said, ‘Covid was tough for all of us. It didn’t matter who you were or what you did, it was a tough time.’

Perhaps, but it was tougher for some than for others. Brave doctors, like Victorian Dr Mark Hobart, lost his licence simply for giving valid vaccine exemptions to his patients. He is still fighting to get it restored. He is one of many. Nurses, teachers, pilots, firefighters lost their jobs and many are still fighting to get them back.

In the case of Djokovic, deporting from Australia denied him the possibility of winning the Australian Open which had the biggest prize pool of the four major tennis grand slams that year and a prize for the winner that year of $2.875 million. The number of grand slams a star wins also contributes to a tennis champion’s place in history. Djokovic forfeited both rather than cave into the pressure exerted by governments doing the bidding of pharmaceutical companies who made billions out of the sale of vaccines.

On the other side of the world, President Trump has just signed an executive order reinstating, with full back pay, all those members of the armed forces who were sacked for refusing to be vaccinated.  It seems so removed from Australia that it might as well have happened on Mars but where America leads Australia will follow and justice will come for those who were persecuted simply because they stood up for their right not to be vaccinated.