Choosing China over Sweden

This week, Zhang Zhan, a Chinese citizen journalist and former lawyer, is set to be released after four years in jail for the heinous crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. By that, what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) means is that Zhang dared to travel to Wuhan in February 2020 and report to the outside world, exposing the cruel tyranny of the Covid lockdown from the epicentre of the outbreak.

“I can’t find anything to say,” she reported in one video clip that she posted, “except that the city is paralysed because everything is under cover. That’s what this country is facing now … They imprison us in the name of pandemic prevention and restrict our freedom. We must not talk to strangers, it’s dangerous. So without the truth, everything is meaningless.” Little did she, or we, know that this was the fate that awaited us too.

Last week, another Zhang was also persecuted in China. Zhang Yongzhen is the virologist who shared the Sars-CoV-2 virus with the world in defiance of CCP censorship. He was lauded internationally for his heroic commitment to transparency and furthering global knowledge about the pandemic but has been harassed by Chinese officials ever since and last week was evicted from his laboratory, sleeping on its doorstep in protest.

The parallels with the persecution of Dr Nikolai Petrovsky should be shameful to Australians. Petrovsky bravely revealed in May 2020 that the Sars-CoV-2 virus was highly likely to have been manipulated in a laboratory to make it infectious to humans. Last month, Petrovsky was evicted from his laboratory in Adelaide after a long period of harassment that began when he developed a traditional Covid vaccine that should have provided an alternative to Australians who did not want to risk taking the novel genetic vaccines that the government approved.

The persecution of doctors was not mentioned by former Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt in his submission to the federal government’s Covid inquiry. Mr Hunt criticised state premiers for not publishing the medical advice they presumably got from the CCP that underpinned their draconian curfews and five-kilometre movement restrictions.

Indeed, this month, Judge Liz Gaynor ruled that Victorian police “employed unjustified violence” at a protest against the lockdowns on May 29, 2021, in which they punched one man in the face, subjected two others to capsicum spray, and hurled all three to the ground with such force that one was left with a dislocated arm.

Mr Hunt said that “Given the strong presumption of individual freedom and liberty that underpins our nation and the risks to educational attainment and mental health, my strong forward recommendation is that all States and Territories adopt a uniform national code for pandemic management which mandates medical advice be published for any restrictive measures.”

That’s all well and good but in reality, the medical advice underpinning almost everything about the management of the pandemic in Australia by both the federal government and its state counterparts wasn’t worth the paper on which it was written. For example, Mr Hunt proudly trumpeted “Public health and safety measures” introduced “to reduce disease transmission” without questioning what point there was in reducing disease transmission for the vast majority of the population.

In February 2020 the whole world watched as the luxury cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined off Japan for a fortnight because of an outbreak of Covid onboard. Of the 3711 people on board—2666 passengers, median age sixty-nine, and 1045 crew, median age thirty-six—only fourteen died, all in their seventies and eighties except for one woman in her sixties. The lesson should have been that Covid was not a threat to young, healthy people.

As Professor Christopher Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, said in a public lecture on April 30, 2020, “the biggest risk factor for dying from this disease is undoubtedly age. Doctors and scientists in China picked this up at an early stage” and he stressed that “even in the most high risk group, the majority of people who actually get this infection do not die”.

This was borne out in every year of the pandemic in Australia where the vast majority of fatalities occurred in people in their seventies, eighties and nineties. Indeed, since 2022, women with the highest number of Covid deaths are those aged over ninety.

That being the case, there was never any justification for abandoning Australia’s pandemic plan, which called for focused protection of the vulnerable, who were the elderly and the immune-compromised, while allowing the rest of society to continue on with business as usual.

This is what Sweden did, and while there was an increase in mortality in the elderly in aged care homes in the first year of the pandemic, everybody else was fine. Sweden never shut down its schools, and teachers and students suffered no ill effects. On the contrary, in Australia it was children—particularly in Victoria—who suffered enormously under lockdowns. A study published by the OECD in March 2023 showed that if you control for population growth, which was higher in Australia, Australia’s excess death rate from 2020 to 2022 was 3.5 times higher than in Sweden (2.1 per cent versus minus 0.6 per cent) meaning there were no excess deaths in Sweden at all.

Despite the positive evidence from Sweden, Mr Hunt tore up the national pandemic plan that had been prepared by his predecessor (and chairman of Quadrant) former Health Minister Tony Abbott and embarked on a fool’s errand of trying to flatten the curve of transmission, which quickly descended into the madness of attempting to eradicate Covid. He did this even though it meant spending billions of dollars keeping the nation under house, state, or national arrest, and modelling overseas travel policies on North Korea. Mr Hunt wouldn’t let anyone enter or leave the country unless they were a chief health officer, a premier, or some other privileged member of the Covidian caste, or until they got vaccinated.

Perhaps when he calms down after castigating state premiers for imposing five-kilometre lockdowns he might like to publish the health advice that justified not allowing the unvaccinated to travel overseas until July 6, 2022? The only purpose of the policy seems to have been to coerce people who wanted to travel into getting jabbed and punish those who dared to decline the injections. It became apparent very rapidly that the vaccines didn’t stop transmission and if Mr Hunt had asked anyone from Pfizer, they would have had to tell him that they didn’t even bother to test for it.

The torrent of “breakthough” infections destroyed any rationale for vaccine mandates but in his quixotic quest to stop transmission, Mr Hunt proudly used the national cabinet to impose “social distancing” and “the widespread community use of face masks”. Where was the health advice for those initiatives? It should have been apparent from the start that the coronaviruses are respiratory infections just like colds and flu and the reason why Australians had never worn face masks to prevent the transmission of respiratory infections is because they are not designed to prevent the spread of airborne viruses in the community and don’t work.

A Cochrane review—widely seen as the gold standard for healthcare data—of the efficacy of face masks published in January 2023 and based on seventy-eight randomised controlled trials with a total of 610,872 participants in many countries definitively showed, once again, that face masks don’t reduce transmission. Why would they? Just watch someone exhale cigarette smoke while wearing a face mask—almost all the smoke comes out at the sides of the mask or goes up into their eyes.

Social distancing—keeping 1.5 metres away from others wherever possible—was just as hare-brained and for the same reason. The aerosols that transmit respiratory infections drift much farther than 1.5 metres in an enclosed space. The best way to disperse them is to open a window or go outside, but of course that was discouraged when it wasn’t outright banned as in Victoria, under Dictator Dan, for twenty-three hours a day.

The real problem was not just that Mr Hunt colluded with the premiers in the lockdown of Australia and the mandating of vaccines that were neither safe—the government has been forced to provide woefully inadequate compensation—nor effective, but that he presided over the censorship and persecution by health bureaucrats of doctors, medical researchers, and almost anyone who dared to criticise the government narrative. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and state medical boards are still punishing doctors who dare, for example, like Queensland general practitioner Dr Melissa McCann, to altruistically organise and crowd-fund a class action for the vaccine-injured. Dr McCann has been forced to undertake Chinese-style “re-education”. Disgracefully, other healthcare workers are still not allowed to work because they declined the mandated vaccines, even though we have known since the Athenian Plague of 430 BC and since at least mid-2021 from a peer-reviewed study that immunity acquired from infection with Covid was stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity. The shameful truth is that when Australian governments—state and federal—had to choose between Sweden and China, they chose China.