Is the International Handball Federation joking, asks Icelandic goalkeeper Björgvin Páll Gústavsson in a tweet on the Federation’s quarantine rules for the 2023 World Cup. Are you trying to destroy our sport?
I want to thank everyone for the support regarding my last tweet about the covid 19 restrictions in the next Handball WC!
— Björgvin Páll Gústavsson (@BjoggiGustavs) January 4, 2023I just now sent IHF this letter here below. All retweets, especially if you are a player taking part in tournament, are well appreciated! Stay tuned…
pic.twitter.com/4djBw1VR6W
According to the rules all players must be vaccinated and boosted, tested daily for COVID-19 infections and quarantined for five days in case the test comes out positive.
As Gústavsson points out, the results of the tournament would be severely skewed by this measure.
Gústavsson has written a letter to the Federation where he brings up questions on the legality of those measures, considering that Sweden and Poland, where the tournament will take place, have dropped all Covid restrictions.
Earlier, the manager of the Icelandic team complained about the Federation’s demands for vaccination, quoting Dr. Aseem Malhotra who has explained the risk the vaccination poses to young people. It’s been estimated that approximately the same number of sportspeople have died from heart attack in the field in 2021-22 as in the 38 years prior.
Icelandic online newspaper Fréttin sent the Federation an enquiry regarding the legality of its vaccination requirements over a month ago, but has received no reply.
Now that COVID-19 has truly become endemic with a mortality rate even lower than the flu, it looks as if some people simply cannot accept that simple fact.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson is an economist, consultant and writer based in Iceland. This post first appeared on his Substack blog, From Symptoms to Causes, which you can subscribe to here.
Stop Press: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified hundreds of safety signals for Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines, according to monitoring results obtained by the Epoch Times. Statistics expert Professor Norman Fenton, reviewing the data, commented: “The probability that the true rate of the adverse events of the Covid vaccines is not higher than that of the non-Covid vaccines is essentially zero… The onus is on the regulators to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference.”
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I had never heard of handball until seeing this article.
Me neither but I’m liking the players. A lot.
Brilliant news.
Ww need the IHF to dig their feet in and for the players to form a single, defiant block and give the IHF authorities a monumental sex and travel response.
This has the potential to be a real goody. A sporting war. Loads of publicity and lots of bad press for the poison pushers, statistics all over the place, tragic stories. Billy and Klaus flapping. Bourla nowhere to be seen. Fishy in his cave. Sage in a bunker somewhere. Michie on a fact- finding mission in Antartica and Raine AWOL.
Marvellous.
Come on you lot.
Oh I fervently hope so.
In my own circle of musicians we dodged a bullet when a minority of Karens on a management committee tried to make vaccination a requirement of performing a symphony concert. They failed to impose the requirement, but then the venue owners imposed their own restrictions which scuppered the concert at the last moment. It’s chaos. We can’t be sure that some unknown authoritarian Karen isn’t going to veto our next attempt. Legal action looks prohibitively expensive, presumably it would be ECHR Right of Assembly Case versus Article 13 lawfare.
That’s upsetting to hear.
All the best
Michie the Bichie in the snow ! Frostbite would be too kind ! Mind you her hatchet face would probably melt the thickest ice
Nice one Freddy
The person who runs the IHF needs to be named and publicly shamed for the petty tyrant that he is.
Not yet. We want a proper set to, something that even The Times cannot ignore.
Come on lads. Get in to them!
Being a personal fiefdom, The Times can ignore whatever it wants!
I’ve looked him up. His name is Hassan Moustafa.
He’s been the president of the federation since 2000. So he’s been running the sport for 22 years, being reelected 6 times, the last 3 unopposed.
I bet he runs it like a personal fiefdom. That’s how most of these international federations operate, accountable to no one but themselves.
The Sep Blatter of Handball then !
You beat me to it Freddy.
Since when does the International Handball Federation, a perfectly private organization, have the authority to prescribe mandatory medical procedures for people attending or playing handball matches?
NB: The obvious answer is It doesn’t.
Governments have signalled over the last three years that they are quite happy for private companies and NGOs to do as they like in this regard and essentially do their dirty promotion and enforcement work for them.
And these international sports federations are completely unaccountable to anyone but themselves. Not unlike the WHO or UN. They have these pseudo democratic processes that elevate a delegate from each country to a global council which then sets rules for the entire world. And because it’s “democratic” then everyone has to follow their rules.
The moment you open your eyes, it’s impossible not to see the world as just a series of cartels. The pharma cartel, the media cartel, the energy cartel, all the sports cartels, the tech cartels, the banking cartel… etc….
The thing is the IHF really doesn’t have this authority, no more than they can randomly arrest people on premises they happened to rent. It’s neither a sovereign government enforcing some laws on its own territory nor an organization created by sovereign governments which have chosen to delegate certain powers to it. The people behind this may have the chutzpah to try it nevertheless, on the grounds that bullying oftentimes works, but bullying is all they have to support their stance.
They can keep the players out of the tournament which belongs to them, unless there are laws explicitly prohibiting that sort of discrimination.
I don’t know what the laws in Sweden and Poland say in this regard.
Of course, the players can get together and decide to boycott. At this point, they’re insane if they don’t.
After Damar Hamlin, I find it hard to imagine there is any athlete of any note who is not concerned about the vaxxes and certainly don’t want any / any more at this point in time. It only stops when we make it stop.
I don’t think your theory that the IHF is a sovereign government which has automatic exterritoriality in any place it may rent somewhere and is thus not subject to the laws of the countries its operating in and authorized to make up its own laws as it sees fit and enforce them violently is correct. But please feel free to prove me wrong by coming up with something which shows that private associations of businesspeople do actually have these rights in Sweden and Poland.
Re private companies setting mandates…
The situation is really bad in Australia where it’s likely millions have been impacted by jab mandates set by state governments, businesses, sports clubs etc.
In regard to companies, I’m challenging the jab mandate set by Westpac Bank for its employees, a jab mandate which is still in place.
See my email to the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Westpac Group: Westpac and Covid jab mandates – why were employees denied a voluntary decision on this medical intervention? 4 January 2023.
Well maybe, but where were they when people including children were being forced, coerced and gaslighted into being injected and generally vilified if they weren’t.
Most sports governing bodies are inept, corrupt because they are monopolies. Competition is the only thing that can keep them on their toes. There is little to prevent a group of professionals setting up a more democratic leaner and meaner organisation and ensure by a comprehensive constitution that the tendency to corruption and being captured by bad actors is democratically blocked. Two competing governing bodies in a region or country tend to keep each other a bit more efficient and honest. Perhaps Iceland should make a start.
Now the “Long march through the institutions’ is complete the march through sporting associations seems well underway as the England squad demonstrated in Quatar.