‘No’ to Covid amnesty

We appear to be reaching a tipping point on Covid governance as high-profile advocate after high-profile advocate of masks, mandates and mRNA breaks ranks with the official line. The latest Australian defector is Kerryn Phelps, and she joins a line of internationals including Aseem Malhotra, Silje Schevig, and John Campbell.

It appears the Swedes were more right than most to not lockdown or compulsorily mask-up; and the mRNA vaccines have so many adverse reactions universal deployment makes no sense. The pin-ups of the first round of Covid, countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan, are now failing in the second. The policies our health gurus pushed were wrong.

But the shift in balance turns up dilemmas in how to ensure something like this never happens again.

One thing is certain, if we leave the same people in charge, it probably will.

Australia is the land of the bureaucratic fail-upwards. No one ever appears to bear any consequence for their incompetence. As a result, they move up the escalator of promotion on the basis of years served, personal charm, and networks.

No matter what they mess up, they survive and are promoted (Kevin Rudd being the latest exhibit).

If there is no penalty for failure, then the majority of bureaucrats will become indifferent to either success or failure, and it becomes just the process and the mates that count.

So, as the balance of opinion shifts these failures will be trying to reposition themselves for the next uplift in their careers. It's unavoidable that some will succeed, in fact, it is in our interests that some do, because under different leadership their institutional knowledge could be indispensable to running a health system.

The challenge is to ensure they don't overwhelm the new competent cadre that must be installed to run the health system. We also need to find some to make examples 'pour encourager les autres'.

These were not mere lapses of judgment. The decisions they made, or cheered on, were frequently breaches of essential rights, including those against being forcibly medicated or being involuntarily experimented on, amounting in my view, to crimes against humanity.

When you make decisions like these you reveal a reflex mindset that should disbar you from any governance position, except for the rare exceptions when there is a genuine Damascus Road conversion and the previous persecutor can become an exemplary proselytiser.

I'm led to this musing by the case of Kerryn Phelps.

Kerryn Phelps was at the forefront of masking-up, isolating, and muscling-up with gene therapies.

Now, in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, she has revealed the effects of vaccine injury on herself and her wife. This story has made the major media as reported by Murdoch, Nine, and the whole pack. It also helps to convert her image from tyrant to victim.

How should she be dealt with? Embraced as a new convert, or shunned? I think in the case of Kerryn it is pretty clear – no mercy.

There are an increasing number of prominent medical professionals and journalists who are not recanting but still asking forgiveness. They are repositioning to try to keep a foot in both camps. What else would we expect from politicians, health bureaucrats, and the click-bait mafia?

Kerryn Phelps prospered as a former president of the AMA, a city councillor, and briefly a federal MHR. Many were fooled into thinking that she had joined the 'Covistance' after revealing her and her wife's vaccine injuries. She even complained that the medical establishment not only wouldn't discuss, but actively censored and censured any discussion.

But Kerryn's criticism of Covid vaccines has to be taken in context. These comments were made in the body of a submission on 'Long Covid'. Long Covid is a device that appears to be designed to extend the Covid fear-dynamic and maintain the power of the current dominant faction in the Covid health bureaucracies. It is also described as an ill-defined collection of symptoms following Covid where people 'feel tired' – something not uncommon with most flues.

Fear of developing Long Covid is the reason we are told we have to keep fighting Covid, even though the dominant Omicron strain is on par for severity with a very bad flu.

Based on a low-grade study from the Netherlands which used the results of a non-representative mail-out survey to estimate the prevalence of Long Covid, Phelps claims one in eight (12.5 per cent) of us who catch Covid will acquire it.

For context, as of January 5, the UK ONS puts the figure for Long Covid at 3.3 per cent in the UK, and Israeli scientists say it will resolve in most people by 12 months.

She then leverages her faulty figure to call for a raft of invasive and authoritarian measures such as masking and CO2 monitors in indoor spaces. She calls for substantially increased funding for research into the causes and treatments of Long Covid (a disparate set of symptoms ranging from brain fog, headaches, and loss of smell and taste to heart palpitations) and measures to stop Covid infecting school-aged children.

She wants to reintroduce mandatory isolation and expand Work From Home. And she wants information packages to help doctors to diagnose long Covid.

She still insists on vaccination, despite the plight of her and her wife, but she demands more information and more sympathy.

Alarmingly, and seemingly unironically, I believe she subtly calls for censorship of doctors spreading misinformation on page seven of her submission.

Yet on this basis she herself ought to be censored as the submission is frequently factually incorrect. She condemns as misinformation true ideas like the failure of masks; it is necessary and inevitable for everyone to get Covid; herd immunity from mass infection is a good idea; Covid will evolve to be milder; and children are sicker this year because of immunity debt.

Let's compare her position to that of cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra. His conversion occurred after his father, also a cardiologist, died from a vaccine-induced heart attack. Like Phelps, Malhotra had been an advocate of vaccination, but he has completely jumped ship. While Phelps tries to keep everyone happy Malhotra has gone full-Pauline, risking personal crucifixion by his profession.

While he primarily talks and tweets on vaccines, he has also paid the idea of mask mandates some attention. His proselytization is ferocious and continuous, not a few curated titbits released to mainstream media outlets, and the only way he will be put in charge of health policy is if there is a complete upending of the status quo as he attacks both Tory and Labour politicians.

Nick Coatsworth might be as close as we've seen in Australia to a Malhotra.

Which leaves open the question of what to do. I have to admit to no clear answers at the moment. There are many who should not be let near a health crisis again, including some institutions like Grattan and Doherty.

While some are calling for a Royal Commission, the commissioning of one is unlikely to be forthcoming from a Parliament stuffed with the guilty, so the work could fall to a civil society project.

The quality of debt is assessed by private ratings agencies. Why not apply the same principles to areas of public policy, assigning ratings to public health professionals in a publicly available database?

What we have seen with Covid is symptomatic of so many areas of public policy, and there is a convergence of views of the Covid obsessives in a lot of areas, such as climate, energy, and economics. Failure in one area should trigger alarm in others.

There should be no more failing upwards, Dr Phelps.