Piers Akerman: Health experts, politicians responded to pandemic with fear

We haven’t been guided by science during the pandemic but we’ve been ruled by pseudoscience and political deception, Piers Akerman writes.

How sweet is the message of Christ renewed each Christmas, even against the background static of illogical and irrational Covid anxiety. By any reading, the New Testament’s theme is that of hope.

Unfortunately, the dominating message from our so-called health experts and most of our political leaders has been one of hopelessness.

Like the mythical ouroboros, the Ancient Greek and Egyptian symbol of a snake eating its own tail, the paranoia fuelled by wildly inaccurate modelling touted unquestioningly by the ABC and the Nine Media has fed upon itself to generate a totally unwarranted sense of danger.

I don’t claim expertise but the numbers recorded and analysed by the Bureau of Statistics (which has not yet been overtaken by wokeness as the weather bureau has by swallowing the global warmist snake oil) lay out the cold facts.

According the most recent update on the ABS website, issued in September, Covid-19 was the 38th leading cause of death (898 deaths). Clearly this figure is outdated but not to any statistically important degree.

The world has been whipped into a ridiculous and scientifically unfounded anxiety over Covid-19, Piers Akerman says. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gaye Gerard

In fact, in 2020 there was a decrease in mortality in Australia. Whilst some were hiding under their doonas when they weren’t twitching back their curtains and busily dobbing in neighbours who hugged their grandchildren, fewer Australians were actually dying.

I’m going to reproduce the plain language from the ABS though I doubt it will convince the nutcases from either end of the spectrum – those who love the despotic Labor premiers Dan Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Mark McGowan or those who believe the virus was a Luminati-concocted conspiracy released to distract attention from a mystical global paedophile network.

With Covid so far down the causes of death, the actual top five leading causes of death have remained the same as in 2019 (ischaemic heart disease, dementia including Alzheimer’s disease, cerebrovascular diseases, lung cancer and chronic lower respiratory diseases).

While all the focus was on Covid (and almost all the research money was diverted to vaccines), the actual age-standardised death rate decreased for each of the top five leading causes of death from 2019. 

Pointedly, it must be underlined that the top five leading causes of death have remained the same since 2011.

Deaths due to chronic lower respiratory diseases (including emphysema) had the highest proportional rate decrease from 2019 at a huge 17.8 per cent. At any other time, this should have been front page news but it barely rated a mention.

Rates from suicide, drug overdoses and car crashes decreased.

Alcohol-induced death rates increased by 8.3 per cent (I blame the unnecessary lockdowns, particularly those which made Melbourne the lockdown capital of the world).

The median age at death for Covid sufferers was 86, not a bad innings at all when the median age for death for males was 78.8 years and for females 84.8!

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews did not respond well to the pandemic, Piers Akerman writes. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Luis Enrique Ascui

Just over half of those who died from Covid were female (460 female deaths, 438 male deaths at the time of the ABS report) and those who died from the virus under the age of 70 were more likely to be male.

Dementia was the most common pre-existing condition, not to be entirely unexpected given the median age of death.

Chronic cardiac conditions, hypertension and diabetes were also commonly reported comorbidities. Again, hardly unexpected given the median age of those who died.

Most deaths occurred in people with a usual residence of Victoria and we know the reason why – the absolute failure of the Andrews Labor government to run a coherent and competent response to the virus.

All top five leading causes of death were non-communicable diseases (they are not passed from person to person) so the issue of mask mandates and lockdowns was shown to an irrelevancy if not for the fact politicians used draconian Covid restrictions as handy distractions for their abject incompetence.

Since Covid first appeared in China, with the available evidence suggesting it escaped from a Wuhan laboratory two years ago, the world has been whipped into a ridiculous and scientifically unfounded anxiety.

For Heaven’s sake, we saw panic-driven shoppers fighting in the supermarket aisles over rolls of lavatory paper!

The media, particularly the social media giants such as Facebook, are as guilty as the politicians for this unwarranted hysteria.

We haven’t been guided by science, we’ve been ruled by pseudoscience and political chicanery.