The Advertiser’s Lockdown Kids series exposed true cost of Australia’s Covid era | Caleb Bond

I, among others, was pilloried for questioning the covid health autocracy. But we’ve just been proved right all along, writes Caleb Bond.

It’s hard to believe it’s been five years this month since Covid madness was unleashed upon us in the form of lockdowns and state border closures.

But I haven’t forgotten the pain and destruction followed the restrictions imposed by trigger-happy politicians and officious chief health officers – and I never will because it is the ultimate example of what happens when you put too much trust in government.

Remember the claim about two weeks to flatten the curve?

The Advertiser’s Lockdown Kids docu-series, launched this week, lays bare the damage that was done to the health of young people in particular, supposedly in the name of health.

We were told lockdowns and border closures would save lives.

And perhaps they did stop some people from contracting, and ultimately dying from, Covid.

But they also cost lives in the form of suicide due to social isolation and caused ongoing mental health issues for many others.

They include Bridie Cocks who, at just 15, took her own life after spiralling into deep loneliness and anxiety caused by lockdown.

The Ballarat teenager Bridie Cocks.

Plenty more have told of anxiety and other mental health disorders that developed due to their very natural instincts to socialise being denied by governments.

The research backs it up.

A 2022 review of papers written on suicide during the pandemic, published in BMC Psychiatry, found “the majority of the studies reported an increasing trend of suicidal attempts during the COVID 19 pandemic compared to the rates reported before the pandemic”.

Covid is a disease with a minuscule death rate for people under the age of 60 – just 748 such people had died of Covid by the end of last year.

It is for those aged 80-plus that Covid poses a real risk.

In March or April of 2020, I said in a radio segment that rather than the rest of us being unduly confined to our homes, the elderly and those most at risk should self-isolate if they were worried.

For that I was labelled reckless and a granny killer, as were many others who dared to criticise the “health” autocracy that took hold of our state governments.

But Covid killed grannies anyway and young people paid the price for the true recklessness of lockdowns with enduring mental ill health.

Covid-era Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a press conference with at Kirribilli House in Sydney during NSW COVID-19 lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dylan Coker

By the way, just 24 people under the age of 20 have died of Covid in Australia.

The risk and damage of lockdown was many factors greater for them than Covid.

Those of us who went against the orthodoxy have been vindicated again and again – and yet no government has apologised.

Even the Australian Human Rights Commission has belatedly acknowledged in a new report, Collateral Damage, that human rights were ignored during Covid.

It found that “measures such as international and interstate border closures, hotel quarantine, lockdowns, school closures, restrictions in aged care homes, vaccine mandates and mask mandates had a substantial – and often hidden – human cost”.

And that the most negative aspect people reported of the pandemic was not the fear of catching Covid but restrictions on gatherings.

I know many people want to forget those years because it was such a bleak time but if you forget it then our leaders will get away with it.

In large part, they already have.

Originally published as The Advertiser’s Lockdown Kids series exposed true cost of Australia’s Covid era | Caleb Bond