The extraordinary importance and respect given to the vaccine modelling by the Doherty Institutue is justified, but also an indicator of the striking currents in our culture, revealed and accelerated by Covid.
Across the Western world, the public has for decades been losing faith in government and government institutions. This has resulted in a relentless quest for non-political institutional authority that governments can deploy in convincing the public.
I don’t mean necessarily convincing the public of the utility of particular policy measures but just convincing them of the broad contours of reality. In the first part of the Covid outbreak the chief medical officer of Australia, and his counterparts, the chief health officers in the states, had automatic credibility. They were sober folks, not playing in the ego and celebrity lanes that politicians occupy, and they knew what they were talking about.
But as the crisis wore on, their authority has eroded. This is mostly unfair. One of the central features of Covid is that no one, no one at all, can accurately predict what will happen. No one can guess with assurance how the virus will mutate, what other countries will do, how effective vaccines will be and for how long.
But the health officials’ loss of credibility is a bit their own fault, too. Innocent of the vices of celebrity but also its subtle temptations and countless traps, some of them became too smug and happy at their own status as players in the game of politics. The worst moment for them all, and in my view perhaps the most irresponsible statement by any senior official in the whole Covid saga, was when Queensland’s Jeannette Young, in a blatant slap at Scott Morrison, said young people “might die” if they had the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Non-political authority and credibility, in our vitriolic and hyper-partisan public culture, is an immensely valuable asset. Those who, for whatever reason, possess it are frankly fools if they throw it away needlessly. Once it’s lost, it’s very hard to recover.
At the same time, there have been irresponsible campaigns waged against health bureaucrats and officials simply because they are not infallible. On Covid, no one is infallible.
The Doherty Institute, partly because of the genuine high quality of its work, but also partly through happenstance, is almost uniquely fitted to hold and project public credibility. First, its work is genuinely world class.
Second, in this highly personalised media age, it is associated with a captivating individual, Peter Doherty. He is a Nobel prizewinner, which, translating broadly, makes him for the public roughly the equivalent of a 100m freestyle Olympic gold medallist who also broke a world record. On top of that, Doherty’s manner is that of a knockabout Aussie bloke. That’s the way we like our heroes.
The Doherty Institute guards its reputation. Its senior personnel, such as the estimable Jodie McVernon, will talk to the media to help educate them but will avoid topics on which Doherty is engaged in not yet finalised research, and will resolutely refuse to be political. That is a very smart discipline, much as we journalists love the maverick pontificator.
Once, the Christian churches, the judiciary, even the police all had non-political moral authority. But they have all been diminished or politicised in different ways. Governments are often guilty in this. To take an overseas example, before the Brexit referendum the British government convinced the UK Treasury to predict that if Brexit won there would be an immediate, severe recession. Brexit duly won, but there was no recession. So Treasury advice was seen as politicised baloney and its credibility with the British people is diminished, probably forever.
Very often it’s advice given in the interests of what is seen as a moral cause that does the most damage. There are countless Australian examples. Many elements of the federal climate bureaucracy have for years and years been massively overstating what the Chinese government has done, or even undertaken, to combat climate change to convince Australians that we are laggards. But – and this distinction is crucial – it is one thing to be sensibly sceptical about exaggerated claims in politicised advice. It is another thing altogether to come to the nihilistic view that nothing any government agency says can ever be trusted. That is an extremely dangerous and profoundly mistaken view for a sizable minority of the community to adopt.
Thus one of the very worst cultural outcomes of Covid in Western societies is that elements of the paranoid right are becoming indistinguishable from elements of the nutty left in their disconnection from reality and their willingness to break the law and encourage violence in demonstrations. Covid should be uniting us as we face a common enemy in the virus, but it is dividing us instead. This happened 100 years ago in the Spanish flu as well.
It is said that no country handles adversity better than Australia, but no country handles good fortune as poorly. Overall, we have had, until this NSW outbreak, good fortune in this pandemic, by international standards. Our Covid death rate has been among the world’s lowest and most of the time, except for the limits on international travel, we have led a relatively normal life.
But quite soon, notwithstanding the tremendous hope in vaccination, life will likely get harder, not easier. I have the greatest possible respect for the Doherty Institute, but all modelling is extremely fallible. The institute is doing good work to educate us to realise we need 70 per cent of eligible adults vaccinated and ongoing social distancing measures of considerable significance to keep Covid deaths at the level of a very bad flu season.
In truth, the evidence of Florida and Britain and numerous other much-vaccinated jurisdictions, while not directly comparable and involving somewhat lower vaccination rates than Doherty proposes, is not altogether encouraging. Moreover, the virus could mutate to become both more contagious and more deadly than Delta, just as Delta is more contagious and more deadly than previous strains.
We could have the maximum practical vaccination rate of 70 or even 80 per cent, and still, quite plausibly, face thousands and thousands of Covid deaths and extreme stress on the health system. That’s not an argument for permanent lockdown. It is an argument for understanding there are no guarantees, the Covid future is intensely uncertain and at some point we will probably have to face up to a lot of Covid deaths compared with our run so far. That means there are big cultural adjustments ahead. I hope we’re up to it.
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