Australia to Kanye West: you must be fully vaccinated to play here

After the Australian public and government overwhelmingly agreed they didn’t want unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic in the country, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has a strong working for hip-hop superstar Kanye West. Kanye announced plans to tour Australia in March, but the government has responded: not without a vaccine you aren’t.

While Kanye’s vaccination status is unknown, he has made some decidedly anti-vax statements in the past. He did say in an interview last year that he received one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, but in an interview with Forbes magazine, he spouted a string of religious imagery and vaccine misinformation (something the Pope himself strongly condemned this weekend).

“It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralysed. So when they say the way we’re going to fix Covid-19 is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”

The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported yesterday that, according to industry sources, Kanye was planning a stadium tour across the country in March, though no comment was released yet by representatives of the rapper who has sold 21 million albums and 100 million digital downloads worldwide, ranking him in the US as a top-selling hip-hop artist behind only Jay-Z (27.5 million albums), Tupac Shakur (36.5 million), and Eminem (46.5 million).

Prime Minister Morrison referred to Novak when explaining that, in Australia, nobody is above the law when it comes to vaccination and, if Kanye is not fully vaccinated with at least 2 doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, he would not be allowed to enter the country.

“The rules are you have to be fully vaccinated. They apply to everybody, as people have seen most recently. It doesn’t matter who you are, they are the rules. Follow the rules – you can come. You don’t follow the rules, you can’t.”

Australia has recently been similar to Thailand when the Delta variant started to spread, hard hit by the Omicron variant with about 2 million infections recorded after only 400,000 for the entirety of the pandemic before then. A record 98 people died Friday and another 97 Saturday, and Australia has taken its vaccination efforts very seriously. The majority of people supported Australia’s decision to boot unvaccinated people from the country, famous or not.

SOURCE: Thai PBS World