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As I reported recently, those responsible for the most egregious wrongs of the pandemic are now asking we, the wronged, to just forget the whole thing ever happened. We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty, they say.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Not after Wellington. Not after Melbourne. Not after forced vaccinations, empty funerals, loved ones left to die alone and children banned from schools and even playgrounds.
Pauline Hanson is vocal in her demands for a full Royal Commission into the pandemic response, but pigs will fly before the guilty parties are hardly likely to expose themselves to that sort of scrutiny.
So, in the meantime, we’re just going to have to do with an independent review like the Fault Lines review. Commissioned by leading philanthropic organisations and headed by Peter Shergold, at one time the most senior public servant in Australia, the 100-page report consulted 200 health experts, public servants, epidemiologists, unions, community groups, businesses and economists. It received more than 160 submissions and compassed 3000 hours of research and analysis.
What it found is damning – although none of it should be news to BFD readers, given that we were saying much the same things from the earliest months of the pandemic.
Lockdowns were wrong. School closures were wrong. Border closures were wrong. Poor people were hurt the most.
The BFD reported all this and more, as did a brave few in the legacy media. But it’s one thing for us “deniers” to contradict your Podium of Truth, quite another to be vindicated by an exhaustive review.
As I have been shouting from every platform I can since 2020, the most egregious act was that committed against our children – the mass shutdown of schools on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. To their eternal shame, state premiers and chief health officers were both complicit in this.
They were wrong and they caused untold damage that will be immeasurable and long-lasting. The inquiry makes this crystal clear […]
They are unequivocal, they are damning and they are almost word for word exactly what I and a few other brave souls have been saying from the very beginning of the pandemic.
Lockdowns, border closures and other restrictions, such as on hospital visits, funerals, weddings and so on, were, “effectively inhumane and should only have ever been used as a ‘last resort’”.
“Rules were too often formulated and enforced in ways that lacked fairness and compassion. Such overreach undermined public trust and confidence in the institutions that are vital to effective crisis response” […]
And as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported, it was poorer communities who were hardest hit, especially by the school closures.
Of all the unforgivable damage wreaked by the Covid panic, that inflicted on children is perhaps the most egregious.
The papers cited a Mitchell Institute study finding that one in five children in lower socio-economic postcodes did not have access to a laptop or computer at home and a survey of NSW teachers in 2020 found that only 18 per cent of teachers in low socio-economic status schools had confidence that their students were learning well from remote classes.
And the SMH also reported in 2020 – as I have often cited – that more than 3000 students simply disappeared out of public schools in NSW after the first shutdown.
A groundbreaking Daily Telegraph expose this month revealed 7000 NSW students, overwhelmingly from disadvantaged cohorts, who were not enrolled at any school […]
This is nothing short of a national disgrace and yet we were warned about it.
That last point gives the lie to the “amnesty” claims that “we didn’t know”. That’s a barefaced lie. There were pandemic plans, developed over decades and multiple pandemics, by the likes of the WHO and the CDC. Those plans were summarily tossed out the instant Covid broke.
We knew Prof Neil Ferguson’s modelling had been wrong, every time. We knew border closures and lockdowns never worked before – and within just a couple of months, we knew they weren’t working for Covid, either. I first reported this back in April, 2020. If I, a freelance journalist, could find this out, then what excuse did Dan Andrews, Jacinda Ardern, Siouxsie Wiles, and all the rest of that wretched crew, have?
Indeed, to put fury ahead of modesty, I warned about it. On television, on radio, in print and online.
Constantly, repeatedly, publicly – with the evidence right there, at the time, on my side. And yet I, and anyone else who dared question the lockdown-shutdown orthodoxy, was dismissed, abused, harassed and condemned.
As indeed were we. We were sneered at as “dangerous misinformation” by publicly-funded troughers who proved exactly how much faith they had in their solemn pronouncements by routinely breaking their own rules.
These are the sort of people who like to talk about being “on the right side of history” and now history has caught up with them. They were wrong, dead wrong.
Not just the decision makers who awarded themselves close to messianic status – with powers to match – but the frothing mobs that cheered them on. They were wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong all along […]
But history will remember them and history will judge them and history will not be on their side.
News.com.au
They will, of course, do everything they can to avoid an accounting. They will demand an “amnesty”, they are already slithering back into the shadows of Twitter, and hiding in their publicly-funded offices.
They must never, ever, be allowed to get away with it. Not ever again.
