Polls Apart From a Needed COVID Post-Mortem

If the opinion polls are in any way adjacent to popular feeling, then Australia’s monumental COVID policy disaster of the last three years has largely been marked, now that the hysteria has subsided, by the majority of Australians with a laconic ‘What was all the fuss about?’.

Most of us, apparently, are unruffled by the economic devastation of the lockdown years, including their debt/inflation/interest-rate spiral. Likewise, they are mostly unconcerned about, if even aware of, the mortality, morbidity and fertility costs of mass experimental injections. And they have no issue with the assaults on liberty that imposed on Australia more than a touch of a banana republic.

We are three years into the ‘pandemic’ (which would never have been a pandemic under previous WHO definitions which, inter alia, required significant real world mortality, not just alarming horoscopes cast by the pandemic astrologers), but the latest polls attest to the lack of public fuss over what our governments did to us in the name of ‘safety’. It seems a majority of the population believes our governments and public health ‘experts’ have successfully handled the pandemic.  The dissident minority can often lose sight of our fellow citizens’ largely enthusiastic, or just blasé, views on the COVID policy farce.

Active opposition and protest was a factor, eventually, in helping to roll back the COVID mandates and restrictions, but the freedom-oriented parties that sprang up in opposition have had a hard time finding permanent electoral traction.  Arguably, widespread virus fatigue at both elite and popular levels, together with the political, social and economically unsustainable COVID Derangement Syndrome as society’s default operating mode, contributed more to COVID lockdowns, mandates and restrictions overstaying their welcome. Even the most tyrannical premiers — yes, that’s you, Dan, Mark and Anastasia — succumbed to political exhaustion in the end.

Their pandemic reputations, however, remain largely unsullied, according to the polls and, a more telling example of Australians’ tolerance in being ordered about, the resounding re-election of Victoria’s Dan Andrews.  As much as we may wish it otherwise, for three years the states-sponsored COVID panic was a stunning success for its architects, administrators and enforcers. Recall the kilometres-long queues at testing centres and vaccination hubs, the ubiquity of masked faces and look to the public’s positive acceptance of social distancing, lockdowns, curfews, masks and vaccination policies were all tickety-boo.

Consider the findings of three opinion surveys.

Pew: An international Pew Research survey (the 2022 Global Attitudes Survey) in August last year found that in Australia, land of the long lockdown and the big needle, the population rates its government’s COVID response more highly than do people in nearly every and any other countries.  In Australia, 76 per cent of us think government ‘has done a good job dealing with the coronavirus outbreak’.  Only socially authoritarian Singapore (88 per cent) and Malaysia (77 per cent) give a bigger tick of approval (80 per cent of Swedes also had positive feelings towards their government but, unlike every other country surveyed, Sweden maintained liberty).

Pew’s survey highlights that, back in the darkly hysterical COVID days of 2020, almost all (97 per cent) of Australians rated our government’s handling of the virus as very good, so there is some comfort in the decline from 97 per cent to 76 per cent of those who really like what our governments did to us.

Lowy: The latest Lowy Institute poll basically confirms the Pew poll.  Back in 2021, reports Lowy, 65 per cent of us thought our governments handled the pandemic ‘very well’, and although this ardour has cooled somewhat (only 24 per cent give it top marks now), over half of us (56 per cent) still say our governments did ‘fairly well’ (up from 30 per cent in 2021).  Whilst 14 per cent  now say that it has all been handled badly (up from a tiny base of just 4 per cent at the height of the awfulness at the start of 2022), those saying we did ‘very badly’ remains at a depressingly low 5 per cent (although that is an improvement from just 1 per cent in 2021).  Pollwise, we hardcore COVID dissidents represent not much more than a rounding error.

Overall, according to Lowy, roughly eight in ten Australians in 2022 give our governments a COVID pass mark.  Disturbingly, 94 per cent of Australians think the lockdown-loving, border-sealing New Zealand also handled the ‘pandemic’ well or very well.

The COVID vaccines, whilst we are on gloomy poll news, remain in good standing with Australians, and globally as well, according to Pew.  In all 19 countries surveyed, around two-thirds or more of their populations say that having been vaccinated is somewhat or very important in order “to be a good member of society”.  Dismayingly, Australia is at the very top of the vaccine virtue league ladder, with 87 per cent of those surveyed backing being jabbed as a social good — a number that includes 60 per cent who rate vaccines are ‘very important’.

Essential: This lingering, widespread adherence to the official COVID Narrative in Australia is manifested in ongoing illusions about the virus and alleged countermeasures. Five months ago, an Essential poll found that a majority of Australians viewed our quasi-fascist, politico-medical COVID regimes as delivering better outcomes than in lockdown-free/light-restriction Sweden.  Well, if you’re only ever told by the propaganda organs that pass for the media here that ‘let-it-rip’ Sweden has been a virus basket-case, why wouldn’t you believe it?  Encouragingly, 29 per cent of Australians now think that Sweden did better than Australia, so at least the anti-lockdown cause is getting into some Australian ears.

The same poll, however, found that two-thirds of Australians are still labouring under the illusion that our hospitals are bursting at the seams because of COVID.  Hmmm, wasn’t the COVID vaccines supposed to stop that from happening?  Perhaps best not to explore that bit of cognitive dissonance (‘Saved by the COVID vax!’ / ‘Hospitals overrun by COVID!’) because it may reveal that the vax is a dud and all the measures to force it on the population were authoritarian hijinks to reinforce a political narrative (COVID bad / government and its experts good).

What Essential, Lowy and Pew are telling us is that whilst a majority of Australians are keen to fold up the COVID circus tents, they are taking a distorted pandemic history with them.

Not just Australia

The Great COVID Delirium has been global, of course, and the majority of the world’s populations still maintain a rosy view of harsh ‘pandemic’ policy.  Lockdowns in the US, for example, remain bafflingly popular, according to the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus index for September 2022, with three in four Americans (73 per cent) saying that the early 2020 shutdowns ‘were necessary to save lives’ (Democrat voters are insanely infatuated by lockdowns, with 93 per cent singing their praises compared to just 52 per cent of Republicans).

Large reserves of other COVID-crazy attitudes still exist Stateside, with a third of Americans saying it will be ‘a year or more’ before they personally return to living normal lives; a third of those surveyed report wearing a mask some or all of the time when leaving the house.  Fortunately, some Americans are starting to get a bit self-conscious about their face furniture, with one in five (19 per cent) saying they ‘worry how other people view them because of their mask’.  Well, advertising your public-health virtue like that will make you a bit of a target for the odd caustic glance.

Why so much support?

Popular support for lockdowns and all the other ‘mitigation’/Zero-COVID policy efforts can be explained as the result of a stunningly successful fear campaign which massively exaggerated the risk.  In a Kekst CNC poll in 2020, conducted at the height of the viral terror, the median guesstimate by Britons for the percentage of the population killed by COVID was 7 per cent (which would, if true, mean a truly horrific 4.5 million dead). Americans were worse, believing COVID had already disposed of 9 per cent of their countrymen (some 30 million people – more than died amongst all combatants in the First World War).

People are generally not very good at such guessing games in the absence of comparative context such as normal mortality rates from other causes, but the common man’s perception of the lethality of COVID, then and now, does not come within cooee of its actual risk profile.

The go-to expert (a genuine one) to consult on COVID’s Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), prior to whatever benefit of the vaccines, is Stanford  professor of medicine Dr. John Ioannidis.  His latest meta-analysis of 31 separate empirical infection studies (based on sero-prevalence measurements of antibodies), combined with official COVID death figures, frames what was imagined by many as the ‘deadliest disease ever’ in a completely different light.

The IFR that Ioannidis calculates was a near-invisible 0.0003 per cent for those aged 19 and under, 0.002 per cent for those aged 20–29 years, 0.011 per cent for the 30–39 year-olds, 0.035 per cent for the 40–49 year-olds, 0.123per cent for the 50–59 age group (a mortality rate equivalent to a normal flu season) and 0.506 per cent for the 60–69 year-olds (again, equivalent to a bad flu season).  So, out of every 100,000 people aged under 70 infected with the virus, COVID would have struck down just 95.  For the over-seventies, their IFR was 4.9 per cent (2.0 per cent in normal household settings and 5.5 per cent in residential aged care, where you find the much sicker, the more frail and thus the more vulnerable.

COVID’s IFR is thus highly age and morbidity-stratified, the viral illness targeting almost exclusively those people already at or over average life expectancy and who have serious comorbidity baggage.  The IFR, mortality-wise, is also incredibly low compared to other causes of death and, even then, it is significantly inflated because it uses official COVID deaths tallies which inflate the IFR because they include ‘died withs’ as well as ‘died froms’ (73 per cent – 88 per cent of official COVID deaths in the US, for example, were those of people who died not from COVID but because of multiple pre-existing conditions. Only 6 per cent had no known pre-existing comorbidity).

Inn a few words, Australia lost its collective mind over a virus which 99,905 out of every 100,000 infected people aged under 70 would easily survive and which saw 951 out of every 1000 people over seventy pull through.  People of any age in average health had little to fear, yet the optics for politicians and public health ‘experts’ of being seen to ‘do something’ meant shutting down the economy, imprisoning critics, social-media bans and gags and injecting them with a  vaccines that were rushed into production and remain even today listed as ‘experimental’.

The next frontline

We have come a very long way here in Australia since the darkest days of dreary lockdown, heavy policing, manic masking and clownish ‘social distancing’ but one Great COVID War front remains active.  Excess deaths following the introduction of the COVID vaxxes and their boosters continue to quietly pile up, a global phenomenon that COVID experts so enthusiastic about mass jabbing refuse to recognise. Meanwhile, popular enthusiasm for the jab, once near monolithic, is beginning to wane.

Whilst 97.3 per cent of the Australian population aged 16 or over have had one shot, and 96.0 per cent have had two, only 72.4 per cent have lined up for shot number three and just 44.2 per cent (of the eligible population i.e. those aged 30 or more) have opted for dose number four.  Parents of children aged 5-15 are also cooling off, with a bare majority (52.4 per cent) of children having had two doses, down from 60.7 per cent who have had one dose. Absent unethical jab mandates for employment or travel or access to venues, Australians are voting with their now-liberated feet by walking away from the experts’ elixir.  Safe, effective and necessary?  Only the minority of Australians who are fully, four-dose jabbed believe this fiction anymore. Not before time, the vaxx narrative is crumbling.

Nevertheless, there remains a largish minority of COVID True Believers in Australia. Sans their once-ubiquitous facemasks, they can be hard to spot at first glance. But, like Idaho farmers abducted by aliens for a deep and thorough probing, a wild-eyed and other-worldly stare comes over them when talk turns to COVID.  Fortunately, the social and political momentum is no longer with them.

There is, however, a much larger majority of ‘compliants’ who mask up when told and unmask only when permission is granted, who could again become the automaton footsoldiers in a never-ending war on viruses.  It is this great middle — those who feel that our governments basically got it right — that must be reached and persuaded if we want to hold to account the policy architects responsible for making the past three years so much worse than they need have been. In short, those with political power, media heft and cultural influence who royally screwed us over.

What’s needed, clearly, is a royal commission.

If there isn’t a reckoning, the next generation of pandemic choreographers, including the experts’ choir currently singing the praises of mRNA pharmaceuticals for every disease under the sun, will try it all on again.  They got away with it because, as the polls show, the great Australian public were complicit by ditching our native scepticism and healthy distrust of elites in favour of blindly accepting what was fed to us.