Earlier this month, the Australian Human Rights Commission chimed in, condemning lockdowns as an affront to human rights, something that should’ve been obvious at the time. The idea that all the restrictions and lockdowns passed any sort of cost-benefit analysis is laughable, especially given the endless list of socio-economic and health damages they wrought. That’s why no pandemic plan of any nation recommended those sorts of policies be pursued, let alone for a mild and contagious virus.
These measures led to the biggest increase in inequality in human history, supercharging asset prices while crushing the educational attainment of a generation of young people. They saddled future generations with debt levels comparable to the aftermath of a world war. Indeed, in a week where commentators have decried the imminent surge in federal public debt beyond $1 trillion, let’s remember that at least a third of it can be traced directly back to our ludicrous spending binge.
Numerous countries across Europe, including Switzerland, Sweden and Norway, exhibited practically no increase in public debt without noticeably different health outcomes. Indeed, Sweden, which famously refused to copy China’s totalitarian approach, ended up practically with the least excess deaths of any Western country.
Why the greatest levels of panic and fiscal insanity were concentrated so significantly in English-speaking countries remains to be explained. While it’s great to see the case for lockdowns headed for the intellectual scrap heap, there’s another Covid policy that unfortunately remains largely immune from criticism: de facto compulsory Covid vaccination.
I am proud of my record criticising Covid policies. Donald Trump’s elevation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Makary – all part of that small group of brave Covid critics – into his administration has been a wonderful vindication of their expertise and persistence.
Five years on I should apologise for not having been as strident in condemning mass coerced Covid vaccination. At the time, I didn’t dare: the experimental vaccines were accorded practically religious veneration by the mainstream media. To point out that more people died from all causes (unrelated to Covid) in the vaccinated as opposed to the placebo group of Pfizer’s 2020 trial would risk total banishment.
I was not as brave as former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson, who was infamously thrown off Twitter and “cancelled” for asserting in 2021 that the Covid-19 vaccines didn’t stop transmission or infection.
“Don’t think of it as a vaccine; think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficiency and terrible side-effect profile … And we want to mandate it? Insanity,” he tweeted.
All that was true then, and even more obviously now. It’s entirely possible that coerced Covid vaccination caused more damage to society even than lockdowns.
In 2023, Western Australian health authorities quietly released data that compared the risk of adverse reactions across different publicly available vaccines: it was an eye-popping 24 times greater for Covid vaccines than for all others combined. Doubtless the various Covid vaccines helped people, but it should’ve been a personal decision, especially given they never stopped transmission.
The Amish population of the US, about 350,000 strong, refused entirely to take the Covid-19 vaccine for ideological reasons, providing a natural control group. They are still around and thriving, exhibiting not worse outcomes than other Americans, as are the millions of residents of numerous less developed nations that couldn’t afford the Covid-19 shots.
Quite aside from unnecessary injuries and deaths, largely of young people who were never at serious risk from Covid, confidence in public health authorities and tried and proven vaccines has been trashed.
Numerous polls in Australia and the US now point to declining rates of confidence in public health authorities, and even declining confidence in tried and proven vaccines for diseases from measles to polio, a point The Australian reported this month.
In the US confidence in public health has plummeted, from 69 per cent in April 2020 to 44 per cent three years later, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Pinning down the extent of the damage is difficult. Given how enthusiastically they championed compulsory vaccination, neither the pharma industry nor government will investigate these important subjects.
Personally, I know of many individuals, among friends and colleagues, who experienced serious vaccine injuries, which contradicts the media narrative that injuries are vanishingly rare.
In any case, the public and investors have spoken: demand for the Covid shots, now mercifully voluntary, has collapsed throughout the developed world, even as governments campaign for them to continue. While the Overton window – the range of tolerated public commentary – has shifted since the crazy years of 2020 and 2021, not enough public criticism is directed at de facto compulsory Covid vaccination. The policy was wrong in principle. The supposedly “safe and effective” products clearly failed to live up to their promise, and they have caused many thousands of injuries and deaths around the world.
“Trust and confidence will not be restored unless politicians and bureaucrats recognise the full human cost,” the Human Rights Commission recently concluded.
Picking which of the Covid-era health policies was worst is challenging, but forcing lightly tested vaccines on the world’s population has good claim to being the worst of all.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
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Five years on from the collective madness that gripped much of the world during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s become fashionable to decry the kind of government overreach that was practically championed by almost everyone in Australia.