The madness of COVID may be behind us, but for some, the fight for justice is far from over. One of those people is Mariya Shmandiy, a South Australian woman who was smeared as the state's 'most dangerous woman' simply for refusing to comply with shifting, draconian COVID mandates. Her crime? Returning home from a holiday unvaccinated.

When I spoke to her, she recalled the nightmare beginning with a trip to the Northern Territory with her mother. “Upon returning back to South Australia… we approached a neon sign that stated unvaccinated residents no entry,” she told me.

Police ordered them to drive 13 hours home without stopping—no petrol, no toilet breaks. Then, once home, they were placed under house arrest for seven days.

But it didn’t stop there. When police arrived at her house on November 26, they imposed even stricter conditions. Despite her initial quarantine period being over, officers told her she had to isolate further because she hadn’t taken a PCR test. “So the rules kept changing,” she said, noting that police specifically targeted her as an “anti-vaxxer.”

Over 11 days, officers conducted constant compliance checks, often arriving at random times, including late at night. On December 5, she was pulled over by police, and bodycam footage revealed their intentions. “This is an ongoing issue with the person that we’ve found. She’s out and about breaching quarantine all the time,” an officer was heard saying. “We’ve got to lock her up.” And that’s exactly what they did.

Despite being “low risk” in their own words, police ensured she was jailed. “It was disgusting. It was disgraceful,” she told me. Locked in solitary confinement at the Adelaide Women’s Prison, she spent 13 days behind bars — over alleged COVID breaches. When she was finally granted bail, the conditions included forced COVID testing and potential vaccination under threat of reimprisonment.

In March 2023, after years of harassment, intimidation and legal battles, all charges were dismissed. But the damage was done.

Shmandiy’s case is a chilling reminder of how far authorities were willing to go to enforce their pandemic dictates. She was never a danger to society — just a citizen who refused to bend the knee to an out-of-control government.

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