Commonwealth Government to hold inquiry into COVID-19 response, but state and territory decisions excluded

All governments and their over zealous officials should be held to account for their actions during the Panpanic. For the lockdowns, school closures, 5km travel restrictions, border closures, fines, check-ins, mandatory masks and vaccines, persecutions and policing abuses….
FinReview today:
“Thursday’s announcement of an “inquiry into the response to the COVID-19 pandemic” was so utterly disingenuous and patronising that the government would have more credibility had it just broken its promise altogether and done nothing. Instead, Anthony Albanese and Health Minister Mark Butler stood up and treated the Australian people like idiots.”

When Covid started, I thought the Commonwealth’s national approach made a lot of sense.
“National Council”, however, became a bit of a farce with States going rogue. The issue of course was that Health was a State responsibility.
A couple States also closed their borders for their own electoral advantage, during State elections etc.

My view is the Commonwealth made mistakes, and so did every State & Territory but given
that almost 23,000 Australians and globally 6.7 million have died of Covid, politicans of all juristictions, made decisions with some haste, sometimes political and sometimes backed medical advice.

Of course, we are all now looking back with the benefit of hindsight.

Mr Albanese’s announcement today, is disgraceful. It’s a political decision.
Many of the decisions that crippled the country were made at the States & Territories level, because they were the juristictions responsible for HEALTH, not the Commonwealth.

It would appear that this Inquiry will be largely focused on attacking, the now Commonwealth Opposition; hardly a wise use of taxpayer’s money!

We’re only going to look at what the other mob did!

The pandemic response was a catastrophe at all levels. Completely overrode individual rights on fear based politics.

1. Lockdowns. There remains zero evidence that lockdowns accomplished anything other than destroying the economy and the public’s emotional and physical wellbeing. There is zero correlation between places that locked down and those that didn’t nor severity of lockdowns and infection rates. Even within Australia, Sydney had lower infection rates than Melbourne despite the severity of lockdowns in the latter. There is nothing new or surprising here; the best virologists of history said that the best way for people to cope with a pandemic is to try and keep things running as normally as possible.

2. Medicare Vaccine Passport Scheme. This is perhaps the most morally abhorrent policy in Australia’s history. Enabling a system that allows government or businesses to exclude people based on whether they underwent a medical procedure is morally repugnant on a level that is rare to see in history.

3. Mandatory Vaccination. Given that the government’s own reports, from before any of the vaccines were available anywhere in Australia, showed there was little evidence that vaccination reduced transmission, that is vaccination really only has a benefit for the individual not the broader community, there was zero argument to require anyone to subject themselves to it (especially if they had already recovered from the disease themselves). The Western Australia data shows that government was very quickly aware of the extremely high level of adverse effects of vaccination. Both those being the case, mandatory vaccination quickly rises to level of a violation of the Nuremberg Code, which we considered, as a species, to be a capital crime only 70 years ago.

4. Check-Ins, testing and mandatory reporting. Privacy violation that accomplished nothing except normalising privacy violation. The high false positive rate always made testing relatively pointless, particularly as there is no difference in treatment for the vast majority of people whether it is this virus or any of the other respiratory viruses we have millennial of experience with. Given we knew how low the IFR was by the time of the Diamond Princess, we knew then that for most people the traditional guidance of plenty of rest and plenty fluids was going to be the best advice.

5. Masking. We have known for years that masking has negligible effect on transmission. Indeed, 20 years ago, during SARS-COV-1, state governments were fining people from attempting to profit off convincing people they needed to mask.

6. Fear based policy. The excessive fear government generated caused incredible harm in-and-of-itself. From people too terrified to seek medical help for other conditions that could have been treated if they were caught early. Indeed, the latest ABS data still shows a significant excess death above the baseline (which has nothing to do with this virus), and we are still seeing significantly higher suicide rates this year. Excluding Novak Djokovic is another example of pointless fear based policy not based on any evidence. Even the daily updates government maintained were also designed to create fear. And, of course, the previous Federal Government used that fear as a distraction to loot the treasury.

The underlying problem is government myopia. There is far more to living a quality life than quantity of life. No consideration was given to the other needs that humans require. All sold on a false promise that it was actually possible to avoid being exposed to this virus. It was obvious in early 2020 that there was zero chance of driving it to extinction. Animal reservoirs meant the outcome was always determined, and it really shouldn’t matter much to an individual if they catch it four or five times over the course of their lifetime. Even if they could reduce their exposure by one or two instances over their lifetime, the same wouldn’t be true for their children.

None of which is to say that this virus was nothing to worry about or there was nothing that could be done. The lie was in pretending that government overreach could actually provide a solution. There never was, and likely never will be, a magic policy solution that can prevent pandemics. The government reaction was just the old politician’s logic joke: “Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.”