Covid’s public health cultists would keep us masked up forever

Push from the bureaucracy to keep NSW wearing masks long after the rest of the country had tossed them out shows that the fight for freedom will continue long after the coronavirus goes, writes James Morrow.

Good on Dom Perrottet for confirming that Sydney’s great unmasking will still occur on December 15.

But the fact that it was ever in question, even after the Premier already pushed the date out by two weeks, shows just how precarious our freedoms are going into the post-Covid era.

On Wednesday this paper revealed that health officials were pushing to keep people masked up in shops even after the state hit the 95 per cent double-vaccinated mark, despite other states having dropped the rule far sooner.

Premier Dominic Perrottet has confirmed mask rules will be dropped on December 15. Picture: AAP

Earlier this week it was also reported that at the height of the Delta outbreak the state’s Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant wanted to extend the strict lockdown measures imposed on southwest Sydney, including a curfew, across all of metropolitan Sydney — even where there were few Covid cases.

All in the name of science and keeping us safe, of course.

Put aside the fact that Melbourne locked down hard with a curfew and wound up being the most locked-down city in the world — while also suffering the worst Covid death toll in Australia.

In one email to Health Minister Brad Hazzard, Dr Chant wrote, “A curfew should be considered for the messaging effect as we need to signal the absolute urgency of the current situation with strong compliance presence.”

NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant argued for a curfew to be considered for “the messaging effect”. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

In other words, not because Covid magically became more dangerous after 9pm but because people needed to be made to be scared. You can almost feel the science!

Likewise when it comes to masks — particularly in shops — the evidence is just as thin, with vaccinations and social distancing far more important.

Indeed, even the NSW government previously conceded that shops are not all that dangerous when it comes to Covid.

When NSW Health stopped posting notifications about supermarkets that positive cases had visited, NSW’s deputy chief medical officer Jeremy McAnulty told the 11am press pack, “We just don’t see very much transmission at all in … supermarkets, shopping centres and so on.”

This was back on August 11, when about 48 per cent of the state’s over-16s had received one dose and less than a quarter were fully protected.

Cases of Covid caught at shopping centres have not been high. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Today we are at more than 92.1 per cent fully vaccinated, and retail is still considered dangerous by the health boffins. Or at least dangerous enough to require people to still go through the motions of masks, just to remind them who is really in charge.

To see where this mentality leads, spend some time at Parliament House in Canberra.

Despite the ACT achieving near-universal vaccine coverage and the rest of the city basically back to normal, Australia’s temple of democracy has been overrun by health cultists.

The few MPs, journalists and staffers allowed in the building are required to wear masks at all times.

When they enter, the plastic tub that carries their phone and wallet through the X-ray machine is dutifully disinfected with all the seriousness of South Australian health authorities telling fans not to touch the footy if it is kicked into the stands.

A shopper removes her mask after leaving a supermarket in Manly. Picture: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

The building’s cafes have had all their seating removed lest two people catch up for coffee.

Even the chairs and benches in the building’s numerous courtyards have been spirited away to stop people gathering outdoors — when we know outdoors is the safest place to be.

Around the world the evidence is clear that so much of this is just theatre, designed to make people feel either more secure or afraid, depending on which camp they are in.

California, where derelicts are allowed to foul the streets but law abiding citizens are hectored into wearing masks in the name of public health, now has twice the Covid cases of Florida, with its famously anti-restrictions governor Ron De Santis.

Earlier this month the reliably earnest and liberal American magazine The Atlantic published an essay, “The Upside of Covid Hygiene Theatre”.

In it, author Colin Dickey admitted that much of what we do in the name of preventing Covid’s spread is more akin to religion than science, something many of us have long suspected.

The surge in mask wearing during the coronavirus pandemic has thrown up a potent new threat to wildlife due to people thoughtlessly discarding the protective gear. Picture: Anthony Wallace/AFP

“Even if we began these practices thinking they had a rational basis in keeping us safe, for some of us they’ve evolved into having a ritual benefit instead,” he wrote.

As with people who still wear masks outdoors for no other reason than to show their righteousness, Dickey said, “Rather than see hygiene theatre as waste and nonsense, we might see it as the continued and gentle performance of care.”

Spare me.

Despite predictions of apocalypse when we opened up, Covid cases in NSW are now burbling along at about 200 a day.

The disease has become background noise but not for lack of shouting.

OzSAGE, the alarmist doctors’ group whose members have been behind so many sky-is-falling doomsday predictions that never came true, is now saying that we will get hammered at the start of the new year.

They want children to be vaccinated despite little evidence it is necessary, and of course they want continued “administrative controls” (as they gently put it) on our lives.

Thanks but no thanks.

Covid may be with us for a while but we don’t need democracy-denying doctors running our lives forever.