Not the COVID Investigation We Need

An independent review of Australia’s response to COVID-19, released in late October 2022, provoked some immediate responses from mainstream and social media. A few key points were lifted and used in told-you-so pieces about why schools should never have been closed and how lockdowns, if needed at all, were overly long and harsh. It is nice that the bleeding obvious has been stated, albeit sotto voce.

However, on reading the full 100-page Fault Lines report there is very little of any substance. In fact, the report suffers from two insidious diseases: the Woke Australia Policy (WAP) and Victim Acquired Induced Diversity Syndrome (VAIDS). The latter social disease is a subvariant of WAP whereby the public sector and woke corporations spread victimhood within certain communities, then proclaim their miraculous cure. This is, of course, more diversity.

The independent report goes by name of Fault Lines, a title you might think would be about which institutions and individuals were at fault for the worst public policy decisions in the history of Australia, followed perhaps by some recommendations and the mooting of whether Dan Andrews should be flogged before or during his life sentence. You will be disappointed to discover that those “fault lines” are of the “societal” variety. In a few words, the report’s key takeaway is that some groups were “disadvantaged”.

Getting into what passes for the meat of the report, it is full of “we did so much better than other countries”, complete with poor statistical comparisons and no mention of the vastly different methods of collecting, collating and reporting health data across different countries. This makes such comparisons utterly meaningless. For example, it was widely reported that in the UK if you died for any reason within 28 days of a COVID positive test you were recorded as having died from COVID. This led to a massive inflation in statistics and absurdities such as being run over by a truck or falling off a roof being labelled as COVID deaths.

There are the occasional outbursts of fevered drama that sound like they were written by a moonlighting climate change fearmonger:

Footage of mass burials, people collapsing in the streets, health systems in crisis and doctors being forced to decide who lived and who died became commonplace on our television screens.

You can almost imagine a COVID-imbued Greta Thunberg reciting that line.

There is no genuine “footage of mass burials”. How could there be when nearly every country actually had lower than average deaths under lockdown conditions? In Australia, the 909 deceased reported as COVID deaths in 2020 was pitiful when compared with the 2017 influenza and pneumonia death toll of over 4,500. Fake footage gained wide currency in early 2020 which stoked fear and did much to spread the global hysteria. The truth was that one much-broadcast clip was taken from a TV series. It was not, as claimed, from Italy but from a TV series – India Today). Similarly misleading was the New York City mass grave allegedly filled with COVID casualties. The truth about that footage is that it was of a mass grave for the indigent and homeless that has been accepting the wretched refuse of the Big Apple’s streets for 150 years . In Germany during the 1968-89 Hong Kong flu pandemic the dead were stored in subway tunnels and garbage collectors had to assist digging graves. Tellingly, in both the 1969 pandemic and the Asian flu pandemic a decade earlier, people actually died in their homes, usually in their sleep. With COVID, by contrast, casualties mostly breathed their last in hospitals.

As for “people collapsing in the streets”, these videos all emanated from China and much of the footage circulating in the West was soon shown to be fabricated or without context. Oddly, after the disease spread to the other 7 billion people on the planet, no more video emerged of people collapsing on China’s streets. Could it be that, having cursed themselves with the accidental release of the Wuhan virus, Beijing decided the rest of the world should follow suit and endure its own mass disruptions? The fact that China banned internal flights from Wuhan while allowing international one strongly suggests that is indeed be the case.

No health system was “in crisis” unless the report’s authors are referring to the poor choreography in some of the numerous dancing TikTok videos of gamboling healthcare workers. The only time doctors were forced to decide who suffered was when they were inclined to prescribe ivermectin or HCQ and prohibited by bureaucratic fiat from doing so. In Queensland you could go to prison for doing so. None of this is mentioned in the report, although the “misinformation” trope gets a good going over.

“Conspiracy theories were widely distributed …This bred mistrust of the advice being conveyed by the Australian Government in some circumstances.”

One can perhaps appreciate why the Australian government and its bureaucrats would be mistrusted, especially as we were promised life would return to normal after the “safe and effective vaccines” had been administered to 50 per cent of the population, the promise being that “you can’t get it and you can’t spread it”. This soon crept up to 60 per cent, then 70 per cent … 80 per cent … and then to more than 90 per cent. Then came the booster, then another booster … and yet another. After that, the pericarditis and myocarditis cases. Yes, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, let me repeat that there is no possible reason to mistrust our government, certainly not to assume the serried ranks of its TGA issuers-of-edicts and newly famous epidemiologists were confident only about seeming confident rather than actually knowing what they were doing.

The report’s authors believe only “trusted sources of information” can be allowed, otherwise “sometimes dangerous theories” might circulate. If only there were some kind of Ministry of Truth working in conjunction with social media to silence dissenting voices. But wait, there was!

What follows is perhaps the least aware, most patronising and sanctimonious paragraph in the report:

The effectiveness of public health messaging was also constrained by written communications about pandemic policy being delivered at a reading comprehension level that was well above the national average. Only 15 per cent of Australians read at a diploma level or above. Government communications during the COVID-19 pandemic required a bachelor’s degree level of reading comprehension to understand. Messages don’t need to be dumbed down. But they do need to be conveyed in a manner that can be widely understood by the Australian public.

It wasn’t that the public couldn’t understand government communications, it was because they usually made no sense. Bunnings, bottle shops and brothels couldn’t spread COVID, so they were allowed to remain open, but attending church, gathering in groups of more than ten to bury loved ones or simply watching the sunset on an empty beach could get you infected. COVID would jump you, the instant experts said, if you stood up in a pub, rather than remaining seated. It was perfectly safe for thronged masses to protest a violent career criminal’s fatal fentanyl overdose in Minneapolis, but protesting for the restoration of your own rights in your own country was punished.The report’s authors lament that Australians just aren’t smart enough to comprehend government messages, although one early mantra was simplicity itself, “two weeks to flatten the curve”. Even Kylie from Kalgoorlie, who left school at 16, understands the difference between two weeks and what turned out to be more than two years.

Another picayune problem that drew the authors’ attention was that food hampers “were sometimes not culturally appropriate”. And the answer to this dilemma and others is, of course, “increase the diversity of the public sector to ensure it reflects Australian society”. Such genius! Now that Ahmed from Auburn has lost his small business he can join the public service and make certain halal hampers are provided along with instructions in Arabic. We could always insist that people wanting to live in Australia master the local language or at least achieve a basic proficiency.  But that might mean less diversity and everyone knows diversity is a strength, except when it is a weakness, which can be fixed only with more diversity.

That the report picks up on the minutiae and utter irrelevance of halal food hampers in the grand scheme of things while missing so much else is astonishing. Of the many things the report missed perhaps the most unforgivable omission was in this throwaway line, “Some of the harshest lockdowns in the world took place in Australia and the world noticed”. The behaviour by various state governments, specifically that of Victoria, does not need repeating here. If you missed any of it, the award-winning Battleground Melbourne documentary will hit you in the face like, well, a rubber bullet from a VicPol assault squad. Unlike hiccups in the supply of halal meals to Melbourne’s locked-in public housing tenants (who shouldn’t have been locked in to begin with), the report pays scant attention to the most brutal, unnecessary, totalitarian, immoral and destructive use of State power in Australia’s history.

It is not only what the report misses but also what it gets so wrong. 

Those living in aged care were particularly at risk .. .Many hospitals were reluctant to accept infected patients from residential aged care, fearing that intensive care units (ICUs) would be overrun.

This is blatant memory-holing, a rewriting of what really happened. At the start of the pandemic, hospitals planned to put mildly sick people INTO aged care facilities. At a meeting in NSW’s principal COVID hospital the CIO claimed this was to prevent the hospitals from overfilling. Hospitals and ICUs were never in danger of being overrun. Ironically it was this policy that led to the majority of people who died with a positive COVID test in 2020.

Of the 909 people who died in 2020, about 700 were in aged care facilities. It doesn’t matter what virus it is, when something gets into an old folks’ home it will go through the place like wildfire. Large numbers of people dying in aged care facilities from respiratory illnesses is not unusual, so why did the states put the elderly in such danger? Over 90 per cent of the aged-care deaths were in Victoria, and those concentrated in just ten facilities. Premier Daniel Andrews and his cronies should be called to account before the royal commission into COVID we will never see. Instead of the witness box they have just been re-installed on the government benches.

Fault Lines also misses something else that could have and likely still is skewing the data – the fact that aged-care facilities and hospitals received government money for every COVID-positive patient and even more for COVID deaths. As the old saying goes, subsidise something and you get more of it. How tempting was it for facilities to write-up deaths as “from COVID” rather than “natural causes with COVID”?

So what does the report actually get right? Not much, and things that are incredibly obvious are skirted – schools should have remained open and Australian citizens should not have been locked out of their own country.

The role of data is also raised as “New data partnerships were formed with Apple and Google”, which, of course, need to be expanded because who doesn’t want more Big Tech collusion with the power hungry state? The admission that State and Federal public servants don’t like sharing data “is the fear that the data they share may be used to justify a cut in federal funding” is a disgrace but no surprise.

Overall, the report’s recommendations are predictable, pointless and summed up in three words, “more government please”. The authors recommend an Australian version of America’s CDC — in other words, more bureaucracy. There is also a push for an “evaluator general” at state and federal levels. Translated: more public servants to fend off criticism of public servants and shield politicians from embarrassment. It is a PR nightmare for politicians when their highly paid appointees insist the dams will never fill or, likewise, hospitals will overflow with the dead and dying, and then exact opposite happens.

Jeffrey R. Grimshaw is the author of Trigger Warming. Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Global Warming (But Were Afraid To Ask)