Nearly four years on since the onset of the pandemic and the rash of public policy interventions to manage and contain it, many more people have become sceptical of the range of policy responses by health officials, governments, and drug regulators.
Yet, substantial numbers remain convinced that while mistakes might have been made, the interventions were mostly successful and generally well-intentioned in unprecedently challenging circumstances of a fast-spreading lethal new virus.
The sceptics feel vindicated on three counts: the gravity and universality of the threat from the disease were exaggerated, often deliberately; the efficacy of the policy interventions were overstated; and their collateral harms and risks were downplayed.
The vilification, silencing, and defenestration of genuinely concerned and well-credentialled dissenters contributed to growing loss of trust in the good faith and competence of the authorities. In summary, over three years we witnessed the arrogance of know-all experts, the authoritarian instincts of governments, and a surprising degree of timidity and compliance of the people.
The mantra of ‘Follow the science’ has been unravelling. Testifying before Congress on January 8th–9th, Anthony ‘I am science’ Fauci confessed that the health authorities’ six-foot distancing rule (1.5-2.0 metres for countries following the metric system) was “likely not based on scientific data”. It “sort of just appeared”. He also conceded that Covid vaccine mandates “could increase vaccine hesitancy in the future”. The larger point of course is that the mandates contributed to a general loss of public trust in health and other institutions.
In an excoriating retrospective analysis of the Covid policies enacted by Drs. Fauci and Deborah Birx, Scott Atlas, who served as Covid adviser to President Donald Trump, wrote in Newsweek last March that the policies “failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America’s children”. He lists 10 falsehoods that were promoted by health leaders, officials and academics.
Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, admitted last July that public health officials had shown an unfortunate narrow-mindedness in their single-minded focus on Covid to the neglect of other health, social, and economic considerations. In his own words:
So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life.
You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.
The U.K. Covid inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett looks set to become the most expensive in British history, with one estimate from the Taxpayers’ Alliance putting the total cost at £156 million. It has also proven farcical, devoting endless time on the equivalent of tittle-tattle gossip on WhatsApp groups, and showing remarkable hat-doffing deference to the health officials and their top scientific advisers and rude indifference to equally eminent critics of the official narrative.
Even by its own low standards, the nadir came with the testimony from the Prime Minister (PM), of all people. Presenting to the inquiry on December 11th, Rishi Sunak drew attention to a study which indicated that more quality-adjusted life years (QALY) would be lost by the first lockdown than by the Covid disease.
In a jaw-dropping response, Hugo Keith KC, counsel assisting the inquiry, quickly shut him down. He was not interested in “quality life assurance models” (sic), he said.
Remember, this is the PM speaking, one moreover who was Chancellor under Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the time, suggesting that the cure might indeed have been worse than the disease. Professor Karol Sikora, an eminent oncologist and a former head of the cancer program at the WHO, called this “the single most revealing exchange in the Covid Inquiry”.
Sir Patrick Vallance was the U.K.’s chief scientist when coronavirus struck. Like Collins in the U.S., Vallance too conceded in testimony at the U.K. Covid inquiry on November 20th that science was given undue weight over economics: “The science was there for everyone to see. The economic advice wasn’t.”
In an astonishing open letter to PM Scott Morrison on April 19th 2020, many prominent Australian economists rejected commentators’ calls for a rapid return to work and labelled the notion of a “trade-off” between public health and the economy a “false distinction”. They said that while the measures adopted to contain the spread of COVID-19 had caused economic damage, those negative effects were far outweighed by the lives saved.
The letter was eventually signed by 265 economists. But it has not aged well and this might explain why the group’s website with the full list of signatories is no longer accessible. This was astonishing because this non-economist was under the impression that cost-benefit analysis was integral to the discipline of economics.
For what it’s worth, I wrote as early as March 30th 2020 in Pearls and Irritations:
In responding to an epidemic, there is a trade-off between public health and economic stability. It is the duty of health professionals to focus solely on the former. It is the responsibility of governments to balance the two…
Public policy must be based on a balance of risks and benefits…The health of citizens and the health of the national economy are closely connected and interdependent.
In a follow-up article on April 17th 2020, for the Lowy Interpreter, I wrote:
Health professionals are duty-bound to map the best- and worst-case scenarios. Governments bear the responsibility to balance health, economic, and social policies. Once these are included in the decision calculus, the political and ethical justification for the hard suppression strategy is less obvious.
Albanese’s Covid Inquiry
In opposition Anthony Albanese and Labor had promised a Royal Commission, which has strong powers to compel witnesses to testify and demand relevant documents. In September Prime Minister Albanese announced the powers, composition, and terms of reference of Australia’s Covid inquiry. It failed every best-practice test of an open and independent public inquiry. It lacks statutory powers to gather documentary and oral evidence.
With narrow and limited terms of reference, it will not examine decisions and actions of state governments, which formed the vast majority of pandemic management policies. Any self-respecting person approached to be on the panel would have politely but firmly turned down the invitation.
The three panelists are all women with public records of advocating lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. Angela Jackson has past ties to the Labor Party. In June 2021 she tweeted that Melbourne’s lockdowns had helped “to keep the rest of Australia Covid free”, adding: “Time to bloody step up Sydney.” The next month she said Victoria needed “a hard lockdown” to get through the pandemic.
Catherine Bennett was also supportive of Melbourne’s lockdowns in 2020–21. The third panellist is Robyn Kruk, Director-General of the New South Wales Department of Health.
Defenders of the Albanese model were few and far between. The opposition party attacked it as a “half-baked” inquiry that would function as “a protection racket” for the mostly Labor state governments that had instituted some of the harshest unscientific measures in the world. Its scope should either be widened or else it should be disbanded, they said.
Peak aged-care bodies, unions, and the pro-Labor government Greens added their voices to the chorus of criticisms of the decision to exclude actions by state governments. Even some Labor Party parliamentarians described the inquiry’s narrow scope as “bizarre”.
Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay said the inquiry will fail to do justice to the high human cost of the Covid policies, including family separations, school closures, and Australians not permitted to come home from overseas. The Australian columnist Peter Van Onselen said Albanese’s limited and toothless Covid inquiry was “base politics at its worst” and the PM had borrowed the playbook from the satirical British TV series Yes, Prime Minister. Paul Collits criticised the scope and all-women composition of the inquiry committee as a non-inquiry “female farce”.
Because of my work on Covid issues since March 2020, I was asked by several people to put in a submission (the closing date was December 15th), at least “for the record”. I declined. Taking part in that sham exercise would imbue it with some degree of undeserved legitimacy.
On September 21st, a media release from Senator Malcolm Roberts derided the “betrayal of everyday Australians and small businesses” with the government “running away from a Royal Commission”. He promised to request a Senate inquiry by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee to recommend proper terms of reference for a Covid Royal Commission to be established in 2024. The Senate agreed to this on October 19th.
The committee will report back by March 31st. Several groups, including some that I am associated with, have been busy preparing submissions to the Senate committee that had a closing date of January 12th.
A collaborative effort to draft a comprehensive people’s terms of reference can be found here, with 45,000 signatories as at January 17th. It includes two organisations with which I am closely associated, Children’s Health Defense Australia and Australians for Science and Freedom. (Full disclosure: I am one of the co-authors of the document.)
It calls for answers to the scientific basis for some of the most intrusive and coercive pandemic management measures, the cost-benefit analyses behind the policies including an examination of the harms likely to result from both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions; and explanations for enacting and enforcing vaccine mandates despite knowing that they stop neither infection nor transmission.
Ramesh Thakur, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His new book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023), is out now. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
One of the reasons people haven’t woken up as much as they ought to have done is that people still believe there was a pandemic, because that “fact” keeps being repeated as if it were as plain to see as the sun in the sky.
There will never be a worthwhile inquiry into “covid” while those responsible (almost every powerful group, private or public, and most powerful individuals) are still alive and active. They were all more or less complicit in what happened. There was no opposition of any substance. So what possible incentive does anyone who controls what an inquiry would do have to hold such a thing? To discover the truth, or at least to properly consider what happened, you need something much more adversarial, where there is a team with broad remit to subpoena witnesses who would testify under oath, and seize evidence, and set their own terms of reference. That will not happen in our lifetimes.
In any case, other than the detail of whose hand was up whose jacksie, the “truth” is known by a great many now – it’s just that nobody wants to say it out loud. Why would you want to admit you’ve been had?
No. We need Nuremberg-style trials.
And subsequent deterrents.
I suggest a few action points:
The above would save money and get to the truth better and faster.
And increase the pressure on the MHRA to release all data on vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
I’ve sent it to all the “sceptical” contacts I have on Whatsapp who I know were unvaccinated (2), or I think they know that the inquiry is a farce (5). 7 is a depressingly small number of people…..
2 unvaccinated is pretty low. Maybe you don’t know many people or there are some but they’ve not made it clear to you. I thought I was doing badly with just 5 including Mrs ToF.
Among ones old friends the number is very low, but several of them will not be having anymore jabs (some after complications even told by their doctor not to) but have made several new friends in groups formed for the unjabbed
You’re right – and I know quite a lot of people. I really hope that there are more people in the unvaccinated camp – but it’s not a question (have you had the jab?) that I feel comfortable asking.
I’ve never asked anyone. I’ve been pretty clear on my views of “covid” and on my own “vaccination” status and other people have volunteered the information. I know most of my work colleagues and other people I talk to have been “vaccinated” because they all made a big song and dance about it at the time. There are a few people at work I am not sure about as they’ve never mentioned it, but that might just be because they are private people who don’t share that kind of information.
These days while I am happy to answer people if they ask me, I don’t make a point of talking about what the “vaccines” appear to be doing to people’s health because it feels awkward telling people they might have poisoned themselves. Always happy to discuss though how “vaccine” passports and any kind of coercion was and is wrong.
Your experience matches mine. It’s awkward.
A real CoVid enquiry would be the trial of those who committed crimes against Humanity.
“Nearly four years on since the onset of the pandemic”. Why the assumption that there was a pandemic?
I take care to only ever refer to the alleged pandemic.
Yes plandemic (it was certainly planned, many years in the making, patents on Sars II date back to the 90s).
Scamdemic. Certainly was a scam, a pilot project of Medical Nazism, a prep for what is still to come.
“We need real inquiries if we’re going to restore people’s faith in public authorities.”
I am sure I speak for the majority on here when I state that faith in public authorities is now non-existent and there is zero chance of it ever returning.
Public authorities exist but I aim to ensure I do absolutely nothing to assist with their works or continuance.