What’s up, Doc? ... Simply more Covid-19 alarmism from Norman Swan

ABC medical reporter Norman Swan put fearmongering over fact-checking.

Dr Norman Swan’s mistakes are always to the alarmist side, ­exaggerating the threat of Covid-19 and forecasting disastrous outcomes that never occur, writes Chris Kenny.

For someone who calls himself “Australia’s most trusted doctor”, Norman Swan sure gets a lot wrong. His multiple misdiagnoses during the pandemic at least provide a public service by reinforcing the virtue of seeking a second opinion.

Just over a year ago, I highlighted Swan’s many erroneous predictions as the ABC’s medical reporter and pandemic analyst. Predictably enough his mistakes are always to the alarmist side, ­exaggerating the threat of Covid-19 and forecasting disastrous outcomes that never occur.

Swan has defended the harshest and most futile pandemic crackdowns in Labor states, such as repeated lockdowns in Victoria, while criticising the less draconian responses of the NSW Liberal government. It is hard to fathom how partisan preferences might infect something like pandemic commentary that should involve only rational and practical considerations – but there you go.

Yet Swan has outdone himself this week with a frightful intervention that broke all the standard rules about personal intrusion, public fearmongering and basic fact-checking. It is a potent example of how some people are desperately seeking to prolong the period of crisis, for whatever political, professional, or personal motivations, consciously or not.

Speaking on ABC breakfast television, Swan was eager to warn the public that even after they had been infected with the virus, and recovered, Covid might still kill them. He cited a study based on 2020 cases – before vaccines, antiviral treatments, the arrival of what are now the most common variants, when we knew much less about the virus – and he illustrated his point with a couple of prominent and tragic deaths from earlier this year, Shane Warne and Senator Kimberley Kitching, both just 52 years old.

“My view is that it’s too much of a coincidence that Shane Warne and the Labor senator in Victoria died not long after a Covid infection,” Swan told viewers, “And people are reporting sudden death after Covid infection. It’s not benign.” Talk about telehealth, this TV doctor was happy to fly blind and stoke anxiety.

If Swan had bothered to check, he would have discovered that Kitching had, in fact, never been infected with Covid. Warne, on the other hand, had seen off the virus twice, but was exposed to other, well-documented heart disease risk factors, including smoking, drinking and poor diet.

Yet Swan was happy to use these deaths to put the fear of God into anyone who wanted to listen. Official figures show at least 10.5 million Australians have been infected with Covid, and scientific studies suggest it might be closer to 16 million, or two thirds of us.

All those people who have survived the virus at least once, the vast bulk with mild symptoms, were being told they were not in the clear. Rather, Swan wanted them to consider that they might suddenly drop dead.

In the furore that followed, the ABC had no choice but to concede their medical reporter had breached editorial standards. The national broadcaster had a breakfast television host read an apology on Swan’s behalf: “Dr Norman Swan has issued an apology after suggesting there may be a Covid link to the deaths of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching and cricket great Shane Warne. He made those comments during his interview on our program yesterday. Dr Swan says he’s personally apologised to Senator Kitching’s husband yesterday and that he made an error he regrets.”

Hang on, where was the apology to the public? Did the ABC and Swan not understand the substance of this transgression or were they just playing dumb?

Sure, Swan needed to apologise to the Kitching and Warne families. But the far greater infraction was the spreading of baseless fear among ABC audiences.

Swan continues to register himself as a doctor, even though his original medical training occurred almost half a century ago and he no longer practises. All the same, he surely would be aware of the dictum, courtesy of the Hippocrates work Of the Epidemics, which urges medics “to do good or to do no harm” – often simplified as the crucial rule, “first, do no harm”.

Warning people, unnecessarily, that they might drop dead anytime because of a virus that is now endemic in our population is not doing good. It is doing harm.

The hysterical response by some to the pandemic is still evident in people wandering around outdoors in masks, elderly people still isolating at home, bureaucrats considering a return to compulsory masks, and some employers still insisting on redundant vaccine mandates. The ABC should get Swan to pull his head in.

It could invite real experts on to ABC programs more often; people who practise medicine and are sensible and articulate. The infectious diseases experts Professor Peter Collignon, Professor Catherine Bennett, Associate Professor Nick Coatsworth and Dr Clay Golledge have all been generous with their time for media during the pandemic, as well as accurate in their predictions, and sober in their advice.

But the ABC has preferred the gloomy, sensationalist, interventionist, and often erroneous analysis from Swan. I guess it makes for a better story.

Swan has spoken about how he studied medicine in Scotland in the 1970s only after he failed to gain admission to the drama school. “I came to the conclusion it would be much safer to be a second-rate doctor than a second-rate actor,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2010. In recent times, through the pandemic, he has found a way to bathe in the footlights, playing the role of the ABC’s “most trusted” doctor.

Shane Warne’s manager said it best, telling The Australian it was “totally disrespectful” for the ABC to air Swan’s “asinine” post-­mortems. “Why would anyone take any notice of what this guy has to say? What on earth would he know about Shane’s health?”

Fair call, and then the kicker: “Maybe he (Swan) could tell us who really killed JFK.”

But Swan alone is not to blame. As is typical at the national broadcaster, the lack of restraint, lack of editorship, and lack of perspective has been evident as the organisation has encouraged and followed Swan along the cata­strophist path.

When the history of the pandemic is written, the constant stream of alarmist misinformation from the ABC (and most other media) will be central. The symbiotic relationship between hysterical journalists and power-stuck politicians sucked the lifeblood out of a normally vibrant society.

Instead of comparing responses around the world and coming to the obvious conclusion that we inflicted greater social and economic costs on ourselves for no greater benefit, some commentators and politicians want to continue the paranoia. They would prefer we still behaved like communist China, where major city lockdowns are provoking violent street protests – even in a totalitarian country – which could lead to all sorts of unintended consequences in coming weeks and months.

The pandemic panic merchants have a lot of explaining to do. Having supported lockdowns, curfews, rings of steel, border closures, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and having warned we cannot live with the coronavirus, they are left with all the evidence of overreach, with so much of the tumult and trauma exposed as unnecessary, as we proceed to live with the virus. Only the communist regime in China continues to pursue the impossible Covid-zero goal that many aspired to in this country.

Perhaps we will never see an appropriate reckoning because the main culprits dominate our media, politics, and bureaucracies. We need a national royal commission to investigate our pandemic response but there is precious little impetus for it because this would amount to the media/political/­bureaucratic elite calling an inquiry into themselves.