Yes. Too many people want to be done with Covid: the appalling assault on our rights, the lies, the rubber bullets, the signal that democracy in Australia only exists if the ruling parties grant it. The scum actually followed the Communist Chinese model of control.

By trying to put the Covid atrocities out of mind, the drones are signalling that it is OK for our appalling political class to do the same thing in the future, and not just with a dose of super-’flu. They have left themselves wide open to authoritarianism next time the scum think that they know best.

I think the author is writing from a US angle on statistics and results of the mishandling of Covid. And American citizens were treated much better than Australians were when it came to the behaviour of servants of the people turning into masters

Seems this joker got his economics degree from the bottom of a cereal box.

The piece works, sure, but only if you accept a whole series of assumptions that never actually get demonstrated. The main one is that lockdowns are the dominant cause of the economic problems we see today.

Okay. Compared to what?

Pandemics damage economies even without restrictions. When a contagious disease spreads widely, people get sick, supply chains break, consumers avoid public spaces and businesses cut activity. Economic contraction happens regardless. Ignoring that counterfactual makes the argument pretty shaky from the outset.

The jobs numbers cited don't really prove what the article suggests either. A single monthly report showing job losses doesn't establish some long-term structural collapse in the labour market.

Labour data moves around month to month all the time.

The inflation claim has a similar problem. Inflation didn't just appear in countries that had strict lockdowns. It turned up almost everywhere after the pandemic. Countries with very different policies all saw the same spike, which suggests the drivers were broader things like disrupted supply chains and energy prices rather than lockdowns by themselves.

Then a whole grab-bag of other issues gets folded into the same narrative: tariffs, oil supply disruptions, Fed balance sheet policy, manufacturing trends. None of these are actually shown to flow from lockdown policy. They're just placed in the same story.

The vaccine section is probably the weakest part. The article suggests rising disability numbers might reflect widespread vaccine injuries affecting "millions", but it provides no evidence at all for that claim.

By the end the language shifts into calling the lockdown period "barbarism" and urging readers to sign a political campaign.

That's really the tell.

This article isn't a serious economic analysis. More just an argument looking for evidence after the fact.

covid tyranny and the numerous deaths and maiming of the compliant public is the biggest crime other than murdering the unborn babies in my lifetime. The deceit, cover up and gas lighting has been unparalleled. Those who participated in the most evil were rewarded for it. We have a couple of gg's who should be totally ashamed of themselves. The good part is that anyone with half a brain can now see that public health, Pollies, media and many other lied daily to them as they served their filthy globalist masters. This is what dei has produced in this country. Thank God for the honest doctors and other medical professionals who put the patients first despite costing them their livelihoods. tga/aphra showed themselves as pure harlots even hiding the death of kids from the gene therapy. How they sleep at night astounds me. It's no wonder that all the grubs involved in mandates just want it to go away. To bad for the relatives of those killed and maimed from the gene therapy.

Even from the early days of the lockdown hysteria, it was clear that the economic impact of those decisions were going to be disastrous.

By far the biggest error was the decision to pay people to not go to work. The cost of that in financial (but also social) terms was catastrophic and as I've said many times on these pages will be paid for by the next generation(s). Add to that the effects on small business up and down the country where mom and dad stores, shops and other businesses were obliterated.

We also had kids locked out of school and parks for weeks on end. The long term effects of that are still and will continue to be monitored and debated. But even minor impacts on the next generation are to be abhorred.

Then of course there is the issue of the mess that was the vaccine. There's still a long way to go on that issue and the final verdict might be a decade away. That the vaccine wasn't a universal panacea is hardly now open for dispute. We'll probably never know how many people were killed by the vaccine itself and how many will suffer reduced quality of life. Add to that the vaccine reluctance here and in many other nations due to the people realising that they were lied to by the authorities and medical fraternity over the covid shot and therefore growing to distrust other vaccines as well (probably incorrectly).

All this before we even get to the attacks on individual freedom and the use of police and other enforcement bodies to implement a disputed government policy made in a knowledge vacuum.


The governmental reaction to the spread of the WuFlu was a monumental error. While those who boosted it and those who fell for the government line will continue to dispute that it was the greatest failure of leadership this century, we can be reasonably safe in assuming that no government will make the same errors if the CCP decides to unleash another virus on the planet.

mhaze,

You've bundled a lot of grievances together there, but most of them are assertions rather than demonstrated conclusions.

Take the claim that paying people not to work was "catastrophic". The alternative in early 2020 wasn't a normal functioning economy. It was a rapidly spreading pandemic where businesses were already shutting because customers and workers were staying home anyway. Programs like JobKeeper were introduced precisely to stop a wave of bankruptcies and mass unemployment during that period.

You can certainly argue those programs were imperfect or overly generous in some cases. But simply declaring them catastrophic doesn't show that letting the labour market collapse would have produced a better outcome.

The vaccine section is even more speculative. You say we may never know how many people were killed by vaccines. That's an odd claim given vaccines were administered to billions of people and monitored across numerous independent health systems. Serious adverse reactions exist with any medical intervention, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows the vaccines reduced hospitalisation and death from COVID.

Saying the "final verdict might be a decade away" just keeps the claim alive indefinitely without evidence.

As for school closures, there is genuine debate about their costs. But those decisions were made in the middle of a new pandemic with limited information and hospitals under severe pressure in many countries. Hindsight always makes policy choices look simpler than they did at the time.

Which brings us to the broader point. It's easy, several years later, to declare everything a "monumental error".

But that's hindsight, not analysis.

If you think the policy response was wrong, the question becomes: what specific alternative strategy would have produced a better outcome in early 2020, given what was known at the time?

WTF?

Let's take a look at Singapore. From 2002 -2004, Singapore, along with a number of other countries had to contend with the SARS outbreak.

While only suffering a few hundred cases the fatality rate of 13.9% of those who were infected was on great concern because of Singapore's high population density.

The Australian Journal of Medicine goes into considerable depth describing Singapore's post SARS response.

The Disease Outbreak Response System Condition framework was established as the foundation for the national responses to any future outbreak.

Singapore started screening for COVID19 on 2 January 2020 at a time where many were calling it "just the case of the flu" that had something to do with China.

Border control measures started on 3 January and were progressively ramped up.

From 7 April, all non-essential workplaces were closed, schools were physically closed but moved to home-based learning, and food establishments were only allowed to provide take-away and delivery services.

Singapore was well aware of the social and financial ramifications of their strategies before implementation.

In 2025, their economy grew 5.7 per cent. This topped 2024’s 4.4 per cent and is the fastest pace since 2021 when the economy rebounded from the Covid-19 pandemic with 9.8 per cent growth.

No doubt Singapore will have an even more swift and comprehensive response with any future pandemics. Let's hope that Australia takes note as well.