The government’s Covid Response Inquiry report, released on 29 October, was roundly expected to be an ethically offensive piece of sycophancy. Despite giving damning expert evidence to this inquiry, I guessed – based on the brazen lack of acknowledgement of or accountability for covid-era mistakes displayed so far by Australia’s political class – that this “inquiry” would be a whitewash, providing cover for the many covid-era betrayers of the Australian people.
We know that those in authority during the covid era ignored, with horrific consequences, the danger of fanatical fear; the danger of relying on data-free modelling rather than real science; the danger of suppressing dissent and coal-face experimentation in a crisis; the danger of ignoring time-tested principles like freedom of movement and freedom from medical coercion; and the danger of placing religious faith in novel, barely-tested injectable products, while ignoring or even, unconscionably, suppressing the healing potential of existing knowledge, protocols, and drugs, not to mention the power of our bodies to mount natural protective defences when properly supported and nourished. Worst of all, our governments in their hubris ignored the danger of thinking that the operation and fruits of a vibrant economy could be suspended and replaced, for any period of time, by government action.
We are now in far more debt, with less societal strength and cohesion, less trust in our institutions, and less health than before covid. These outcomes are not because of covid itself, but because of the colossal mismanagement of the covid crisis by our so-called leaders.
The covid era showed in stark relief that Australian institutions – including those charged with stewarding our health, and those intended to match how our country’s resources are spent with the needs and long-run well-being of the Australian people – desperately need reform. Root-and-branch reform is the only way to restore the trust that has been lost in our institutions’ ability to provide for and serve Australia’s people.
Does the Covid Inquiry report address all of these issues? Not by a country mile.
The report’s first most glaring oversight is its continued dogmatic worship of the vaccine-or-bust ideology, ignoring the corrupting profits motivating Big Pharma to push this ideology, the rot in our system of drug review and approval, and the morally bankrupt therapeutic nihilism that has characterised Australia’s treatment of those infected with covid. The report advises boosting vaccine uptake as an unquestionably positive action – in spite of the obvious fact that the risk-benefit profile of taking any vaccine differs from person to person, and can be unfavourable – and even advises an extension of the ridiculous vaccine indemnity scheme, which would allow large drug companies to make even more profit at the expense of Australians’ health in future crises, even if their products deliver net health damage.
The report also claims that “Australia was one of the most successful countries in its pandemic response” and that strict restrictions were “in the country’s best interests”. These claims, while perhaps psychologically reassuring to people who participated in or were injured by the country’s response, are entirely without basis. Australia’s lower per-capita covid death rates since 2020, and its somewhat more favourable if still weakened economic situation, relative to some peer countries are woefully insufficient statistics on which to base such a judgment.
Where is the reference to the tens of thousands of excess Australian deaths since mid-2021 that are not reducing, even as covid deaths have slowed to a trickle? Where is the recognition that the quantum of harm from lockdowns vastly exceeded any benefit from them? Where is the honest admission that covid-era school closures and isolating the elderly in their dying weeks and days were little more than child and elder abuse, respectively, justified by middle-aged adults’ fears? Where do we read that damaging trust in public institutions is a horrific sin against our country, visited upon it by covid-era authorities?
We expected from the limited Terms of Reference set by the government that this “inquiry” would ignore the lion’s share of the abuse experienced by Australians during the covid era because states’ actions were considered out of scope – even though it was the states that visited lockdowns, curfews, school closures, and masking rules upon their terrified populations, justifying this abuse by pointing to that very fear and claiming baselessly that these policies would reduce the threat of covid. As my cost-benefit analysis with Sanjeev Sabhlok has shown, lockdowns inflicted human costs on Australia in an amount equal to at least 68 times the value of the human benefits they could possibly have delivered. Locking down whole healthy populations is a murderous policy, and should never, ever be done in Australia again.
Worse still, the Terms of Reference of the inquiry invited a mental approach to the policy review process in which government played the role of saviour and supporter of vulnerable citizens during an implicitly dangerous time.
The authors of this inquiry’s report at least had the courage to consider state responses and admit some of the harms done directly by lockdowns and school closures. However, they still accepted implicitly the fatal government-as-saviour mentality, advising preparations for the next health crisis involving more bureaucratic coordination, planning, and surveillance, and thereby making it easier – not harder – to close schools and borders and to implement quarantines in future. The authors advocate the dangerous “One Health” approach being pushed by the CDC and WHO, whose conceited simplicity implicitly downplays the reality that different health threats to different individuals require different responses through time, and what works best to minimise suffering and death will evolve over time through freely taken, coal-face action, not through coordinated government planning and direction.
The authors of this report are oblivious to the most fundamental big-picture cracks in our institutions revealed by the country’s covid response.
The reality is that the covid era was dangerous to humans mostly because of governments’ reactions to covid – not because of covid itself.
If Australia had directed its resources to reduce death and suffering from covid – by investigating and helping disseminate the best approaches discovered in 2020 and 2021 to support immunity and combat the virus in those vulnerable to it, while avoiding heavy-handed, coercive interference in people’s everyday lives and medical choices – we would have lost far fewer people to covid itself over the past few years, not to mention everyone who would have been better off by not having lockdowns and related anti-human policies.
A responsible government today would embark on a wide-ranging evaluation – conducted by experts across the disciplines with no political or economic skin in the game – of all aspects of covid-era policy that departed from the approach outlined in our Pandemic Management Plan, a plan that was tossed in the bin in mid-March 2020. In fact, full Terms of Reference to cover what is needed have already been suggested by the Australian people to the Australian Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Reference Committee, in the form of The People’s Terms of Reference for a Covid-19 Royal Commission, available here.
For the past couple of years, we have seen elites dodging and weaving, strategically leaving key positions, attempting to brush obvious mistakes and inconsistencies under the carpet, papering over real pain with platitudes, and brazenly suggesting that even more bureaucracy (e.g., an Australian Centre for Disease Control) is needed in order to protect Australia better next time. Despite furrowing its brow over some mental health, learning, and physical health effects of covid policy, particularly on certain vulnerable populations, the covid-19 inquiry report sadly falls into this same category. It even praises the ACDC initiative, revealing the utter blindness of its authors.
After the failure of governments to manage covid, we need less government next time – not more.
When those in authority begin to accept the enormity of the covid policy evaluation task that morality, patriotism, duty, and all good things require of them, they will recognise this Inquiry’s report as merely a baby step in the needed direction, followed by a frantic run back into the comforting arms of an abusing father. Healing Australia’s horrific self-inflicted, salt-caked wounds from the covid era will begin at that moment.
An edited version of this article appeared in the Australian Financial Review on 30 October 2024.
