Former prime minister Tony Abbott has called for COVID-19 restrictions to be relaxed, arguing officials have become trapped in “crisis mode” and that governments need to consider “uncomfortable questions” about the number of deaths they are prepared to live with.
“From a health perspective, this pandemic has been serious. From an economic perspective, it’s been disastrous,” he said.
“But I suspect that it’s from an overall wellbeing perspective that it will turn out worst of all. Because this is what happens when for much more than a mere moment, we let fear of falling sick stop us from being fully alive.
“Now that each one of us has had six months to consider this pandemic, and to make our own judgements about it, surely it’s time to relax the rules so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks they’re prepared to run.”
His key points:
Mr Abbott said governments approached the pandemic like “trauma doctors instead of thinking like health economists”
He accused Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews of wanting to extend a “health dictatorship” by pushing for an extension of state of emergency powers
He said the media had spread “virus hysteria” and people should be allowed to make their own decisions
Speaking in London to the UK think tank Policy Exchange, Mr Abbott said the media had spread “virus hysteria” and people should be allowed to make their own decisions.
For the ABC Daniel Andrews is more their kind of guy.
The moment was, of course, when he looked at his watch while Julia droned on. No one, of course, ever mentions how Kevin Rudd shoved her aside just before the 2013 election.
That’s the middle of Melbourne in the middle of the day in the middle of the week
The Covid pandemic has brought on our modern version of The Stockholm Syndrome which you will recall are: “feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards a captor.” We now have the Melbourne Syndrome, which I come across versions of every day:
Feelings of trust or affection felt during a lockdown by its victims towards their most authoritarian political leaders.
Now why should it be the “Melbourne” syndrome? There are plenty of place similar where you find similar attitudes. In my view, I believe it should be called the “Melbourne” Syndrome because Melbourne has now implemented the hardest lockdown at the hands of one of the most far-left and incompetent political leaders in the world, a leader who nevertheless retains high approval ratings, within a state in which the corona virus issue went from benign to statistically explosive (although the death rate is still near invisible at something like 0.002% per head of population). I therefore believe Melbourne should have the “honour” of bearing the name of this widely observed form of political insanity. Others are welcome to suggest alternative places and names.
And not only do we have the hardest lockdown possibly anywhere in the world, we also have the most incompetent leadership since unlike virtually everywhere else, following the initial peak, things in Melbourne managed to get far worse whereas the norm everywhere else, including the rest of Australia, was for conditions to have improved. And let me provide a reminder of what we are being asked to endure. These were “the Stage 4 Lockdowns” that were put in place by the Victorian Government at the the start of August when out of nowhere there was a large statistical increase in the number of cases although trivially small relative to the size of the population. Melbourne by the way is the capital city of the state of Victoria.
The “state of emergency” in Victoria has been upgraded to a “state of disaster”, meaning police can now enter your home to carry out spot checks even if you don’t give them permission and they don’t have a warrant.
Between the hours of 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., you’re not allowed to leave your homes except for work, medical care and caregiving.
Outside those hours, you may only leave your home for four reasons: shopping for food and essential items, care and caregiving, daily exercise and work. “We can no longer have people simply out and about for no good reason whatsoever,” said the Premier.
Daily exercise can only take place within a 5km radius of your home and cannot last longer than an hour.
You cannot exercise in groups of more than two, even if they’re members of the same household.
Apart from daily exercise, you are only allowed to leave your home once a day for essential supplies and food.
In the whole of Victoria, you cannot buy more than two of certain essential items, including dairy, meat, vegetables, fish and toilet paper.
Schools have closed again, with all Victoria school students returning to remote learning from Wednesday (except for vulnerable children and children of permitted workers). Childcare and kindergarten will be closed from Thursday.
Golf and tennis venues, which were open, have now been closed.
Weddings will no longer be allowed from Thursday, and funerals will be limited to 10 people.
Face masks anywhere outside your home have been mandatory for people in metropolitan Melbourne since July 22nd, but that rule has now been extended to the entire state of Victoria.
You cannot have visitors or go to another person’s house unless it is for the purpose of giving or receiving care. However, you can leave your house to visit a person if you are in an “intimate personal relationship” with them, even during curfew hours.
If you have a holiday home or were planning a holiday outside Melbourne, you must nevertheless remain in the city for the next six weeks.
The maximum fine for breaching a health order currently stands at $1,652.
Are people upset by these restrictions? The figures below are for Australia as a whole. Will get to Victoria in a moment.
As for the nature of the statistical collections, this is the Chief Medical Officer of Victoria specifically stating that to be classified as a Covid death only requires that the virus was present, not that it had been the actual cause of the fatality.
With this kind of approach, you could turn any common sickness into a statistical killer. Think of this as well, which is the first of the comments on the video.
I am a provider. One of my patients admitted herself into hospice d/t kidney failure and tested negative for “COVID.” When she died, they put on the death certificate death d/t “COVID.” We are in the early stages of a democide. THIS is what it feels like to have the governments force you to live in and breathe NONSENSE. War is peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength and 2+5=5.
And are the numbers in Victoria exaggerated. Here are some stats for Victoria versus the rest of Australia that were published the other day. Victoria has around a quarter of the country’s population.
New Cases Australia – 25,205
New Cases Victoria – 18,608
New Cases Outside Victoria – 6,597
Recent Deaths Australia – 156
Recent Deaths Victoria – 149
Recent Deaths Outside Victoria – 7
Total Deaths Australia – 549
Total Deaths Victoria – 462
Total Deaths Outside Victoria – 87
So this is where we are:
[The Premier] said restrictions would be in place until next year if Victorians didn’t adhere to them and case numbers didn’t decrease.
“It won’t be a 6-week strategy, it will be much longer,” he said.
“We will be into 2021 with significant lockdown in place.”
And do people resent this fantastic intrusion on their lives? Do they feel the heel of the state and wish to see it lifted? Here are the results of a poll of Victorians over whether they support the measures that have been taken:
The lockdown might be draconian, but Victorians overwhelmingly support the public health restrictions imposed to curb the second wave of coronavirus infections….
New research shows 72% of the sample backs the decision of the Victorian government to impose a curfew between 8pm and 5am, 71% supports curbs on leaving the house, while 70% endorse restrictions on business and the requirement that people travel no further than 5km from their house.
It’s the Melbourne Syndrome all right, unless someone can come up with an example even more absurd yet with the kind of wide support as we find in Melbourne, which used to be and was for many years the World’s Most Liveable City. Well we do still have very nice parks and restaurants, if only we were allowed to visit them, or our children, or our friends, or sit in a cafe, or go to the movies, or just to walk along the street or the beach more than a couple of miles from our home.
Really, is there anywhere else to compare with this? It is one of many such emails that have been sent to me from friends and family around the world who have found Melbourne mentioned in the local news. Melbourne does however stand well out from the pack.
You can therefore still see traces here in Australia’s origins as a penal colony.
Trump likewise reposted messages asserting that the real death toll from the coronavirus is only around 9000 — not nearly 183,000 — because the others who died also had other health issues and most were of an advanced age.
“So get this straight — based on the recommendation of doctors Fauci and Birx the US shut down the entire economy based on 9000 American deaths to the China coronavirus,” said the summary of an article by the hard-line conservative website Gateway Pundit that was retweeted by the President, denigrating his own health advisers, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx.
The post was a distortion of data available on the website of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that 6 per cent of coronavirus fatalities list only the virus on the death certificates. For other deaths, the patients had an average of 2.6 other conditions or causes of death. The statistics do not mean that they did not die because of the virus, but help explain who is most vulnerable to it.
Let me therefore take you to the post at Small Dead Animals which I cited before: Remember that thing called the Covid Pandemic?. Allow me to quote what you will never read in the Age or see on the ABC.
In last night’s Reader Tips, SDA regular Deplorable Meposted a link to this page on the CDC website. It leads to some interesting reading and very enlightening data (emphaseses mine):
Comorbidities
Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups. For data on comorbidities,
A little more digging will take you to this page showing the cumulative deaths in America involving Covid-19. Here’s a screenshot of the data shown today. Furthermore you can go to this page to download a slightly older dataset which breaks down Covid-19 related deaths by age range. Here’s a screenshot of this dataset’s breakdown by age range.
For those, like most journalists, for whom #MathIsHard, let’s take a look at the numbers:
2020 Covid-19 related deaths in America: 167,558
Percentage of Covid-19 related deaths for ages 0 – 54: 8.16%
Percentage of these deaths purely caused by Covid-19: 6%
Number of Covid-19 related deaths for ages 0 – 54: 13,673
Number of deaths for ages 0 – 54, where Covid-19 was the only apparent cause: 820
Current US Population: 330,209,500
One can only wonder what historians will think, looking back at these minuscule Covid-19 death numbers of healthy people under 55 years old, asking why on earth much of our working activities were shut down? While one could offer politicians the benefit of the doubt in March and April, now that September is about to begin, why is anything still shut down?
To trust the people who report the news to understand what they are reporting and to get the story straight and explain what they are saying honestly may be the largest act of faith in the world today.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a new report detailing how many COVID-19 deaths in America also involved other underlying health conditions.
According to the report, only 6% of the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. list COVID-19 as the only cause of death. 94% of COVID-19 deaths involved at least one other underlying health condition, and on average involved “2.6 additional conditions or causes of death.”
Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups.
The CDC listed the top underlying medical conditions linked to coronavirus deaths as:
Influenza and pneumonia
Respiratory failure
Hypertensive disease
Diabetes
Vascular and unspecified dementia
Cardiac Arrest
Heart failure
Renal failure
Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events
Other medical conditions
According to the CDC, 9,683 people have died in the United States having only COVID-19 listed on their death certificate as cause of death. At the time the CDC report was released, 161,392 deaths had been attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S.
That’s from Johannes Leak in The Oz today, reminding me of my post on August 6: The Melbourne Syndrome. As I wrote then:
The Covid pandemic has brought on our modern version of The Stockholm Syndrome: “feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards a captor.” We now have the Melbourne Syndrome, which I come across versions of every day:
Feelings of trust or affection felt during a lockdown by its victims towards their most authoritarian political leaders.
Since Melbourne has now implemented the hardest lockdown at the hands of the dumbest and most incompetent political leader in the world, I believe that Melbourne should have the honour of bearing the name of this widely observed form of insanity.
Was asked to leave the park today sitting in the sun with a friend. Very friendly and all, but still. And not only do we have the hardest lockdown possibly anywhere in the world, we also have the most incompetent since things have only managed to get worse and we are far and away the state with the worst record in Australia. And just a reminder of what we are being asked to endure (this may be a bit old, but if so, they have only been tightened):
The “state of emergency” in Victoria has been upgraded to a “state of disaster”, meaning police can now enter your home to carry out spot checks even if you don’t give them permission and they don’t have a warrant.
Between the hours of 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., you’re not allowed to leave your homes except for work, medical care and caregiving.
Outside those hours, you may only leave your home for four reasons: shopping for food and essential items, care and caregiving, daily exercise and work. “We can no longer have people simply out and about for no good reason whatsoever,” said Kim Jong Dan.
Daily exercise can only take place within a 5km radius of your home and cannot last longer than an hour.
You cannot exercise in groups of more than two, even if they’re members of the same household.
Apart from daily exercise, you are only allowed to leave your home once a day for essential supplies and food.
In the whole of Victoria, you cannot buy more than two of certain essential items, including dairy, meat, vegetables, fish and toilet paper.
Schools have closed again, with all Victoria school students returning to remote learning from Wednesday (except for vulnerable children and children of permitted workers). Childcare and kindergarten will be closed from Thursday.
Golf and tennis venues, which were open, have now been closed.
Weddings will no longer be allowed from Thursday, and funerals will be limited to 10 people.
Face nappies anywhere outside your home have been mandatory for people in metropolitan Melbourne since July 22nd, but that rule has now been extended to the entire state of Victoria.
You cannot have visitors or go to another person’s house unless it is for the purpose of giving or receiving care. However, you can leave your house to visit a person if you are in an “intimate personal relationship” with them, even during curfew hours. So no “bonk ban”.
If you have a holiday home or were planning a holiday outside Melbourne, tough cheese. You must remain in the city for the next six weeks.
The maximum fine for breaching a health order currently stands at $1,652, but Kim Jong Dan said he would have more to say about penalties later today, i.e. he’s going to increase them.
Did you hear that? With this kind of approach, you could turn any common sickness into a statistical killer. And so pleased with himself as well. Can airheads be monsters? Yes they can! Thinkof this, which is the first of the comments on the video.
I am a provider. One of my patients admitted herself into hospice d/t kidney failure and tested negative for “COVID.” When she died, they put on the death certificate death d/t “COVID.” We are in the early stages of a democide. THIS is what it feels like to have the governments force you to live in and breathe NONSENSE. War is peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength and 2+5=5.
Let me preface this with a quote from a Letter to the Editor at the Oz.
`
I had to leave for the UK recently…. Extraordinarily, after all the tribulations leaving Australia, I entered the UK by merely sliding my passport into a slot, unmolested by bureaucrats, and emerged blinking into sunny freedom. Here I can walk outside and freely breathe the air. I can go for an evening jog. I can eat in crowded restaurants and go to concerts. I can travel anywhere in the UK or most of the world … except Australia. Quietly, the rest of our planet is getting back to normal, unwilling to continue throttling liberty and society for a virus that, yes, caused a lot of deaths, but would not have looked out of place in a reasonably bad winter.
Meanwhile back in Australia, and in Victoria in particular, we have this. And while the writer calls her a “Karen”, Mandy Crear is definitely not one of them. She is a modern secular saint, and as seen above is both handcuffed and accompanied by six members of our local constabulary, as befitting a dangerous criminal such as herself. The entire story from the Herald-Sun is reprinted below. It is titled, “Frankston ‘Karen’ anti-masker Mandy Crerar refuses to wear mask in jail, remanded again.
A Frankston ‘Karen’ is still refusing to wear a mask even as she languishes in jail on remand, a court has heard.
Anti-authoritarian Mandy Crerar was listed to apply for bail again on Tuesday, but her case was adjourned because prison staff said she wouldn’t put on a mask.
It meant custody officers at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre couldn’t take her to a media room for her online court case.
The 58-year-old had her first bail application on August 12, but that was denied because she refused to guarantee she would abide by the COVID-19 health requirements.
Ms Crerar is accused of coughing on staff at Cafe Fleur by Jen in Frankston and allegedly assaulting police because she had been refused service for not wearing a mask.
Officers say she continued to be uncooperative and refused to answer COVID-19 questions back at the station. She faces a total of nine assault, affray, resisting emergency worker and failing to comply with Chief Health Officer’s direction charges.
Her partner Andrew Lane pleaded for her to be released from custody, saying he needed her assistance around the home and he “couldn’t cope without Mandy here”.
Her defence lawyer Christopher Terry told the online court he was advised she was abiding by directives at the prison where she is being held, but that was disputed by corrections staff.
He said the 14 days she had already spent behind bars was more than she would likely receive if she was found guilty or pleaded to the charges she faced.
He said a $5000 surety and the care requirements of her partner were also factors that needed to be considered.
Magistrate Timothy Gattuso said he was not prepared to consider bail for Ms Crerar if she was not prepared to put on a mask inside jail.
“If she is saying she will do it in the community, I want to see if she is prepared to do it for a court hearing,” Mr Gattuso said.
She is listed to face online court again on Thursday, August 27.
To give Dan Andrews an extension of his powers would be a betrayal of our freedoms which is a legacy we must protect, while making Victoria the most absurd political entity on the planet.
Hydroxychloroquine has the well-known side effects of heart arrhythmias and the risk of blindness with prolonged use.
And to whom do we owe this useless bit of knowledge. No one seems to want to take full responsibility.
This opinion was written by Alastair Stewart, director of the ARC Centre for Personalised Therapeutics Technologies, in collaboration with his University of Melbourne colleagues Phillip Reece, honorary senior fellow, department of pharmacology and therapeutics; David Story, deputy director, Centre for Integrated Critical Care; and Megan Munsie, deputy director, Centre for Stem Cell Systems.
So here is the first of the comments listed according to best liked:
IS HYDROXCHLOROQUINE EFFECTIVE FOR TREATING COVID ?
Listen to Dr. Harvey Risch Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale ……
‘’I conclude the evidence is overwhelming, there is no question that for the people who need to be treated and are treated early, it has a very substantial benefit in reducing risk of hospitalisation or mortality.
‘’And there’s been a massive disinformation campaign that stretches from government to the media that’s either suppressing this message or id countering it with a false message.
‘’I’m not an expert in the reasons why that’s happening other than just observing it. But I am an expert in the science, and I can tell you the science is all one-side sided. ‘’In fact the science is so one-sided in supporting this result that it’s stronger than anything else I’ve ever studied in my entire career.
‘’The evidence in favour of Hydroxychloroquine benefit in high risk patients treated early as out-patients is stronger than anything else I’ve ever studied. So scientifically there is no question whatsoever ever.’’
But what would this Professor know ?
Here’s his Education & Training;
PhD : University of Chicago (1980)
MD : University of California, San Diego (1976)
BS : California Institute of Technology (1972)
Postdoctoral Fellow : School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington
Suppose we just ask those elderly folks lying sick in hospital whether they would like to try the HCQ procedure.
Meanwhile it has occurred to me that too much focus has been put on the rank incompetence of Daniel Andrews. He is after all a man with limited intelligence and no expertise in virtually everything he legislates about. It is this cypher Brett Sutton. What expertise does he have in creating such massive damage to the people of Victoria? He needs to take more of the blame for the idiotic policies of Victoria. There are lots of considerations that go into making a policy and focusing only on the disease and ignoring everything else is idiocy on stilts.
It is quite clear that the Chinese flu has become the decisive issue in American politics. Whether we are in a genuine pandemic and whether Donald Trump has taken the right approach or ought to have handled it differently is the one last issue available to the Democrats. Nothing Trump can do or say will ever receive the slightest approval from either the American media or anyone on the left who wishes to see Trump lose the election. Republican states continue to open their economies up and Democrat states continue to lock them down. The Russian hoax was virtually never mentioned during the Democrat National Convention when it had been the single most important issue for the past three years. It’s gone, and CV-1984 has taken its place.
So we have this now: PLASMA TREATMENT EVOKES POLITICAL RESPONSE. Yet another approach to dealing with the virus has been recommended by the President and the left-media have gone berserk once again.
Last night, President Trump announced that the FDA has granted emergency authorization to use plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to treat others who have contracted the disease. Plasma-based treatments have been in the works for some time, and the Mayo Clinic has carried out an extended test of the type of therapy the FDA approved yesterday.
To my knowledge, there are no safety concerns relating to plasma treatments, but critics were quick to claim that there is insufficient evidence of efficacy to support the expedited approval. As usual, the reaction to Trump’s announcement was political, not medical:
“The FDA must approve drugs or vaccines based on their safety and effectiveness – NOT political pressure from the White House,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted on Saturday. “The President’s dangerous attempt to inject himself into the scientific decisions of [U.S. FDA] jeopardizes the health & well-being of all Americans.”
There is no doubt whatsoever that HCQ was condemned across the American media and the American left precisely because Donald Trump had spoken positively about the lives it might save. But that is American politics, and it is as obvious as anything one might have ever observed in the world of politics. My question is this: why is this same issue playing out politically in other countries, and in particular, why has Australia forbidden the use of HCQ for treating Covid?
You would think that how we treated the virus was in some way related to the American election which obviously it is not. Yet we allow people to die without allowing our own doctors to apply HCQ to people who might have otherwise recovered. This is both sickening and inexplicable. Let me quote Terry McCrann on this issue who is as puzzled as I am: Waiting for Godot, from one pandemic debacle to the next.
Further and more critically, there is arguably a better way if we were to actively embrace the two treatment protocols which have been shown to work in other places: Donald Trump’s hydroxychloroquine plus zinc and Thomas Borody’s ivermectin plus zinc.
Instead, we have seen an extraordinary, nothing short of hysterical, blitz to demonise the first; and now a move by the TGA to kill the second lest it gain some sort of toehold. Borody is being ‘investigated’ for potentially “breaching the ban on advertising COVID-19 treatments”.
Is that not exactly another example of the mandatory stupidity design feature? A blanket ban on advertising a virus treatment? In other words, shut up and just take whatever the “experts” dish out to you — even, mandatorily.
If HCQ plus zinc and ivermectin plus zinc — I have to keep stressing the “plus zinc”, because all, and I mean all, the trials that have “proved” HCQ does not work, have been trials that did not include zinc, the critical joint component — do actually work, even if not to Borody’s claimed 100 per cent for ivermectin, we have a wide open doorway out of the economic-virus nightmare.
We could turn the virus into an irritation. We could open up the economy, and treat anyone testing positive for the virus, just like we do for any other disease/injury.
So why aren’t we doing that? We are not part of the American political world so why are we not just using the tools we have available to cure people who are otherwise being allowed to die? Our politicians have a lot to answer for.
Law of Markets 