Rita Panahi: Daniel Andrews finally drops Covid-19 hysteria for reason

The Covid eradication strategy was ruinous and even its biggest hysteric, Daniel Andrews, now seems to agree.

You know there is something seriously amiss when chief Covid-19 hysteric, the man responsible for Victoria’s botched response, emerges as a voice of reason.

Premier Dan Andrews appeared to shift dramatically from the ruinous eradication strategy that he’s adopted thus far and pledged to fully re-open the state not when a significant portion of the population has been vaccinated but when everyone has been given the opportunity to be vaccinated. It’s an important distinction.

“We wouldn’t be having lockdowns to protect people who weren’t prepared to protect themselves,” Andrews said.

Bravo. Now, it’s probably not a coincidence that Andrews’ change of heart comes after a poll published in the Herald Sun late last month showed 75 per cent of Victorians support an end to border closures once everyone has the chance to get the vaccine “regardless of how many are actually vaccinated”. Frankly, I don’t care how the Premier arrived at his road to Damascus moment, I’m just glad he’s there.

Premier Daniel Andrews made the lockdown comment at a press conference last week. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

It’s taken some time but finally a sizeable percentage of sensible people, scared silly by hysterical media and politicians, are waking up to the Covid-19 reality.

And the reality is that Covid-19 will be endemic; it’ll always be around, there’ll be many new strains and there will be some deaths as there are every year from the flu. How quickly we seemed to forget that 1255 Australians died due to influenza in 2017, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In that year influenza and pneumonia accounted for 4269 deaths.

The only way ahead is to treat Covid-19 like a virulent strain of influenza, not the Black Death.

It’s what many renowned experts called for from the start of this pandemic but instead of listening to the likes of Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff or Stanford Medical School professor Jay Bhattacharya or Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta, who argued lockdowns ultimately do more harm than good, most governments listened to public health bureaucrats and dud modelling.

On Friday the Prime Minister announced a four-phase plan out of the pandemic. But don’t be fooled, Scott Morrison’s supposed exit strategy is nothing more than a plan for a plan. There are no figures, targets or anything concrete to give Australians confidence that we will be rejoining the rest of the world or even uniting as one country with no further border closures.

The only defined target was a major backward step in halving the number of international arrivals, further enforcing the “Fortress Australia” strategy. That decision was a terrible capitulation by the Prime Minister just when the nation needed him to lead us out of this self-inflicted quagmire.