Victoria’s shifting lines of Covid ‘science’ revealed

We were invited to trust “the science” throughout the pandemic. But that term was long ago reduced to a political catchphrase.

Epidemiologists have been lining up to criticise the Andrews government’s decision to keep masks on older primary school kids.

James Cook University professor of infectious diseases modelling Emma McBryde described the mealy-mouthed overreach as a “silly measure”.

“It almost feels as though they can’t let go of control,” she ventured.

“To me, there’s no genuine rationale (for) it.”

Infectious diseases physician Peter Collignon offered this observation: “The people who are pushing these restrictions are the ones who have been wrong with the predictions …”

A need for masks at school has no scientific backing, a spectrum of experts argued, with a kind of unanimity that the shifting lines of Covid science have often precluded.

In response, Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, said something about “downward pressure on transmission”.

After almost two years of interpreting the health advice on our behalf, Andrews, oddly, claimed that it wasn’t his job to “interpret the advice”.

Throughout the pandemic, we have been invited to trust “the science”, even though “the science”, at least locally, was long ago reduced to a political catchphrase.

The Andrews government’s mask rule for primary-aged kids has been criticised. Picture: Mark Stewart

Lockdowns work, we were told repeatedly. We had to do the right thing.

The issue, now that Melbourne is finally poised to regain some lost mojo, is that a growing worldwide consensus suggests that lockdowns didn’t work at all.

This growing body of real “science” deserves an elevated perch in Melbourne, given we set a world record for days imprisoned at home.

To borrow from Andrews, “you can’t ignore the data and the science”.

Exhibit A is Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who has just published a book.

The title captures this collective shaking of heads: The Year The World Went Mad.

“I did not expect that elementary principles of epidemiology would be misunderstood and ignored, that tried-and-trusted approaches to public health would be pushed aside, that so many scientists would abandon their objectivity, or that plain common sense will be a casualty of the crisis,” he writes.

“Yet – as I’ve explained – these things did happen, and we have all seen the result. I didn’t expect the world to go mad. But it did.”

Woolhouse analyses the British experience of lockdowns (presumably, an updated Australian version of the book will be called Two Years the World Went Mad).

His conclusions seem to apply directly to Victoria because our state’s approach was so much more prescriptive than anywhere else.

A near-deserted Melbourne CBD during the city’s final days of lockdown in October 2021. Picture: David Geraghty

He describes lockdowns as “lazy” decision-making which has been “hugely damaging”.

Woolhouse isn’t alone. In 2020, the World Health Organisation declared that lockdowns should not be the first option, mainly because they make “poor people an awful
lot poorer”.

At about the same time, 500 Victorian doctors signed a petition urging the end of lockdowns during the third lockdown of six.

The Covid Medical Network argued that lockdown was ­“unnecessary” and “disproportionate” and would probably cause more deaths than lives saved.

Various groups, including the AMA, bagged the messaging at the time as irresponsible.

Yet significant sections of the scientific world appear to have belatedly subscribed to versions of the anti-lockdown perspective.

Many Victorians shook off the doctrinal oversight in about September last year. We wearied of pernickety controls which seemed so random.

Andrews milked the fear of the people at the pandemic’s beginning. By last year’s grand final, however, he had lost the crowd. Sounding like a teacher who loses control of the classroom, he had told off people for watching the sunset at a Rye beach. Sunsets were just too dangerous.

Victorians fast grew weary of Premier Daniel Andrews’ rules. Picture: Aaron Francis

Victoria took another year, or another 116 days of lockdown in total, after the 2020 urgings of various groups to abandon the lockdown policy as a first response to rising case numbers.

We were blanketed, vulnerable or otherwise, by restrictions that have since been exposed as exercises of control rather than science.

The evidence against the Victorian approach keeps mounting. A Johns Hopkins University study this month pointed out that lockdowns had “little to no effect” in saving lives. This study also nodded to the absence of trust, so prevalent here, that governments showed in their people.

This matters. As two travel company leaders wrote this week in The Australian, freedoms compare to reputations. Lifetimes to build, they can be destroyed in a moment.

“We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse,” Woolhouse says.

“In short, we panicked. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.”

Will history be kind to the doomsayers who thrilled in the power of scaring the people into submission?

What of politicians who still appear unwilling to give up such misplaced control?

— Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist