Waiting for Godot, from one pandemic debacle to the next

Back in March I asked — pleaded — could we just cut out the mindless stupidity.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison talks to Savannah Alegre, specialist team lead of the Microbiology Laboratory at AstraZeneca. Picture: Getty Images

Back in March I asked — pleaded — could we just cut out the mindless stupidity.

Silly me, I had not appreciated it was actually a mandatory design feature of the government, bureaucratic and health response to the virus and which was resoundingly restated during the week by the prime minister’s commitment to a mandatory vaccine which is yet to be invented.

Yes, he then immediately backtracked to something or other: the “something” seemed to be more of a “mandatory voluntary” vaccine; the “other” seemed to be more like a “voluntary mandatory” vaccine.

My original plea was in the wake of the Ruby Princess debacle; since then the head of any sentient person has hit the table on an almost weekly basis as we’ve rolled from stupidity to stupidity.

The big, big one was of course the Victorian state government’s quarantine super-debacle. It made the Ruby Princess stupidity look like Nobel prize-winning acuity in comparison.

The primary victims are the hundreds the super-debacle has killed and will kill; but the economic consequences have also been devastating, or rather the stupidity of the Victorian government’s response: closing down the state economy, destroying businesses, jobs and lives.

Now, Premier Daniel Andrews has set as the metric for taking his figurative knee off the economy’s throat that daily cases have to drop into the single or low double-digits. And if they subsequently kick up to something higher?

Meanwhile, in the seemingly less stupid rest of Australia, those governments play border closures willy-nilly. Can somebody explain what exactly is the purpose of the so-called national cabinet? Could they detail just what it has achieved?

Is our national strategy now all about keeping the national economy under some degree of restraint, along with the prohibitions on both domestic and international flights, with a special place in hell reserved for 6.5 million Victorians in no-longer-so figurative chains?

While we all wait for the arrival of the magic vaccine — which, when it arrives or more likely doesn’t, can only be called Godot? This magic vaccine, this Godot, will be the first-ever invented to work against a coronavirus. And what will “work” mean, as the flu vaccine’s effectiveness varies in any year between 20 and 60 per cent? So prime minister which percentage will “work” for you?

The two mega-stupidities — locking down the economy as the antivirus mechanism, and putting all our very fragile eggs in the vaccine basket — merge.

The first had some unavoidable inevitability in February-March, when we really did not know — thank you China, thank you WHO — what we were dealing with.

And, I should note, when we also saw the one great anti-stupidity move – the PM moving unilaterally to stop the flights from China, albeit then reverting back to the mandatory policy feature by taking too long to also stop the flights from Europe.

But surely not in August. As our Economics Editor Adam Creighton has argued emphatically and — it should have been — persuasively, that the lockdown strategy generated far too many costs, not just economic but social and indeed health, weighted against the arguable benefits.

No, this is not a recitation of a policy which the PM in his, well, let’s just call it ignorance, outrageously characterised as people like Creighton and Sky’s Andrew Bolt wanting to sacrifice the elderly.

It is a direct statement of the dead-end — both in virus and economic policy terms — of the lockdown, waiting for a vaccine strategy, carried to an even more emphatic dead-end by its particularly nasty extension in Victoria.

Further and more critically, there is arguably a better way if we were to actively embrace the two treatment protocols which have been shown to work in other places: Donald Trump’s hydroxychloroquine plus zinc and Thomas Borody’s ivermectin plus zinc.

Instead, we have seen an extraordinary, nothing short of hysterical, blitz to demonise the first; and now a move by the TGA to kill the second lest it gain some sort of toehold. Borody is being ‘investigated’ for potentially “breaching the ban on advertising COVID-19 treatments”.

Is that not exactly another example of the mandatory stupidity design feature? A blanket ban on advertising a virus treatment? In other words, shut up and just take whatever the “experts” dish out to you — even, mandatorily.

If HCQ plus zinc and ivermectin plus zinc — I have to keep stressing the “plus zinc”, because all, and I mean all, the trials that have “proved” HCQ does not work, have been trials that did not include zinc, the critical joint component — do actually work, even if not to Borody’s claimed 100 per cent for ivermectin, we have a wide open doorway out of the economic-virus nightmare.

We could turn the virus into an irritation. We could open up the economy, and treat anyone testing positive for the virus, just like we do for any other disease/injury.

We would not need the magical Godot vaccine — and the payment of billions of dollars to Big Pharma — that would have to be given to all 25 million Australians and still not work anyway. Leading to, what, rolling lockdowns through 2021 and years on?

Ah, but that would require abandonment of the core stupidity policy requirement. And if we did that, what next — repeal of the stupidity requirement for policy more generally?

If we ventured down that path, who knows where it might end? Goodness me, abandoning stupidity as a core feature of policy decision-making in Australia could even lead to the ditching of the “Godot submarines” – the ones we will still be waiting for in 2040.

What indeed will we “get” first: the PM’s magic vaccine or Christopher Pyne’s back-to-the (early) 20th century subs?

My money is on neither.