When the Australian Senate’s Select Committee on COVID-19 held its first public hearings on April 23, 2020, the first witness it called to appear was, quite naturally, the country’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Professor Brendan Murphy. As Australia’s CMO and chair of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC), Professor Murphy was the public face of the government’s coronavirus response. He told the Senate’s COVID-19 Committee that he “first heard notification through the WHO [World Health Organisation] on New Year’s Day, on 1 January that there was a cluster of pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan”. For the next three…