Andrew Bolt: We deserve answers on Covid deaths

Politicians and journalists who declared “every life is valuable” don’t seem to care, or want us to know why Covid deaths are climbing. 

SCOTT Morrison and the rest of our politicians are hypocrites. Look at them, and many journalists, too, now looking the other way as nearly 100 Australians die each day with the virus.

This is astonishing. I remember when our politicians shut down whole cities – Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide – after just one or two infections, to the applause of much of the media.

But now we have 98 Australians on Friday not just getting sick, but dying. Another 97 on Saturday and 87 on Sunday – and almost no one seems to even ask how they died. Where they died. Why.

It’s as if everyone wants to pretend these deaths are not happening, in case the dumb think vaccines don’t work or start demanding more lockdowns.

But the hypocrisy runs deeper, and for me it’s personal.

In early August 2020, when about 10 Australians were dying daily, Prime Minister Morrison called me “hideous” and “immoral”.

An ABC presenter agreed I was “disgraceful”. The Council on the Ageing blasted my views as “totally unacceptable”, and something called the Journalism Education and Research Association accused me of fuelling the “misinformation pandemic”.

What exactly had I said?

When about 10 Australians were dying daily, Prime Minister Morrison called me “hideous” and “immoral”. Picture: Martin Ollman

I’d argued for tougher quarantining of the infected, faster PCR testing, and rapid antigen tests.

I also said our other priority should be “protecting those most likely to die” by cracking down on infection protocols at nursing homes and helping elderly Australians to isolate at home by, for instance, doing their shopping for them.

But locking down millions of younger Australians was too crude: “We don’t crash this economy just to stop the young getting a stuffy nose.” Not when lockdowns “are doing huge damage to — essentially — save aged-care residents from dying a few months earlier”.

Cue outrage. But who are the “immoral” and the “hideous”, 18 months later?

The lockdowns are gone, but the dying is 10 times greater. Melbourne once spent more time locked down than any other city in the world, but last Friday – when 39 Victorians died – Victoria’s Sports Minister announced the Australian Open could lift its crowd capacity from 50 per cent to 65. Tennis above lives!

No, I don’t want lockdowns now that 93 per cent of us are vaccinated.

But I’m horrified that those politicians and journalists who sanctimoniously denounced me and declared “every life is valuable” seem no longer to care now that many more elderly Australians are dying every day, or interested in finding why.

This is criminal. Australians must now take responsibility for protecting themselves, but how can they do that when they’re not told who is dying and how they got infected?

The little information we’re told raises more questions than answers.

About 93 per cent of Australians are vaccinated.

NSW says that of the 101 people who died at the weekend, not one was younger than 60. Two thirds were older than 70, and two were in their 100s. Have we done enough to help the old and vulnerable isolate themselves?

Of the 49 who died in NSW on Saturday, 24 were fully vaccinated and another 11 had even had booster shots. Of the 13 who died in Queensland on Sunday, eight were vaccinated.

Yes, this shows that the unvaccinated are much more likely to die, given they make up just 7 per cent of our adult population. But are vaccinated people getting slack in keeping their social distance, falsely assuming they won’t die?

We also know that most of the dead have other serious conditions. So how many people actually die from the virus, not just with it?

A third of Australia’s virus deaths this year still occurred in residential aged care. Have protection measures broken down?

A third of the NSW dead were from Sydney’s poorer and more multicultural western and south-western suburbs. Are health messages getting through?

I’m sorry to have such little data for you, and so many questions.

Did the dead get infected outdoors or indoors? At the shops or at home? Did they go for medical treatment too late? Could some have saved themselves if they weren’t fat or unfit?

This information should be out there daily. Instead, politicians are frantically rushing out masks and test kits for school children when their own figures show it’s the old doing virtually all the dying, and now in record numbers.

Those politicians tell us not to worry, because case numbers are now going down, but wait until winter – always more deadly with viruses. And wait until the next variant.

So tell us how to protect ourselves. What’s the big secret?