Coronavirus NSW: Falling victim to mask hysteria
Victoria has pushed the panic button on masks and NSW is surely not far behind - yet what is needed is calm, sensible leadership and listening to the science on face coverings, writes Alan Jones.
Opinion
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Is there no end to the level of fear that Daniel Andrews and Gladys Berejiklian seem determined to inject into every crevice of society?
We now have Andrews telling us that as from 11.59pm Wednesday, Victorians will have to wear a mask or a face covering when leaving home.
Where is the evidence that masks will improve the lot of all individuals?
Professor Ian Frazer, the man who developed the technology behind the vaccine for cervical cancer, has said it was useful for an ill person to wear a mask because: “It stops them spreading the infection to other people.”
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But as the AMA vice-president Chris Zappala said in April: “Often people wear those masks incorrectly. They take them on and off, they touch them, they do not change them after a few hours or when they get wet and all of those things make them useless … So I think there is danger … that they give a false sense of security.”
The correspondence I am receiving is overwhelming.
Ben says: “We are being lied to and it will cost far more lives in the long run than what is now known as a virus.”
Walt says: “I cannot believe the fear rhetoric. They never announce when someone dies from influenza.”
As the Menzies Research Centre has said recently: “Make no mistake, the elderly and infirm may face the most immediate risk from COVID-19, but young Australians will ultimately be the biggest losers.”
People are writing to me from everywhere.
The alarmism is out of control.
One writes: “The Victorian Health Minister just stated, ‘we are in for the fight of our lives’. Good grief. When do these stupid people get a grip on reality. Just quarantine the aged and the sick and let the rest of us get on with our lives.”
I did my own poll at the weekend. I asked very intelligent people if they could remember swine flu in 2009?
Not one said yes, but there were 38,000 cases, 191 deaths and no lockdowns.
And no nightly political lectures.
Yet here we are with 11,802 cases and 122 deaths.
In Victoria, 0.08 per cent of the population have tested positive. But 0.0005 per cent of the population have died.
As at the weekend, worldwide, there have been 608,000 COVID-19 deaths this year. At the same time, there have been 7.1 million deaths from communicable disease; 4.5 million deaths from cancer; 2.7 million from smoking.
These deaths are not breathlessly announced in the same fear engendering way that we are being fed stories about coronavirus.
Gladys Berejiklian, in NSW, tells us that the state is on “high alert”. As of Monday, there were two people in hospital and two in intensive care.
At last the business world seems to have woken up, though I must give Prime Minister Scott Morrison credit here.
He has said that we cannot shut the economy down forever, though he did say earlier this year that the shutdown could last until September!
I think he can now see the economic devastation around him.
Business is making the sensible point to localise any future lockdowns to limit damage to the economy.
But no, not in NSW. There is an outbreak at Casula, which is 39km west of Sydney. So for every pub, club and restaurant in NSW — whether it is Tamworth, Bourke or Brewarrina, which is 763km from Sydney — the rules are the same.
If this is not madness, the word has lost its meaning.
Victoria is the same.
Greg writes: “We are 125km from Melbourne. We are classed as rural Victoria and are placed in lockdown, the only rural community in Victoria. Our children have to homeschool, yet five minutes away in another shire, the children can go to school.”
People are depressed and the problems that are being addressed in this ad hoc way have been created by government.
Gladys Berejiklian’s government has presided over the Ruby Princess fiasco and hides behind an inquiry; yet the Ruby Princess produced the bulk of NSW’s 49 deaths.
Andrews is similarly guilty in Victoria. This is the Premier who allowed 10,000 anarchists to march in central Melbourne; he did not act on a virus outbreak at Cedar Meatworks because the owners were Labor mates; he allowed unions to run the hotel quarantining; he used public funds to run the last Labor election campaign; and, when Health Minister in 2009, the Auditor-General found that hospital waiting lists had been falsified. Instead of having the decency to resign, he too, hides behind a judicial inquiry.
For lockdowns, the rules are the same as for face masks. We are not told what they are meant to achieve.
Only a mad person would believe a lockdown would wipe out the virus. Lockdowns are the consequence of alarmist health bureaucrats predicting there would be 150,000 cases, a metaphor of panic and incompetence.
Of course, that hasn’t materialised.
What has is evidenced by the federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg saying that this second shutdown in Victoria — locking millions of Australians into their homes, as I have said previously, like battery hens — is creating economic damage of a billion dollars a week.
But that does not include the emotional, psychological and educational damage that is being done, the consequences of which will be very long term.
These so-called political leaders are stealing our freedoms from under our very noses on the false premise that they are looking after us.
Henry Ergas is one of Australia’s finest minds, an economist who has worked at the OECD. He has taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He wrote recently in The Australian: “Victoria’s lockdown would need to save more than 500 lives a week to be justified, a number that … could only be reached if the lockdown, entirely implausibly, prevented at least 100,000 infections each week.”
No one is saying the outbreak does not need to be controlled.
What I am saying is that no government can eliminate the virus. And no government should be allowed to survive when it is guilty of prospering alarmism, hysteria and fear.
But, when the federal parliament is closed down and the Victorian parliament does not even meet, what hope is there for urgent debate of these issues, when such debate is fundamental to the democratic process.
Good, hardworking, conscientious and ambitious Australians are being shafted.