Alan Jones: Australian government in panic over India COVID outbreak

Societies respond best to emergencies when it is least disrupted - but our government has obviously become addicted to disruptive and pointless alarmism, writes Alan Jones.

The government is now backing away at a hundred miles an hour from the ludicrous, utterly un-Australian and undemocratic threat to Australians seeking to return from India.

It is valid to argue, then, that this is the ultimate manifestation of alarmism that has overtaken politicians in the past 15 months.

The Prime Minister said on Monday that he had clear advice from his Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, that no Australian in India should be allowed to return and, if they did, they would face jail sentences and fines.

Supplies for India were loaded onto Sydney planes overnight. Picture: Supplied

Professor Kelly responded by saying: “I didn’t advise anything in relation to fines, or any of those other matters.”

But Kelly had, in fact, written a letter to Health Minister Greg Hunt, advocating our Biosecurity Act be implemented.

In the letter he stated to Minister Hunt that he, the Minister, could ­enforce the Act and that “the penalty for breaching a 447 determination is five years’ jail or 300 penalty units, $66,000, or both.”

With all this draconian nonsense, facts give way to fear.

Of course we sympathise with the Indian family. India is a friend of ours.

But nonetheless we continue to hear, via almost every media outlet, about “COVID chaos” in India.

The definition of pandemic seems to have changed. It now seems to be based on cases, not deaths.

Since reporting on coronavirus, not one politician or media outlet has ever differentiated between mild cases and serious or critical cases.

Illustration: Terry Pontikos

Witness the hysterical coverage by mainstream media about the former Australian Test cricketer, Michael Hussey, testing positive.

There is no need to get out the planks of wood, the hammer and nails and start banging together a coffin.

Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, Tom Hanks, Emmanuel Macron, Peter Dutton and Donald Trump have all tested positive. It does not mean eulogies should be written.

We are being told that in India there have been 222,000 deaths. That is 0.017 per cent of the population.

Put another way, in a country where 27,000 people die a day, which is almost ten million a year, we have, according to the World Health ­Organisation, 220,000 deaths.

Yet we are told that the country is “COVID ravaged”.

The PM was right to argue there is no racism involved in this. I would argue it is ignorance and alarmism.

The very sensible Senator Matt Canavan rightly said the government “should be helping Australians in India to return, not jailing them”.

Does this selective “advice” have the status of biblical truth?

A bit of history might help.

People in Mumbai queue up to get vaccinated. Picture: Punit Paranjpe/AFP

Professor Kelly is the Chief Medical Officer. On March 16 last year he said: “Up to 150,000 Australians could die from the coronavirus.”

We have had 910 deaths.

Yet our politicians used this modelling to predict scenarios that have never eventuated.

As a result, Australians are now being locked out of their country.

Their entitlement as citizens of Australia is being denied. They are abandoned to a fate that politicians would never accept themselves.

For the first time in our history, we can’t leave our country. For the first time in our history, 9000 Australians in India can’t come home.

And if they do, they face sanctions.

But don’t worry. We are now told that would never happen, as the political retreat begins in the face of a hostile public response.

But why were these threats ­invoked in the first place? What is at work here?

As at today, 3.2 million people in the world have died from or with coronavirus. That is 0.38 per cent of the world’s population.

That is not a pandemic.

But the whole coronavirus ­response is prosecuted on the case that we should be terribly grateful.

Hundreds of thousands of us were going to die — but when we wake up each morning and find ourselves alive, we should give thanks to our political leaders.

In fact, the PM himself has been brainwashed by this shonky “advice”, because he announced in a press conference in March last year: “While many people will contract this virus that it’s clear, just as people get the flu each year, it’s a more severe condition than the flu.

“But for the vast majority, around eight in 10 is our advice, it will be a mild illness and it will pass.

“However, for older Australians, and those who are more vulnerable, particularly those in remote communities and those with pre-existing health conditions, it is a far more serious virus, and that is our concern.

“Our aim in all of this is to protect the most vulnerable.”

Since then, the whole government response has gone off the rails.

Fear and alarmism reign and the government can rarely, if ever, provide medical advice which justifies the positions that they have taken.

India, sadly, has one of the world’s worst health care systems.

Most people in India live in near famine conditions with barely enough food. Put them into lockdown and they will starve.

Indeed, it is the nature of this alarmism that we don’t read that lockdowns in large parts of India are causing starvation and death.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is rightly against a national lockdown.

If there were any epidemiological justification for what the government has just done in relation to India, you would have to cancel flights from Canada, Thailand, South Korea and almost every country where infection rates, as a percentage of population, are similar to those in India.

And if we can’t bring Australians home, which is their most basic ­entitlement, then the government is delivering a vote of no confidence in its own quarantine systems.

Where do we go from here?

I remind the government of the great American epidemiologist Don­ald Henderson, who eradicated smallpox throughout the world.

“Communities faced with epidemics … respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” Henderson argued.

That, today, should be the text for the nation.