Miranda Devine: Governments drip-feeding Covid information to the public

Governments like the US and New Zealand don’t want to release all the pandemic facts, writes Miranda Devine.

Joe Biden heaped praise on New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in their phone call last week.

“President Biden commended Prime Minister Ardern for her steadfast and effective leadership throughout the pandemic,” the White House said.

No wonder.

Ardern has the same authoritarian instinct towards her subjects that Biden has towards his. The New Zealand people are not to be trusted with information the government hasn’t sanctioned any more than the American people are. Misinformation must be stamped out. For your own good.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern looks on during a press conference for the APEC Informal Leaders' Retreat

The government “will continue to be your single source of truth,” Ardern said at a press conference to address pandemic concerns. “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.”

It’s not censorship, it’s keeping you safe from misinformation.

Good girl, New Zealand. A “model” of pandemic leadership, according to the Biden administration.

Don’t worry that New Zealand’s zero infection ambition, easier to achieve than almost anywhere for a small, isolated island nation but still unsustainable in the long run, already has resulted this month in a hospital system reportedly near collapse.

The so-called “immunity debt” from the Covid-19 lockdown has caused a flood of babies being hospitalised with a potentially deadly respiratory virus, which ordinarily would not cause a problem.

But without their immune systems being exposed to a normal level of viruses and bacteria, children are exquisitely vulnerable to infection. Who knows the long-term consequences?

For all the recent criticism of Australia’s handling of the pandemic — and I have been as negative as anyone about the laggardly vaccine rollout — at least our leaders ultimately place autonomy where it has to be, with individual Australians.

Illustration: Terry Pontikos.

In the end, it’s your decision if you want to take the vaccine and we trust you to do the right thing when it comes to stopping the spread of the virus.

In some ways, Australia’s stultifying conformity is a strength at this time. Coupled with the bolshie rejection of authority that runs through the Australian character, it helps ensure an outcome that naturally works for the public good but inoculates against dictatorial overreach.

Citizen autonomy is a precious contract between the governors and the governed which we mostly take for granted in Western democracies, but it has been frayed through the pandemic, and never more so than America which created itself from whole cloth 245 years ago.

Its sublime constitution has been a bulwark against the worst excesses of mankind’s natural inclination towards authoritarianism.

And yet America is under strain, after a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 people, and a year of violent riots, soaring crime and extreme political polarisation that a divisive president keeps hysterically comparing to the Civil War.

And now, under the guise of protecting public health, the Biden administration has made a frightening leap into fascism. And that’s not hyperbole, as the president would say.

It explicitly aligned the government’s aims with Big Tech censorship last week. If it’s something the Democratic party doesn’t want said, it must be banned.

US President Joe Biden speaks about the economy at the White House on Monday. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

It is dangerous “misinformation”, as defined by the government. And it can’t just be banned from one social media platform. Big Tech must act in concert to crush misinformation super spreaders from every platform. For our own good.

That’s what White House press secretary Jen Psaki told us last week.

It’s not just the dirty dozen disinformation devils cited by Psaki as deserving of de-platforming and eternal damnation, for disagreeing with the latest iteration of the official line on Covid.

It’s not just Biden’s intemperate outburst about Facebook “killing people” by allowing unauthorised information free rein.

The president needs scapegoats to blame for the failure of his July 4 target date for 70 per cent of the population to be vaccinated. What went wrong? Republicans of course.

When the president said Facebook is “killing people” he didn’t actually mean Facebook, which was such a friend to his campaign.

He meant conservative content on Facebook which contradicts the government narrative. It’s really Fox News he hates and its two million Trump-loving viewers, the pesky folk who didn’t vote for him and don’t buy his fake unity, as in: “shut up and do what you’re told”.

So he calls them killers in the hope of siccing his media allies on them.

Having convinced you that only his government can keep people safe from the virus, now Biden has to eliminate any information to the contrary – or PEOPLE WILL DIE!

In the same way, it’s for the public’s own good that tech companies hand over every morsel of digital information they hold on any customer to law enforcement.

The media doesn’t complain about this Orwellian overreach because it’s employed against people they detest. So what if the FBI was granted a search warrant to rummage through Rudy Giuliani’s cloud for a year without his knowledge. He deserved it.

As for the MAGA boomers rounded up over the Capitol riot, no punishment is harsh enough. Six months of solitary confinement in a DC jail, drinking water so dirty it has to be strained through a sock, no problem. The president is keeping the nation safe from Civil War.

Thus, it’s not really a surprise to learn that Big Tech is working as an arm of the surveillance state. The FBI is spraying around so many search warrants that Apple, Facebook and Google now have official law enforcement departments devoted to this growth industry.

Apple calls it a “privacy and law enforcement compliance department”, compliance being the operative word, and privacy non-existent.

Documents obtained through discovery from a lawyer for some of the January Sixers show the extent of the intrusion. One warrant requires Facebook to hand over: “The contents of any available messages … attachments, draft messages, posts, chats, video calling history, ‘friend’ requests, discussions, recordings, images … IP addresses … subscriber records and login history… full name, physical address, telephone numbers, birthdate, security questions and passwords” etc.

It’s not metadata. It’s megadata and all purloined without the public’s knowledge, since courts are placing gags on tech companies not to disclose the existence of the warrants.

There is no clearer evidence the tech monopolies are trampling on Americans’ constitutional rights on behalf of a government which is prohibited from doing so.

This is the basis of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google for censoring him. Their collusion with the government means they no longer should be treated as private companies but as state actors bound by the precious First Amendment right to free speech.

The Biden administration has handed Trump a gift. Talk about a ship of (dangerous) fools.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph