Tennis says it would prefer if players were vaccinated, but only if they really wanted to, if that’s OK?

What sets tennis apart from these other sports is that it is for individuals. Typically, a modern tennis player bangs on about their team, but what they mean is Team Me. It is bound to inflect on attitudes. If Djokovic took his stance in a team sport he’d be laughed even further out of court than Ben Simmons.

This doesn’t apply to all tennis players. Andy Murray, bless him, says that tennis players, as world travellers, “have a responsibility to look out for everyone else”. Then again, he spent most of his career as No.2. Djokovic looks after No.1.

Cultural slippage must come into it. When the pandemic first shuttered tennis, Djokovic ran his own little pan-Balkans tour, until it had to be aborted because nearly everyone was struck down by COVID-19, including Djokovic and his family. “Whoops,” he said, and that was that.

Nationals senator Matt Canavan says Djokovic’s bout means that he has immunity anyway, so should be waived through customs this instant. He must have read it in the same online textbook that says coal is the future and Copernicus had it all wrong about the Earth revolving around the sun.

A year-and-a-bit later, the rate of infection in Serbia is 20 times the rate in Australia, and the death rate 17 times, and just 42 per cent of the population is fully immunised, and Djokovic says it’s his legal right to stay mum about his vaccination status and “inappropriate” even to ask.

It’s entirely appropriate, and in this country eminently legal. Whatever human rights instrument you care to look at qualifies the right to privacy when there is, for instance, a public health emergency at hand. That is, per Murray, when there is everyone else to consider as well as No.1.

Australia still treats COVID-19 as an emergency. This attracts criticism here and scorn around the world, but it’s saved thousands of lives, and great medical resources that will be needed now until the peak recedes. Understanding that the bug does not differentiate between a legendary tennis player and your grandmother, a majority of people are grateful.

The whole privacy argument is a bit ropey. You can tell that by the fact that the ever-outspoken Mark Latham is banging on about it. As jealously as we protect our medical records, by legal obligation we disclose bits of them all the time, when applying for a driver’s licence for instance. It’s not just to look after No.1, but everyone else, too.

On privacy, Djokovic is as he never would be on the court, all over the place.

What goes into his body is entirely his business and no one else’s, says the man who wrote a book in 2013 in which he detailed every last item he put into his body every day of every week, starting with breakfast on day one: “water, honey and muesli, including organic gluten-free rolled oats, cranberries, raisins, pumpkin or sunflower seeds and almonds”.

What medical procedures he undertakes should remain entirely confidential, says the man who on the eve of last year’s US Open cheerfully volunteered to the New York Times that he had had a CT scan, blood tests, urine tests and stool tests, at which point I wished he really had maintained his privacy.

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