Dune author Frank Herbert once said that his most important message was that “Governments make incredibly stupid decisions and lie to protect themselves”. After 18 months of the Chinese virus, no one should doubt that.
Australian and New Zealand governments, like so many around the world, panicked and made the incredibly stupid decision to lock entire populations down. A strategy we know does nothing to curtail COVID and in fact, leads to worse overall health outcomes.
Having made that incredibly stupid decision, they’re now lying through their teeth to protect themselves – and bullying the public for the consequences of their own incredibly stupid decisions.
Australians and New Zealanders are being hectored and brow-beaten by incompetent politicians and public health troughers for not rushing to get “the jab”. Leaving aside questions of safety (especially in a novel vaccine peddled by a company that has been fined a staggering $2.3bn), the fact is that “vaccine hesitancy” is largely an issue of governments’ own making.
The elimination strategy has degenerated into a policy at war with itself.
That isn’t because it doesn’t work but because it works all too well, at least judged by its own criteria: the public health response ensures that the probability of catching Covid, much less dying from it, in Australia is virtually zero. There is, as a result, little incentive to be vaccinated – and even those who do want vaccination could reasonably conclude that they should wait until the messenger RNA vaccines, which seem to have fewer dangerous side-effects, become more widely available.
But, however much Jacinda Ardern may boast, elimination is an impossible strategy, short of sealing New Zealand and Australia off from the rest of the world, like mediaeval Japan. Sooner or later, outbreaks will occur – and the government and media will do their Chicken Little routine, all over again.
With vaccination rates still very low, each outbreak, no matter how small and localised, sends state governments into a panicked response that persists until there are no cases of community transmission. That may curtail the risk of infection but it also perpetuates the vicious cycle in which we are now trapped.
Viewed from the perspective of social theory, our predicament is merely an example of a “collective action” problem. Collectively, we would gain if vaccination rates were substantially higher; but so long as the likelihood of suffering serious consequences from Covid remains insignificant, each individual does better to hold back, allowing others to bear the risks and hassles vaccination entails.
So what should governments do? Can we really trust the incredibly stupid decision-makers not to make yet more incredibly stupid decisions?
Perhaps they could just admit that they made an incredibly stupid decision and start afresh?
The best approach, which has been adopted by Singapore, may be for governments to let their citizens know that while the protective measures aimed at the most vulnerable would remain in place, other protections would be steadily phased out, exposing individuals to more risk and placing squarely on their shoulders the responsibility to take precautions – not least through vaccination for themselves and their families.
We would, in going down that path, eventually treat Covid in much the same way we deal with other dangerous but manageable infectious diseases, such as the flu. And by the same token, we would treat Australians as responsible adults who could manage Covid as maturely as they handle life’s other perils, with government’s role being, crucially, to guarantee ready access to vaccines and ensure that any residual protections (such as vaccination checks on inbound international travellers) are efficiently applied.
The Australian
Unfortunately, pigs will fly before the likes of Jacinda Ardern or Daniel Andrews admit that they screwed up.
Worse, such a strategy would necessitate that the lab-coated media tarts who’ve grown accustomed to their daily 15 minutes of COVID fame just shut the hell up and pull their idiotic heads in.
Health bureaucrats and governments would have to come to the incredible realisation that the average citizen is, by and large, best placed to make their own health decisions. They don’t need some panopticon nanny state telling them to wipe their noses, every second of the day.
The media would also have to wean themselves off their addiction to COVID hysteria.
As if.
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