Having a good yarn recently with a mate I hadn’t caught up with for a quarter-century, we got onto the topic of Covid. He was the first to draw comparisons with how countries slid into totalitarianism in the 1920s and ’30s. ‘What amazes me, now,’ he said, ‘is how so many people just went along with it.’
And now, as we both noted, everyone is determined to forget faster than a former heel-clicking Nazi in 1948. People who hung on like giddy fangirls to every TV appearance by Dan Andrews and Jacinda Ardern now want to act like they hated them all along.
Most of all, they’re apparently determined not to learn a single thing from the whole sorry episode.
Five years on from the collective madness that gripped much of the world during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s become fashionable to decry the kind of government overreach that was practically championed by almost everyone in Australia.
Earlier this month, the Australian Human Rights Commission chimed in, condemning lockdowns as an affront to human rights, something that should’ve been obvious at the time.
Where were they in 2020, then? Back then, the AHRC called lockdowns ‘justifiable’ in ‘protecting the right to life and health of people in Australia’. Their only concern, apparently, was ‘increasing reports of racism throughout the Covid-19 pandemic’.
Funny how some people’s memories play tricks on them, apparently.
One thing I remain proud of is that I was on to the failure of lockdowns almost from the start. I don’t claim to be any public-health genius, as I told my mate: I can just read. I could read the pandemic preparedness plans of groups like the WHO, which, right up ’til November 2019, emphasised that population-wide lockdowns should never be imposed. I could read the reports coming out of places like the US, which very early on were showing that lockdowns not only didn’t work, but they appeared to actually make things worse.
Unlike the AHRC, I didn’t pontificate all this from the high hill of hindsight: I wrote my first anti-lockdown article for the then-BFD in April, 2020. Over the next few months, I hardened my stance and hammered home the evidence. Not that it made any difference, but, at least, unlike the bootlickers of the AHRC, I’m not a towering hypocrite.
I could also read the several peer-reviewed scientific papers which, pre-pandemic, warned against mandatory mass-vaccination. They pointed out that such measures were not just unjustifiably authoritarian, but counter-productive. Countries with entirely voluntary vaccination schedules performed better than countries with coercive vaccination programmes.
And that was with vaccines that had passed years of trials and were known to be safe and effective. Which the Covid vaccines were very much not.
If even the AHRC is belatedly finding its nerve on lockdowns, vaccine mandates are still a sacred cow.
While it’s great to see the case for lockdowns headed for the intellectual scrap heap, there’s another Covid policy that unfortunately remains largely immune from criticism: de facto compulsory Covid vaccination.
I am proud of my record criticising Covid policies […]
Five years on I should apologise for not having been as strident in condemning mass coerced Covid vaccination. At the time, I didn’t dare: the experimental vaccines were accorded practically religious veneration by the mainstream media. To point out that more people died from all causes (unrelated to Covid) in the vaccinated as opposed to the placebo group of Pfizer’s 2020 trial would risk total banishment.
I can at least stand proud for having repeatedly condemned mass vaccination from the get-go. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to protect my family better. Several members of my family were forced to submit to vaccination or lose their jobs. Something none of them could afford to do. I truly salute the bravery of those who took the employment and financial battering – and I’ll never, ever, forgive those who forced others to submit.
It’s entirely possible that coerced Covid vaccination caused more damage to society even than lockdowns.
In 2023, Western Australian health authorities quietly released data that compared the risk of adverse reactions across different publicly available vaccines: it was an eye-popping 24 times greater for Covid vaccines than for all others combined. Doubtless the various Covid vaccines helped people, but it should’ve been a personal decision, especially given they never stopped transmission.
Lest anyone still think they did, the US once again provided a natural laboratory, complete with control group: the Amish. All 350,000 of them refused the Covid vaccines. They’re still here and still healthier than any other American group.
The most damning outcome of the Covid vaccine hysteria is the disturbing groundswell of post-vaccine deaths and injuries among those least at risk from Covid: the young. But all that suffering was not only unnecessary, it was utterly counter-productive to public health.
Few things have undermined confidence in public health bureaucracy, and in vaccines, than the Covidian vaccine zealots themselves.
Confidence in public health authorities and tried and proven vaccines has been trashed.
Numerous polls in Australia and the US now point to declining rates of confidence in public health authorities, and even declining confidence in tried and proven vaccines for diseases from measles to polio, a point The Australian reported this month.
In the US confidence in public health has plummeted, from 69 per cent in April 2020 to 44 per cent three years later, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Just as they did in the late ’40s, the rats are scurrying for cover.
Given how enthusiastically they championed compulsory vaccination, neither the pharma industry nor government will investigate these important subjects […]
In any case, the public and investors have spoken: demand for the Covid shots, now mercifully voluntary, has collapsed throughout the developed world, even as governments campaign for them to continue. While the Overton window – the range of tolerated public commentary – has shifted since the crazy years of 2020 and 2021, not enough public criticism is directed at de facto compulsory Covid vaccination. The policy was wrong in principle. The supposedly “safe and effective” products clearly failed to live up to their promise, and they have caused many thousands of injuries and deaths around the world.
“Trust and confidence will not be restored unless politicians and bureaucrats recognise the full human cost,” the Human Rights Commission recently concluded.
And not unless the spineless cowards like the AHRC come clean and admit their own guilt – and are held to account, along with the rest of the utter bastards who pushed the Covid madness.
