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Like the inquiry itself, the 868-page report of the official inquiry into Australia’s Covid-19 response is not fit for purpose.

Bottom line: This is a report of, by, and for the public health clerisy.

For example, the report recommends that the solution to state overreach and abuse of power during the pandemic is to increase the powers and resources of the same two groups (politicians and the public health bureaucrats) to control our behaviour in future health emergencies. As Manuel so gloriously said in Fawlty Towers: Qué?

Instead of virtue-signalling obeisance to acknowledgment of country and lived experience, and a trigger warning that some may find the content distressing, how about this:

“We acknowledge the great loss of life, liberty, and happiness caused by Covid-19 and the response to it. We strongly recommend a Royal Commission of Inquiry to establish the division of causal responsibility between the disease and government policies, so that the perpetrators of mass public harms may be held accountable”.

Granted, the inquiry was hobbled by tightly circumscribed terms of reference in yet another broken election promise that further eroded public trust in politicians and political institutions. Still, the panellists could have said no to the call to serve.

This article explores three important examples of where the inquiry fell short.

In the first two on social distancing and facemasks, the non-pharmaceutical interventions departed radically from existing understandings with no scientific basis or evidence in justification.

In the third on vaccination, the response departed alarmingly from long-established protocols governing the approval and authorisation of vaccines after duly completed trials to determine their efficacy and safety, not just in an immediate timeframe, but over the long haul. To circumvent the full trials requirement, emergency use authorisation was necessary. This could not be granted if existing treatment was available. When physicians who claimed high success rates in clinical treatment of Covid patients with repurposed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, were ordered by regulators to cease and desist, suspicions were fuelled about industry capture of the regulators. There is also a plausible argument that the legal framework governing the approval process should have been that for genetically modified organisms. This wasn’t done.

1. Social Distancing

On May 31, the US Congress published the transcript of two days of testimony in January from Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of America’s Covid response. On the second day of the closed-door testimony on January 10, Committee Staff Director Mitch Benzine asked about the origins of the six-foot social distancing rule applied at businesses, schools and all public settings. Fauci frankly admitted: “You know, I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared”. Pressed on relevant “studies that supported six feet”, he said, “I was not aware of studies that – in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do” (pp. 183–84).

As early as April 25, 2020, Professor Robert Dingwall, a scientific adviser to the UK government as a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), said there has “never been a scientific basis for two metres”, it was “conjured up out of nowhere” and it should more accurately be called a ‘rule of thumb’. He also warned that the social distancing measures would cause “serious damage to society, to the economy and to the physical and mental health of the population”. Was he right, or was he right?

A group of Oxford University scientists explained in June 2020 that the science behind the social distancing rule was complex while the rule was starkly binary. It assumed that the sole or primary transmission route was through physical contact or large droplets. This also explained the early phobia about constant use of hand sanitisers and disinfection of all potential contact surfaces like chairs and tables in restaurants and benches in parks. Yet, the really small viruses can also be aerosolised and spread through the air.

Our chief health officers and ‘experts’ thus need to be interrogated on whether the adoption of the two-metre rule for Australia was an example of copycat idiocy or the persistence of culture cringe: where the Brits and Americans lead, we dutifully follow.

2. Masks

At the Congressional hearing on January 10, Benzine also asked if a cost-benefit analysis had ever been done “on the unintended consequences of masking kids versus the protection that it would give them”. “Not to my knowledge”, Fauci conceded (p. 135).

Until 2020, “settled science” was clear. Masks are ineffective. They stop neither infection nor transmission. The UK Influenza Preparedness Strategy 2011, reaffirmed on February 27, 2020, encapsulated the prevailing consensus (paragraph 4.15):

Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting. Facemasks must be worn correctly, changed frequently, removed properly, disposed of safely and used in combination with good respiratory, hand, and home hygiene behaviour in order for them to achieve the intended benefit. Research also shows that compliance with these recommended behaviours when wearing facemasks for prolonged periods reduces over time.

This conclusion was reiterated in the WHO report published in September 2019 that summarised the best available studies to date, noting that ‘there is very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use’ in community and household settings. It was repeated by senior WHO doctors Mike Ryan and Maria Van Kerkhove on March 31, 2020: ‘There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.”

Consider this poignant testimony to Scotland’s Covid inquiry hearings from Alison Walker, a former BBC sports presenter, on November 17, 2023. Having witnessed the trauma of her 89- and 90-year-old parents residing in care homes in 2020, she asked (around the 36-minute mark):

“If you are surrounded by a group of people 24/7 wearing masks, and you don’t see people smile for up to two years, what kind of effect is that going to have on your mental health and wellbeing?”

Care homes abandoned their duty of “care and compassion”, she believed, and instead “operated under a veil of fear”. (at 1:24:46) This was reinforced by the closing statement from the Care Home Relatives Scotland:

“The evidence demonstrated that the use of masks caused distress, confusion and considerable difficulties with communication. Residents couldn’t see smiles, had difficulty recognising relatives and those with hearing difficulties couldn’t lip-read or read facial expressions or visual clues.”

Masks also do cause some harmful side-effects in some people. Compulsory masking for everyone in all settings is a gross violation of fundamental human rights. It can be justified only if the evidence for their efficacy in community protection is compelling and the risk of harms is negligible. Instead, mask mandates were heavy on fear-mongering and virtue-signalling but light on data and science, overturning, in a couple of months, cumulative scientific consensus built over decades. The report mentions masks several times, but only in the context of the inconsistent application of mandates. It doesn’t address the absence of high quality studies and data to contradict the pre-2020 consensus on their lack of efficacy in community settings, as confirmed in the Cochrane Review.

3. Vaccines

Part of the explanation for the tone-deafness towards the still smouldering white-hot rage in the community is the failure to address the fiasco of the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines.

From the start of vaccine rollout in February 2021 to 70 per cent full vaccination on November 21, 2021, Australia’s total number of deaths was 1,187 (2,110-923) (Table 1). From initial rollout until 80 per cent full vaccination on March 20, 2022, it was 5,599 (6,482-923). Since achieving those landmarks, which for practical purposes amount to full adult vaccination, the numbers of Covid-related deaths are 23,126 and 18,754, respectively.

There are two ways to put these figures in perspective. More than 25 times as many people have died with Covid-19 since 70 per cent full vaccination compared to the total number before vaccination; and more than 20 times since 80 per cent full vaccination than before vaccination.

That is, 91.6 and 74.3 per cent of Australia’s Covid-related deaths occurred after 70 and 80 per cent full vaccination, respectively. This contrasts with just 3.7 per cent before the vaccines began to be rolled out. I really do hate to think what the statistics would be if vaccines were ineffective. And this is even without taking into consideration vaccine injuries or age-disaggregated Covid risks of hospitalisation and death for unvaccinated vs vaccinated and boosted healthy children, adolescents, and adults until age 60.

On October 23, the BBC said that AstraZeneca vaccines had saved 6.3 million lives and Pfizer another 5.9 million, just in the first year from December 2020 to December 2021, including 120,000 British lives saved until September 2021. Looking at Figures 1–2, one can see why they would make such a claim. Yet as per Popperian falsifiability, just the one contrary example of Australia is sufficient to falsify the hypothesis of the Covid vaccines having saved millions of lives.

As can be seen in Figure 1, among the four countries plus the EU, Australia’s vaccine rollout was the last to begin yet the most rapid and successful of all five in covering the population. Figure 2 shows that Australia’s Covid mortality rate was above one death per million people almost continually for 17 months from January 9, 2022 to June 23, 2023, except for a brief period of three weeks in March–April 2023.

If we look at Figures 2 and 3 against the vaccination coverage in the five jurisdictions, two things become clear. For the four entities in the northern hemisphere, the heaviest Covid mortality toll both in terms of the daily and cumulative counts was in the first twelve months of the pandemic and the toll fell dramatically coinciding with the vaccine rollouts. For example, contrasting sharply with Australian data where the pre-vaccine deaths with Covid were under 4 per cent of the total until October 2024, for the UK this was almost 40 per cent. Confusing correlation with causation, authorities and vaccine-faithful advocates continue to attribute the fall to vaccines.

Yet, in the case of Australia, the relationship is reversed. Its Covid-related mortality rates and cumulative toll were exceptionally light in the first twelve months before the vaccine campaign was launched. For vaccine-sceptics, it’s tempting to attribute this to vaccines causing the explosion in deaths. Yet such a conclusion is contradicted by the UK experience. Equally, however, the Australian experience refutes the hypothesis that vaccines saved millions of lives.

Instead, to my mind, taken together the divergent experiences powerfully indicate two other possible conclusions. Firstly, as was the case with lockdown restrictions and mask mandates, the rise and fall of the various coronavirus waves were policy-invariant, following a trajectory to some inner virus logic that was stubbornly indifferent to pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions. Second, population-level immunity acquired naturally through infection likely played a more critical role in getting to herd immunity than vaccines. Hard border closures in Australia (and New Zealand) kept the virus at bay until such time as borders were reopened in the wake of rapid and high vaccine uptakes. This finally seeded the virus in the population and infection, hospitalisation and death rates rose sharply, herd immunity was achieved and the virus receded.

If this is so, then of course the benefit-harms equation for vaccines changes quite dramatically also. The failure – nay, the cussed refusal – to engage in cost-benefit analysis and publish the results, for an experimental product that may very well be contaminating our DNA (see Rebekah Barnett’s comprehensive refutation of the charge that this is misinformation here), offers yet another bit of evidence that regulators have become vaccine enablers first, more committed to defend vaccines from criticism than protect people from harmful vaccines.

Conclusion: Australia’s Covid Response and Inquiry Found Wanting

This article has weighed the report of the inquiry into Australia’s Covid response and found it wanting on critically scrutinising the three measures of two-metre social distancing, masks and vaccines. One of the three inquiry panellists is Catherine Bennett, professor of epidemiology at Deakin University. In an interview with SBS on July 7, 2022, she said: “We have to ensure people have all their recommended boosters because the booster… reduces the risk of serious illness quite dramatically.”

She also recommended “people wear face masks and maintain social distancing”. Make of this what you will.

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Republished with thanks to the Brownstone Institute. Originally published at The Spectator Australia.

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