Straight to the point

My new book brings together a collection of articles over the last three years. Many of these were published in Spectator Australia magazine and on Brownstone Institute, as well as in mainstream newspapers like the Australian and the Japan Times, and on online commentary sites. They are grouped into 15 chapters organised around broad themes.

They represent a time-capsuled set of reflections of an international policy analyst on the unprecedented policy interventions by almost all governments around the world to the rapid global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 disease it caused. The extent to which dominant majorities of peoples in countries with universal literacy can be successfully terrified into surrendering their civil liberties and individual freedoms has been a frightening shock.

As a retired person when the pandemic was declared in 2020, I had the freedom and time to deepen my knowledge of pandemic policy and also the freedom to say what I wanted without fear of losing my job. Because I had been writing for many quality national and international newspapers for several decades, I had a platform to disseminate my views.

I had worked as a policy analyst and adviser in international affairs for many decades as a global governance expert at the intersection of scholarship and policy. But I was not and am not a health policy expert. The book therefore reflects an international policy analyst’s take on measures introduced to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Having first familiarised myself with some of the specialist vocabulary, I applied insights from my global governance background in the worlds of research and policy to Covid-19 policy interventions.

The common elements linking nuclear weapons and public health policies are scepticism about the dominant narrative and beliefs underpinning countries that subscribe to the effectiveness of nuclear weapons and nonpharmaceutical and then pharmaceutical interventions to manage threats to national security and health, respectively; interrogating claims by political leaders and top officials against real-world data, historical evidence and logical reasoning; and analysing benefits against costs and risks.

From the fiasco of the Iraq War I learnt that emotional arguments and moral blackmail generally imply an absence of reasoned argument and evidence and a resort to deflection and bluster instead. Moreover, when presented with excitable exclamation marks (Saddam Hussein already has weapons of mass destruction with which he can hit us in just 45 minutes!), it pays to substitute sceptical question marks instead. The Iraq War playbook – of threat inflation, thin evidence, denigration of critics, dismissal of collateral harms, lack of exit strategy, mission creep, and media capture – was repeated with Covid.

Good Policy Process Delivers Better Policy Outcomes

The Lockdown Files, published by the Telegraph (UK) in early 2023, are a treasure trove of over 100,000 WhatsApp messages in real time between all the principal policymakers on Covid in England while Matt Hancock was Secretary of Health (2020–26 June 2021). They offer an unparalleled and gripping window into the amoral and cynical arrogance circulating in the corridors of power. The files reveal a government gone rogue that viewed and treated the people as enemies. 

The existing frameworks, processes, and institutional safeguards under which liberal democracies operated until 2020 had ensured expanding freedoms, growing prosperity, an enviable lifestyle, quality of life, and educational and health outcomes without precedent in human history. Abandoning them in favour of a tightly centralised small group of decision-makers liberated from any external scrutiny, contestability, and accountability produced both a dysfunctional process and suboptimal outcomes: very modest gains for much long-lasting pain. 

The Lockdown Files confirm that politics informed the policymakers in most of the key decisions on how to manage the pandemic. Accordingly, while medical specialists can debate the technical details of different medical approaches, policy specialists should be among the lead assessors in evaluating the justifications for and results and effectiveness of the policy interventions. Australia’s biggest mistake was to hand over control of the Covid agenda, in the false belief of following the science, to chief health officers (CHOs) who tend to be bureaucrats more than leading scientists engaged in cutting-edge medical research. The sooner we return to the conviction that good process ensures better long-term outcomes and acts as a check against suboptimal outcomes, alongside curbs on abuses of power and wastage of public funds, the better.

A World in Panic

The book begins with the sense of panic that gripped the world in early 2020. If a GP reacts with panic to the symptoms of a patient, the latter should change doctors. Governments have the responsibility to calm and reassure citizens no matter how grave a crisis, not fan the flames of fear. Why then did the world’s media and politicians become collective versions of Lance Corporal Jones in the popular British comedy series Dad’s Army, screaming ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’? Panic set in to drive public policy before data was collected to show that, for most healthy people under 60, the Covid-19 virus was no worse than seasonal flu.

Confronted by the coronavirus pandemic as a ‘black swan’ event, most countries chose the hard suppression strategy with variably stringent lockdown measures. While this is understandable in conditions of extreme uncertainty with a novel virus, there should have been more caution because of a history of failed catastrophist warnings from the Pied Piper of pandemic porn Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, the massive economic costs which also have deadly impacts, the draconian infringement on individual freedoms, and the availability of other more targeted strategies rather than the mythical ‘do nothing’ alternative.

The panic-driven policy interventions demonstrated the problems and risks of basing public policy on models before sufficient data is available to test their assumptions and conclusions. They inflicted devastating social, economic, educational, health and mental health costs, especially on young people in the long term even though they were at negligible risk of serious harm from the coronavirus.

Unless someone is silly enough to claim saving just one life is worth a complete shutdown of the whole country, the debate is about the thresholds of mortality against the human, health, social and economic costs of different strategies. Judged against these criteria on the evidence to date, it’s a challenge to justify the hard lockdowns of Australia and New Zealand.

Covid in Third World Context

It is well known by now that the timing and severity of the pandemic differed across the different regions of the world. The global media landscape is dominated by the big houses in the industrialised Western countries. Consequently few Westerners outside specialist circles realised the extent to which the impact of the pandemic was quite different in the poorer countries of the world. And so were the policy lessons and imperatives. For the vast majority of poor people in developing countries, on the one hand Covid was rarely at the top of deadly killer diseases. But on the other hand, lockdowns proved to be cruel, heartless, and deadly. Their plight was neglected by the very people and countries that loudly trumpet their kind and caring credentials in being concerned about vulnerable and marginalised communities.

The Descent into Authoritarianism

Among the most shocking developments as the pandemic dragged on for more than two years was the degree of coercion and force used by some of the best known champions of democracy. The boundary between liberal democracy and draconian dictatorship proved to be virus thin. Tools of repression like unleashing heavily armed cops on peacefully protesting citizens, once the identifying traits of fascists, communists, and tin-pot despots, became uncomfortably familiar on the streets of Western democracies.

Interventions rooted in panic, driven by political machinations and using all the levers of state power to terrify citizens and muzzle critics in the end needlessly killed massive numbers of the most vulnerable, while putting the vast low-risk majority under house arrest. The benefits were questionable but the harms are increasingly obvious, revalidating Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

Lockdowns destroyed the three ‘ls’ of lives, livelihoods, and liberties. Governments have effectively stolen almost three years of our life. Pre-emptive press self-censorship helped to normalise the rise of the surveillance-cum-biosecurity state in the name of keeping us safe from the virus that is so deadly, hundreds of millions had to be tested to know they’ve had it. Vaccines were initially recommended and subsequently mandated on the slogan that ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe,’ ignoring the admission implicit in the slogan that they do not protect the vaccinated.

Canada’s Freedom Convoy laid bare the stark reality that lockdowns are a class war waged by the laptop class on the working class, by the cultural elites on the great unwashed outside urban centres, and by the virtue signallers on independent free thinkers. PM Justin Trudeau insulted, stigmatised, wedged, and divided Canadians. Complaints about state overreach and abuse of power were met by still greater abuse of state authority with the power to strip citizens of their money, transport, and even children.

Trudeau’s Canada demonstrated how tactics of pressuring financial services companies into terminating accounts and tech companies to deplatform sceptics have become standard operating procedures for Western ‘democracies’ to suppress dissent, punish dissenters, and banish them from participation in social life and the economy.

Australia provoked international incredulity at the brutality of its authoritarian measures to ‘crush and kill the virus.’ The defining image of the pandemic state of siege in Australia will remain the case of Zoe Buhler. The episode is the very definition of a police state. Having crossed that Rubicon, how do we walk Australia back? A good start would be criminal prosecution of cops executing dictatorial edicts and of the officers and ministers authorising such action.

A Pandemic of Vaccines

On 11 July, Politico reported that Germany had thrown out 83 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines (BioNTech/Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax) worth €1.6 billion, has another 120 million doses sitting unused in stock, and has ordered fresh stocks even while vaccine take-up has flatlined.

Many were pleasantly surprised at the announcement that Covid-19 vaccines had been developed within one year by using a revolutionary new platform. Despite the early claims of efficacy, however, many were concerned that all the safety and efficacy trials might not have been adequately completed in the accelerated time frame. They chose to wait some time before getting vaccinated. Doubts grew with alarming rapidity as all talk of a pandemic of the unvaccinated was increasingly contradicted with real-world data from many countries.

Scepticism and opposition to vaccine mandates arose and hardened with barely concealed evidence of gaslighting on the benefits, denialism on the collateral harms and refusal either to conduct or else to publish the results of cost-benefit analyses. The vast majority of Covid deaths in many countries by now are among the vaccinated and boosted. This proves conclusively the ineffectiveness of vaccines at the population level, totally discredits the premise of vaccine mandates, but leaves open the possibility of net protective benefits for target groups like the elderly and people with comorbidities. The policy conclusion is to lift mandates in public settings and prohibit companies from imposing them in most business settings, leaving it instead for people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors, without pressure on the latter from drug regulators.

The vaccine landscape in Australia, and in particular New South Wales which published the best data for much of the time, was a microcosm of what was happening around the world. By the end of 2021, over 75 percent of all Australians (meaning around 90 percent of all adults) were double-vaccinated. Even then, Covid-19, with a cumulative total of under 1,000 deaths, was well down on the list of the leading causes of death. Yet it is after that date that Covid-related mortality really hit Australia and at the end of 2022, and until June 2023, Covid was in the top ten causes of death. 

If this is vaccine success, I asked in May last year, what would failure look like? Meanwhile there is still radio silence in the mainstream media about Australia’s rising excess deaths.

Compliance Became a Moral Crusade

As the weeks and months passed, and lockdowns turned into mask and then vaccine mandates in repeating cycles, with no end in sight, many wondered at the continuing public support for government policies. This was so despite the remarkable lack of observed statistical difference in the rates of death for countries, and for US states, that did and did not lock down or impose mask and vaccine mandates. An important explanation seemed to be a belief that compliance was the right thing to do for the sake of the community, despite individual reservations.

Yet to my mind, selfishness is: the rich outbidding poor countries for booster third jabs before the latter’s first jabs; the panic run on toilet paper rolls; destroying the future of the young who are least at risk for a few more months of existing without living by the elderly most at risk. So please, don’t come a-waltzing morality on me.

The Indelible Stain of Djokovic’s Shameful Treatment

Australia’s international and state entry rules in the time of Covid-19 were frustratingly complex, hostage to subjective interpretation by airline and border staff, and often were enforced with conscience-shocking brutality. Arriving in Australia with a valid visa on 6 January 2022, Novak Djokovic was held in detention at Melbourne Airport. A federal court quashed the government’s decision to cancel the visa of the Serbian tennis star and ordered his immediate release so that he could begin preparing in earnest to defend his Australian Open title. At one point the exasperated Judge Anthony Kelly asked: ‘What more could this man have done?’

The Morrison government was hell-bent on making an example of Djokovic in a panicked ploy to deny the failure of their narrative and policy. An unvaccinated Djokovic leaping and bouncing all over the court to a record 21^st majors triumph would have brought the constantly escalating Covid terror to a shuddering halt. Accepting that Djokovic ‘poses a negligible individual risk of transmitting Covid-19’ to others, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke nonetheless said because Djokovic had a ‘well-known stance on vaccination,’ his very presence could whip up more anti-vaccination sentiment in Australia. Therefore his participation was not in the public interest and Hawke ordered him to be deported.

The breathtaking arrogance of this amounted to a deliberate two-finger gesture to the rule of law backed by an independent judiciary to arbitrate the exercise of state power over individuals.

Regulators Morphed from Public Health Watchdogs to Drug Enablers

The longer the health authorities pushed Covid-19 vaccines, exaggerating its benefits, downplaying its rapidly waning efficacy, and ignoring safety signals on its list of harms, the more attention turned to the role of drug regulators enabling pharmaceutical interventions more than acting as watchdogs on behalf of public health and safety. It contributed mightily to the growing loss of trust in public health institutions. For health bureaucrats and regulators to claim a monopoly on scientific truth is scandalous. Those of us without medical credentials arouse understandable scepticism towards our critiques. This makes it all the more imperative not to silence medical professionals, but instead to welcome and encourage contestable policy recommendations from them.

Governments, health bureaucrats, and drug regulators all over the world have exploited the Covid-19 crisis to grab power and gain control over our lives. Predictably, rather than to most people’s surprise, many are proving singularly resistant to relinquishing their extraordinary powers, instead extending the emergency and broadening its scope to embrace other issues, like the climate emergency being a major health crisis as well. They shifted the balance decisively from the individual-centric in liberal democracies to the collective safetyism of technocrats and experts, justifying restrictions on individual rights and agency for the greater good as determined by government agencies.

The effort to shut down legitimate debates on pain of excommunication from the medical profession represents a clear and present danger to public health. This amounts to subordinating the professional judgment of doctors on the best treatment options for their patients, to the directives of bureaucrats and health regulators. This will diminish confidence in the health service. Chapter 8 of the book asks the public health clerisy: If you become transparent on efficacy, investigate safety signals urgently and fully and publish the findings honestly then, in the long run, will your credibility worsen or will you begin to regain public trust and confidence?

Approaching Endemicity

At which point do authorities conclude either that a pandemic disease has been eradicated, or else that it has become endemic? Whichever of the two is the conclusion, the result should mean an end to the emergency measures proclaimed to deal with the pandemic. Yet, many of the interventions to deal with Covid-19 seemed to have been kept in place long after their shelf life had expired.

The WHO-centred Architecture of Global Health Governance

The top global agency, part of the United Nations system, for promoting preparedness in advance for health emergencies and crises and coordinating national responses, is the World Health Organisation (WHO). Unfortunately, its performance in helping the world to manage Covid-19 proved, to be kind, to be very patchy.

Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm; by the shabby treatment of Taiwan at China’s behest despite the potential lessons to be learnt from its prompt and effective measures to check Covid; by the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus; and by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns that contradicted its own collective wisdom as distilled in a report in September 2019. 

International and domestic border closures, wholesale quarantine of healthy populations, and mandatory vaccine requirements insinuated passport requirements into quotidian activities. Their effects were largely along the lines of those predicted in the 2019 report. Minimal overall impact on viral spread was accompanied by severe and long-term damage to many health outcomes, economic opportunities, and child immunisation and educational programs, and poverty eradication policies, especially in developing countries. They did however benefit private financial interests of some of the WHO’s biggest funders, and that is an added concern.

This makes it all the more surprising that there should be a concerted effort underway to expand its authority and boost its resources by means of a new global pandemic treaty and amendments to the legally binding International Health Regulations. These would greatly increase the authority of the WHO chief and regional directors over the actions and resources of sovereign states.

A Pandemic of Media Malfeasance

In reporting on the pandemic, most of the mainstream media journalists abandoned their cynicism towards claims by the authorities and instead became addicted to fear porn. A critical and sceptical profession would have put the government and modellers’ claims under the blowtorch and subjected them to withering criticism for the magnitude of errors of their predictions. We went ‘from disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound’ as the choice of what to amplify and what to bury became an editorial decision, not an accurate reflection of reality.

A combination of incuriosity and the desire to avoid even truthful reporting in case it fed vaccine hesitancy has caused long-term damage to media credibility in its primary mission to report honestly on major stories without fear or favour, in a balanced and objective coverage. On 3 April 2023, the Australian’s US correspondent Adam Creighton published an opinion article blaming the wall of vaccine infallibility on media silence on its many failings. The article was republished by Brownstone on 4 April and, as of the time of writing in July, it was still on the list of the most popular articles on that site.

Senator Alex Antic’s probing questions led to official confirmation that in less than three years, the federal government intervened 4,213 times to restrict or censor posts about the pandemic on digital platforms. Moreover, echoing the growing understanding about the lead role played by the national security apparatus in the US pandemic response, these requests to the Australian media came from the Department of Homeland Security. The history of government-media collusion in the time of Covid should make us even more wary of the government’s proposed laws on misinformation to be policed by a more empowered Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Covid and Climate Catastrophism

The Covid-19 pandemic is not the only recent example of an issue where alarmism has been fomented to command public and policy attention, demand urgent action, and impose severe restrictions on existing lifestyles and activities. Indeed the most prominent example that has been running a scare campaign for decades is climate change. The two agendas reveal comparable examples of hypocrisy where the elites preach austerity and abstinence to the deplorables but exempt themselves from the same restrictions. There is a similar claim to scientific authority that is used to stifle dissent and defenestrate sceptics, despite the mismatch between catastrophising models and observable data in both cases. Moral framing has permitted the state to assume the role of nanny to keep us safe from the predicted harms, and helped deflect criticisms of widening social inequality between the laptop and working classes and the rise of global technocrats.

State Power and Covid Crimes

The Covid years witnessed the biggest expansion of state power in the history of Western democracies, accompanied by the most serious curtailment of civil liberties, political freedoms, and individual rights. All institutional checks on overreach and abuse of executive power – legislatures, the judiciary, human rights machinery, professional associations, trade unions, the Church, and the media – turned out to be not fit for purpose and folded just when they were most needed.

People were told when and where they could shop, the hours during which they could shop, what they could purchase, how close they could get to others, and which direction they could move in by following arrows on the floor. Governments also stepped into nations’ bedrooms to dictate with whom we could and could not be intimate.

Lockdowns proved the extent to which people would comply with state directives without deploying independent critical thinking and a lack of concern about the gradually increasing degree of infringements of civil liberties and personal freedoms. Compliance with often idiotic rules was ratcheted up to another level still with mask recommendations-cum-mandates. Indeed, governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest.

Waystations on the journey to where we are today with a biosecurity-cum-biofascist state include the national security, administrative, and surveillance states. In the process, people and commentators overlooked two abiding verities. Once governments have acquired more powers, they rarely surrender it back to the people voluntarily. And any new power that can be abused, will be abused, if not today by current agents of state, then sometime in the indeterminate future by their successors.

Accountability and Justice

Significant harms were done to large numbers of people in many countries by the nonpharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. Not all of this, perhaps not even most of this, can be attributed to good intentions under conditions of extreme urgency and unknown science, information, and data.

Will Covid illiberalism be rolled back or has it become a permanent feature of the political landscape in the democratic West? The head says to fear the worst, but an eternally optimistic heart still hopes for the best. Like people with command responsibility when crimes against humanity are committed by soldiers, the highest level decision-makers need to be held to account. This is important to ensure misdeeds are punished, victims are helped to achieve emotional closure, and future acts of comparable malfeasance are deterred.

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/