https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/02/wiuv-n02.html
"The report of a government commissioned inquiry into Australia’s response to
the COVID-19 pandemic was released on Tuesday.
The inquiry spanned a year. The report runs to 892 pages. It is, however,
completely worthless from an analytical or scientific standpoint, adding
nothing to an understanding of pandemics and public health in general, or the
experience of COVID-19 in particular.
Instead, the report is a crude promotion of the profit-driven “let it rip”
policies that persist to this day. It is noteworthy only as yet another marker
of the assault on public health and the rights of the population that this
homicidal program has entailed.
That conclusion was preordained. When the Labor government initiated the
inquiry in September last year, they instigated a “public discussion” that
focussed solely on the adversity associated with public health measures, such
as social distancing, lockdowns and school closures. In one interview, for
instance, Labor’s Health Minister Mark Butler referred to these measures,
declaring: “We don’t want to do that next time. We don’t want to do that in the
next pandemic.”
The government selected a three-person panel that was always going to arrive at
the conclusion Butler had already outlined. Robyn Kruk, who has been in the
upper echelons of the public sector bureaucracy, working with pro-business
governments for decades, was its chair. Economist Dr Angela Jackson was on the
panel. The only individual of the three with medical expertise was Professor
Catherine Bennett, Deakin University chair of epidemiology.
Throughout the pandemic, Bennett was one of the epidemiologists who most
aggressively supported the lifting of public health measures and insisted that
the population would have to “live with the virus.” Under conditions where many
principled epidemiologists and doctors sharply denounced this policy, the
selection of Bennett as the sole public health expert on the panel made a
mockery of its purported independence.
Most fundamentally, the report presents the COVID-19 crisis entirely as a thing
of the past. In a document supposedly about official preparedness for
pandemics, the pandemic that continues is all but ignored."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: November 7, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-115523402
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
