The writer is in Australia.
It is important to admit when one has been wrong, and more so when one has been badly wrong. So let me start with myself. I go back to the years before the Covid pandemic. For a long time, part of my work-related, peer-reviewed legal writings had focused on the failings around the English-speaking world of bills of rights and of the judges – committees of unelected ex-lawyers if we wish to be precise – and, indeed, of the lawyerly caste itself. And I believed that things were only going to get worse. That was in part due to what was happening in the law schools around the Anglosphere. Let’s just say that the law schools, and universities more generally, were uncontestably getting more woke while viewpoint diversity was collapsing – just look at last year’s Voice referendum and the fact that this country has some three dozen law schools yet the number of law professors across the whole country who came out openly against the proposal could be counted on one hand, one machine operator’s hand in fact. But the country as a whole voted nearly 61% “No”. In short, I was a fully signed-up member to the well-known sentiment that William Buckley had conveyed some years back when he said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty. For me, make that also the lawyerly caste that gives us our top judges. Put differently again, I was no great fan of juristocracy or of kritarchy or of lawyers as a group when it comes to driving public policy.
But before 2020 I had been quite a big fan of the doctorly caste. During my seven or eight years on New Zealand’s University of Otago ethics committee, and from interactions more generally, I believed as a general proposition that doctors tended to focus on the evidence. That they did not tend to over-moralise and then attempt to impose their own moral worldviews on others. That they were better at standing up to groupthink and panic, and certainly better than the lawyerly caste. They put a hefty weight on individual autonomy, sometimes through the prism of the doctrine of ‘informed consent’ (about which I have grave doubts, as it happens, since 10-plus years of education is really not able to be summed up in a 10-minute little overview so the patient can give ‘informed’ consent – the proper question to the doctor is “what would you do if this were your son?”). But nevertheless I reckoned doctors valued individual autonomy and a large degree of patient choice. They also, as an aside of sorts, seemed to me to take a real interest in the arts and literature in a way that is dying out in the universities – including in those parts of our universities supposedly devoted to them such as history, literature, classics, even philosophy and which are dying out in part because the academics who staff them want to deconstruct and woke-ify even their own fields of expertise. Still, and in summary, I was big fan of doctors and the doctorly caste. I certainly thought that as a group they were better than the lawyers.
And here’s where we come back to my starting claim, the importance of admitting when one has been wrong. Because let’s face it. Boy, was I wrong about doctors! The pandemic and Covid plainly showed the preponderance of them, as a class, to have been as pusillanimous, panicked and even principleless as the rest of our elites. Let’s take the risk of having all of our blood pressure readings go through the roof and recall the nearly three years of governmental thuggery, heavy-handedness, imposition of idiotic and often irrational rules and resort to lockdown lunacy – not to mention that those imposing these sometimes inane and often unprecedented public health measures virtually never paid the costs of what they were imposing. The police heavy-handedness verging on thuggery did not affect them. The school closures that shut down schools in a way that will see many children, especially the poor ones, disadvantaged for life did not much affect them – and under a fortnight ago, in late March 2024, a new study out of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute came out and found that the total cost to the U.S. economy of the educational loss from Covid school closures will be $31 trillion, leave aside that the closures were completely needless and ineffective at preventing Covid transmission.
There will be a proportionally enormous cost here in this country. And don’t forget that Australia’s educational results pre-Covid were already woeful – we scored below Kazakhstan – so it’s not as though we could afford any drops in scores and attainment, let alone precipitous ones. In addition to the police thuggery and school closures, the people who brought us lockdowns did not pay the costs of devastating the small business sector. Somehow that seems worse when it is a supposedly Right-of-centre political party doing the devastating of its core constituency in favour of the public service and while fostering an ongoing ‘work from home’ mindset across society that has gutted productivity – no serious person really believes that working from home, in general terms, produces as much as working from the office – and that led to last year’s biggest drop in living standards in this country in decades. Nor did a single public health type or politician or top bureaucrat take a big pay cut, or even a small one, all while seemingly flipping coins to decide which were, and which were not, essential businesses. Oh, and let’s not forget that while doing all this they were mouthing the inane, false (but rhetorically effective) phrase “we’re all in this together”, a phrase that was factually wrong on all sorts of levels including poor vs rich, young vs old, and private sector vs public sector. Basically, the lockdown imposers had no skin in the game, to borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb. They didn’t bear the costs of their decision-making. If they had, we would have had different, more liberal decisions.
Or what about the sort of massive government spending and increased debt and all the money printing during the lockdown lunacy? These measures effectively – in part via asset inflation – transferred huge wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich. The pandemic years were the best years ever to be a billionaire. Again, the decision-makers had no skin in the game. Or what about, in a comparative blink of the eye, throwing away everything I had ever heard about the importance of informed consent during my years on a university ethics committee in order to push vaccine mandates? All in all, these years amounted to “the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in at least 200 years”, to paraphrase the retired U.K. Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption.
Which takes us back to doctors. The pandemic response was largely brought to you by public health types and by modellers. Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson was the modeller who years earlier had given us modelled predictions as regards BSE (‘mad cow disease’) and foot-and-mouth disease that massively overestimated everything – by orders of magnitude. This was well-known at the start of the Covid pandemic. Yet it made no difference at all to the British and American Governments’ willingness to treat Professor Ferguson’s forecasts wholly unsceptically and almost as holy writ. Apparently hugely overestimating what the actual deaths will turn out to be, however repeatedly, does not affect one’s career as a fêted epidemiological modeller one iota; it seems, in fact, to bolster one’s position and burnish one’s credentials. Perhaps, though, if instead of overestimating actual outcomes by orders of magnitude you were to underestimate by just one death, well then we’d see some ramifications.
I need also to mention the incredible inroads into free speech and the marketplace of ideas during the pandemic. Censorship, shadow bans, social media blackouts, the legacy press operating more as a latter-day Pravda running the lockdownista line on everything and without even a hint of a trace of a soupçon of an echo of scepticism and questioning as regards that day’s offerings from the public health cadre and Government ministers. Heck, I even had a couple of published, peer-reviewed law articles offering a sceptical view of the pandemic response rejected for listing by SSRN (presumably because only public health types were then deemed suitable to comment on this fiasco, and only lockdown cheerleader ones at that). Or consider the vitriolic response to anyone who suggested that the virus that was found a few hundred yards from the front door of a lab doing research on just this sort of virus – the only known one in that country – might, just might, have actually escaped from that lab. Mirabile dictu! Instead, charges of ‘racism’, were the accepted line or response from our elites, along with mocking anyone who suggested this as the source. Even a former head of MI5 asserting the lab leak theory was censored and banned on social media. Or remember how the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were treated by their university colleagues, by the press, by social media. Mr. Fauci called these three “fringe epidemiologists”, although one day before the pandemic started Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University would have been widely picked as the world’s most eminent epidemiologist. And the other two would have made the top 10 list, those two being Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Professor Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University (then, not now, as Harvard recently fired him for being right about everything). During the frenzied panic and demand for conformity of the lockdown mania years even the most credentialled people in the world were censored, shadow banned and threatened with losing their jobs if they proffered an opinion outside the Government and public health line. So much for any concern about free speech! Gosh, it was even a political party with the name ‘Liberal’ and a Prime Minister Morrison that to their eternal shame offered up the first iteration of the free speech suppressing and truly woeful ACMA Bill, the one that uses the bogus notions of misinformation and disinformation to try to set up a privileged set of people who will tell us what is and is not true – despite the fact that Professor Bhattacharya maintains to this day that the biggest source of disinformation throughout the pandemic was government. These are bleak times for freedom of expression.
And so if you are all sufficiently depressed, we are nearly ready to turn to the occupations and castes who in general terms were principleless, panicked and power-hungry. These were the various types of elites who let us all down so badly during the pandemic in this country and across the democratic world outside of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota and a tiny few other jurisdictions. First, though, let me just pre-emptively deal with a response one hears regularly. This is the line that goes something like: “Well, yes, in retrospect we made a fair few errors but at the time, in conditions of uncertainty, we made the safe, responsible choices that uncertainty demanded.” This is simply wrong. It is public policy nonsense in fact. Indeed, right from the start it seemed silly to me, verging on crazy, to think that in conditions of great uncertainty what you ought to do is to proceed directly to some version of an inverted precautionary principle on steroids, thereby mimicking the authoritarian response of the Chinese politburo – and in the process throw away a hundred years of data that informed the then pandemic plans of the British Government (and the WHO for that matter) and that unambiguously rejected lockdowns. The smart response in an information vacuum is to carry on as you are making changes at the margins to protect those most at risk as you wait for more information. This is how virtually all of us behave all the time in general life. Nor do we focus obsessively on just one cause of death – let’s say from car accidents – and so impose 5 kph speed limits that would undoubtedly save a decent number of lives currently lost in car crashes, but at the same time cause markedly more deaths (rising to myriad more) due to returning us all to the middle ages in terms of being able to move goods and people around efficiently. And anyway, from very early on it was known that this virus was over a thousand times more deadly to the very old than to the under-30s. In most countries, for most of the pandemic, the average age of those dying from Covid was over the country’s life expectancy. For governments to proclaim that “we are all in this together” was not true in any sense that could lead to the sort of policy response we saw everywhere in the democratic world outside of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota and a few other outliers that got their responses more or less correct (a fact that today’s cumulative excess deaths data, from start of the pandemic to today, brings home in the bluntest fashion going). Put bluntly, nothing that we knew in March 2020 justified going down the incredibly authoritarian, “let’s run government on the Chinese Politburo model” path that our elites opted to take. It wasn’t caution. It was stupidity, a complete lack of commitment to both the liberal and the democratic components of ‘liberal democracy’, an incredible naïveté about how handing huge, unfettered power to government and public health cadres affects the likelihood of their ever confining lockdowns to just a fortnight, and – let’s be honest – an awful lot of cowardice on the part of an awful lot of people.
And lest anyone thinks this is all pure hindsight on Allan’s part, I will remind doubters that from virtually day one this native born Canadian, who has lived in Australia for two decades, was an open sceptic of the lockdowns in the pages of the Spectator Australia, the British Lockdown Sceptic website (now Daily Sceptic) and once or twice in Law and Liberty in the U.S. and in the Australian here. In fact, it was that early scepticism that led me to meet the incredibly insightful Ramesh Thakur, whom we’ll hear from tonight, as we were fellow travellers right from the start. I think we got just about everything right, if I do say so for myself and Ramesh.
I just have space and time to comment quickly on the various castes most responsible for the panicked, power-hungry, pusillanimous and principleless response to Covid in Australia and around the non-Swedish, non-Florida democratic world. This is highly contestable but in terms of the Top Five of occupations as regards being panicked, principleless, power-hungry and pusillanimous, my rankings, finishing with the very worst occupation and so starting with the least worst, is:
Fifth worst: Lawyers, Judges and the Lawyerly Caste. Yes, there was next to no chance litigants anywhere in the democratic world were going to be able to use a bill of rights to roll back thuggish, heavy-handed governmental Covid regulations through the courts. I said so in print at the start of the crisis and I believe events have proved that true. My take was that we would have to wait till everyone calmed down and the panic subsided and then you would see the judges discover a tiny bit of a willingness to overturn some of these rules and regulations. But as far as the Covid years were concerned the entire edifice of human rights law, and all its accoutrements, was totally useless. Worse than useless in fact, thereby going a long way to proving the enervated, emasculated worth of bills of rights. You buy one and you are simply buying the views of the unelected judges. And they panicked as much as the rest of our elites. But the lawyers and judges come least bad in my list because I do not think we really should even want to live in a world where the lawyerly caste could decide these sort of issues through the courts. And that is true even when we strongly, even vociferously, disagree with what the Government is doing, as I did throughout the pandemic. The remedy here had to be political. Elect a Ron DeSantis or the Social Democratic Government of Sweden and let them stand up to the panic and show what should be done. There would be nothing left for democracy if a handful of unelected judges could dictate policy here. So only fifth worst.
Fourth worst: Here I’m putting the university caste, including the modellers at Imperial College. Yes, many of them disgracefully imposed vaccine mandates (explicitly or implicitly). Yes, the treatment of your Bhattacharyas and Guptas at the world’s top universities was shameful. But the competition here is fierce so I’m scoring them just outside a podium finish.
Third worst: Doctors get the bronze medal for the four ‘P’s of being panicked, pusillanimous, principleless and power-hungry. Sure, the public health wing of the doctorly caste carried more than its fair share of the load here. And maybe this scoring was a tad affected by our disappointment with an occupation that had looked so good before Covid. But it’s more likely that the gold and silver positions were denied the doctors because at least a noticeable chunk of them were dissidents and sceptics, including the terrific Anders Tegnell. Some even lost their practising certificates because of their bravery. And that would influence anyone’s scorecard.
Second worst: This was a tough call. But in the end I gave the silver medal for most pusillanimously panicked and power-hungry to the politicians. A good few who had come into politics preaching their commitment to freedom and to the individual showed that these protestations weren’t worth the paper they hadn’t been written on. They were too lazy and too fearful to do their jobs the way Governor DeSantis of Florida did. Or the way the Swedish Government did. In fact, they shamed themselves while pretending they’d implemented good policies. They deserve to be voted out everywhere.
Absolute worst: The Jimbo gold medal goes to the journalistic caste. Here is a profession or occupation supposedly dedicated to questioning power and to bringing a sceptical mind to all assertions but especially those by government. It is a job that values an open mind and not taking on trust what the elites are telling us. It is an occupation that is meant to be fearless, not cravenly fearful. So in a close finish the journalists get the gold medal for being pusillanimous, panicked and principleless.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article is the transcript of a talk given at the Covid Revisited conference in Sydney, Australia earlier this week.
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“It is important to admit when one has been wrong “——–Fear of litigation though puts a stop to that were the NHS is concerned. ——-I give you a very simple example. I had been waiting for an appointment to go for an X Ray. The appointment was never arriving so after 2 weeks I called into my surgery. They assured me that I had been referred and would just have to wait. —-I said “OK thankyou very much”. 10 days later the surgery called to tell me I not been referred and I was now referred today ——I said so “Did the Surgery forget”? ——–In any other situation the person would have apologised. had it been a piece of furniture that a store had forgotten to order, or a mistake about some payment due etc etc. ——-But all the girl on the phone from my surgery was prepared to say was “You have now been referred”. ——In other words a refusal to accept they were wrong and had made a mistake. —So my example is not a life threatening one but it showed me what I already knew. That fear of litigation dictates all responses.
Totally agree, spot on. We were betrayed for silver coins. Many of us disliked the medical unprofessionals before Rona. Now I absolutely abhore them. Dishonest, criminal, stupid, vapid, disingenous, borderline evil. Now record excess deaths from the stabs, cancer, heart disease, encephala.
They were all paid during the scamdemic.
The scamdemic was so busy they had time for dance routines in empty hospitals replete with costumes and lighting.
It is NOT just the scamdemic. Since the 60s there is an explosion of cancer, autism, encephala, opioid deaths, dementia, neurological and now gender disorders. All from the ‘health system’ and its ruler – the criminals in Pharma. All from the poisons they shove into you.
Your health is not the concern of these people. Profit, power, prestige, pensions, payoffs from Pharma. The 5 Ps are what they are after.
My surgery is still offering convid jabs, apparently oblivious to the burgeoning evidence about the ill effects. I was recently on the receiving end of an attempted telling-off from one of the doctors because after 2 DVTs in 11 years (both after prolonged bed rest due to influenza A) I refused to spend my life on rat poison. I, rather forcefully, reminded him I was a much older adult and would make my own decisions about my health. He was there for information, and treatment provided I agreed. Rissoles!
Top man.
Absolutely. This is a good article but I was left with the feeling that nothing has been learned and it will happen all over again even though the economy has been trashed.
Like Mr Allan, I am on record to my MP on the 2nd day of lockdown suggesting that lockdown was wrong and why and what the consequences would be. I take no pride but despair when my wife tells everyone that I was right about all my concerns. I had been a farmer and had been directly affected by that *ss Ferguson with BSE, Foot & Mouth and Swine Fever and they believed him again!!!
Not just 30 pieces of silver. What about the vicious, violent over-the-top police response? Petty tyrants!
The Media fell for the Con Trick and revealed that far from being independent and even minded , they fell over themselves to demonise those dissenters who stood up and rejected the Gospel . I tuned into Times Radio when it was launched to avoid the BBC propaganda by this Government mouthpiece . They fell straight under the spell and I suggest became more avid followers of the Government line . I am , as a result profoundly concerned for the future of our Country with the people in influential positions of such lowly talent and competence .
Agenda 2030 and Lockstep spring smartly to mind. I also believe it is naiive to suggest that politicians didn’t know what they were doing. They knew, particularly those in authority because they were ALL acting on orders issued elsewhere – the Davos Deviants as I prefer to summarise them.
Without doubt this is still an excellent summary of the way the DD’s initiated the demolition of the West. I was going to say Western democracies but they were killed off in March 2020, if they ever existed.
Which of the five culprits listed at the end of this article would anybody now consider trustworthy?
And because the plod don’t get a mention I am lumping them in joint third place with doctors for their sheer thuggery, ignorance of the law and blatant two-tier policing.
Our situation is grim for sure.
Davients?
Fair enough
It takes time and effort to qualify as a doctor, and I do respect that. However, it seems to me that the education is narrowly focused on the human body, with very little focus on statistics, nor room for abstract thinking.
Then there’s the managerialism embedded into the profession. Management with very little clinical experience dictating their permitted responses to clinical situations, or prohibiting certain courses of action.
Couple with this the shameless way that doctors are courted by the pharmaceutical companies, with endless jollies and backhanders to continue prescribing the latest concoction. In America, it’s made worse by the lucrative insurance industry that pays doctors well for some of their choices.
I don’t think all drugs are bad (m’kay), but I no longer trust the way that pharma use data to ‘prove’ safety and efficacy – a problem I hadn’t given much thought to before 2020, but one we’re all well acquainted with now.
The Midwestern Doctor appears to buck this trend and has written numerous posts on the demise of the medical profession, the tendency for medical gaslighting and the increased reliance on prescribing a pill rather than attempting to seek the underlying causes.
I’d rather have someone like him/her (who knows?) on my side if I’m diagnosed with something nasty, but how would I find this type of doctor?
‘I don’t think all drugs are bad’
I also don’t think all drugs are bad, in the same way that I don’t think all amputations are bad, but only as a last resort.
Very well said, Dr Allan. Many thanks. This article and others like it on here help a bit with the simmering rage.
But it is the ongoing simmering of the rage that really gives the game away. It still simmers on because the absolute number one culprit (panicked, unprincipled, power-hungry and pusillanimous) in my book, is the general public and they surround us still. Power hungry? Oh, yes! How they loved to twitch the curtains, point the finger, inform on their neighbours, clap their silly hands, bash the pots and pans, compete for vaccine virtue……. Oh, for Pete’s sake!
What an image of ourselves, in general, we saw in the mirror…….
100% agree.
Roughly 80% of people didn’t have the gumption or desire to even try and find out what was really happening.
And the same 80% would simply roll over and blindly accept the same again.
When I walk down a street and see people, I can’t help thinking 80% of you lot would have been brownshirts and happy in pre war Germany..
How right you are!
‘Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.’
Brunhilde Pomsel, Goebbels secretary, 2016
And she would know….
Seconded. Sadly it means living amongst these sheep is extremely difficult.
If it wasn’t for this website, and a few others, I doubt I could cope with my rage and disappointment with humanity. If God, instead of forgiving us, in a temper, chooses to strike down humanity as a failed experiment and start again, could we blame Him?
I think some of them eventually may have found their tipping point, but I can’t help but agree. The warm and fuzzy feeling from being in the smug majority of virtue signallers, seemed to definitely be very seductive to far too many.
At least now, we mostly know who would be ready to die on that hill of truth and who would follow the masses blindly. Sadly, it doesn’t seem there are as many of the former as we might previously have thought.
Well said sir. And the tragedy of it is they’d do it all again tomorrow at the drop of a hat. Frightening as well.
” transferred huge wealth from the young to the old”……At least the old that had not been bumped off through PATHWAYS state democide. I’m sure a few people inherited their property etc that is why I can’t stand people like Benjamin Butterworth who seems to have it in for the old, the little Marxist.
Ultimately, our freedom can only be restored by the citizenry insisting upon it. Politicians and lawyers are untrustworthy and self-interested. They will only respect freedom if their interest depends upon it.
Constitutions and bills of rights are worthless in the face of politicians and lawyers determined to misinterpret the plain meaning of them. Conversely, federalism proved its worth in the USA with some states at least being willing to stand firm against the tyranny.
If England is ever to become again a free and democratic country it might require secession from the United Kingdom along with radical decentralisation within England. If people are able to move easily to more free jurisdictions this would help preserve some sanctuaries for decent folk.
The elderly were at a substantial increased risk of death compared to the young. But any serious analyst should ask why, and when you do it’s not as simple as that. Firstly it is still not clear why the immune system is triggered to produce the cytokine storm that makes you sick, whatever age you are. Maybe that of the elderly has encountered a similar bug before. Whatever. But then you must ask – OK, this new thing makes you very ill, so how do we treat it? And this is where the medical profession went really adrift. The really sick were not given the right treatment. Doctors appear to have thrown up their hands and said “There’s nothing we can do” or misunderstood the pathology and as well as not giving steroids etc put people on ventilators which made them worse. The sad thing is that a small number of doctors had worked out why people got really ill, worked out what the right tests were to determine whether they were, or were going to get really ill and then applied the right treatment (Drs Marik and Kory please stand up). Others, including myself, wrote in with the right instructions. All were ignored. Soon the first place there was a widespread clinical failure to understand the pathology, and in the second a blank refusal by politicians to listen to the clinicians who did understand it, because they would rather listen to statisticians and epidemiologists who did not have a clinical clue. As for journalists they would not listen either. I tried hard enough. But I would put all three groups on the same pedestal.
I would give the gold jointly to the UN and its many agencies, including the WHO and its unholy alliance with the extremely rich who, bored by material things, seek excitement through power
This comment has already been made, but I would agree we should give the diamond award to the general public. Their unquestioning following of the Covid mania was something else.
every time new ridiculous rules came in I thought ‘now they will see’, but they never did.
If the majority had said ‘no’ it would have been a non-starter from the beginning.
I’d put vets in the same category as Doctors. I had run ins with two different vets during the scamdemic and was barred from both merely for pointing out the error of their ways (masking, compulsory testing before attending, only one person at a time, anti-social distancing, one way systems etc etc) okay albeit it in a fairly assertive way. They also tried to put my 12 year Labrador to sleep outside in the wet and cold because I’d refused to take a LFT and thus barred me and Josh from entering the building. These people are inhumane, evil, easily led cowards. I took him home and he died two days later. Absolute b…..ds.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s sophomoric humor notwithstanding, Kazakhstan is a really place with real thoughtful people. I am very fond of my Kazakhstani friends.
Excellent article, with which I agree completely; and a great summary of a dreadful, shameful period.
If we all agree – and I am sure we do – can someone cleverer than me please build a prioritised action plan to protect us from this nonsense in the future? Aside from the injunction to ‘vote them all out’ (which is shortly going to happen anyway in the UK), and militating against the WHO power-grab on its way, what must we do?