COVID-19
Federal Covid Inquiry Finds Public Trust Plummeted

From the Brownstone Institute
By
There is nothing like aggressively wresting human and civil rights away from a population to forcibly impose rules that fly in the face of available evidence, whilst censoring those who try to point this out, and refusing to reveal information on which your rules are based, to bottom out trust in the population at large.
In a report handed down Tuesday, Australia’s federal Covid Inquiry found that extreme public health restrictions, coupled with a lack of transparency about the evidence informing these decisions, has led to a major slide in public trust.
Apparently we need experts and a federal inquiry to tell us the bleeding obvious.
This, by the way, is not a Covid inquiry “like a royal commission,” as was promised by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese prior to his election, but is the toothless ‘royal commission lite’ alternative put forward by Albanese after he got into power.
From the Australian,
“The long-awaited report into Australia’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has lashed state premiers for fuelling distrust and confusion, and for adopting draconian border closures that lacked consistency and compassion…
“In the report, the panel argued the need for transparency in future pandemic responses after “economic, social and mental health and human rights impacts were not always understood or considered” in 2020.”
That’s putting it lightly.
Economic, social and mental health, and human rights impacts weren’t considered at all.
That’s why the Queensland Supreme Court ruled that Covid vaccine mandates enforced by the Police Commissioner were unlawful. Justice Glenn Martin held that the Police Commissioner “did not consider the human rights ramifications” before issuing the Covid workplace vaccination directive within the Queensland Police Service (QPS).
When asked about potential human rights abuses caused by his government’s heavy-handed Covid response, former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews retorted, “Seriously? One more comment about human rights – honestly.”
In one egregious case, the Ombudsman determined that the Andrews Government had “breached human rights” by confining over 3,000 Melburnians to nine tower blocks, under police guard, for up to two weeks.
Back to the Australian,
“[The report] lashed “control measures” instituted by state and federal authorities without sufficient explanation.
“This fed the perception that the government did not trust the public to understand or interpret the information correctly and contributed to the decrease in trust,” the summary reads.
“It was the mandating of public health restrictions, especially vaccination, that had the biggest negative impact on trust. The combination of mandatory measures and the perception people had that they were unable to criticize or question government decisions and policies has contributed to non‑mandated vaccination rates falling to dangerously low levels.”
This is absolutely the case. The hashtag I used the most on social media during Australia’s Covid response was, ‘make it make sense.’
There is nothing like aggressively wresting human and civil rights away from a population to forcibly impose rules that fly in the face of available evidence, whilst censoring those who try to point this out, and refusing to reveal information on which your rules are based, to bottom out trust in the population at large.
The biggest failure by far was the silver bullet vaccines that authorities mandated in order to prevent infection and transmission, when they were not tested for such endpoints, and observational data showed they waned in effectiveness after a month or two at best.
Safety surveillance databases exploded with adverse event reporting rates never seen before, yet authorities still insist these are definitely the best, most safe and effective products ever deployed on the population.
It’s small wonder then that fewer than 4% of Australians under the age of 65 have bothered to get a booster in the past six months.
But the nonsensical Covid response wasn’t just limited to the failure of the vaccines to deliver as promised. A few other rules that made no sense:
You need to be protected by a mask standing up, but if sitting at a table you are safe.
Mandatory vaccines are voluntary.
Rapid antigen tests are illegal – wait, now they’re mandatory.
Footballers can cross the border safely but children wishing to visit a dying parent cannot.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
To this day, federal, state, and territory governments have blocked all attempts to access the health advice on which their extremist policies were based.
In an address on Tuesday, Health Minister Mark Butler admitted that “heavy-handed” policies implemented during the pandemic eroded trust, and that “many of the measures taken during Covid-19 are unlikely to be accepted by the population again.”
But don’t think for one second that means they won’t try it again.
Just as the Queensland Government took its Supreme Court loss as a signal that it needs to add a ‘considering human rights’ box-ticking exercise next time it breaches human rights to bring in a mandate, the federal Covid Inquiry report recommends ways to do the whole shebang next time, but better.
That includes more spending, fast-tracking the new Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC, which the government has invested $251.7 million to establish), and better global coordination, particularly with the World Health Organization’s One Health policy.
The report recommends transparent, evidence-based decision-making next time around, but in light of my recent interactions with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), forgive me for considering this a pipe dream under the political status quo.
Butler said that the report was not about laying blame for individual decisions, but was rather about learning lessons. In other words, there will be no accountability.
Instead, Covid premiers and leaders have been awarded medals and cushy jobs. Most recently, Andrews was appointed to the lucrative role of chairman of Orygen, a youth mental health not-for-profit, to collective outrage.
A good thing that has come out of the report is that government overreach on vaccination mandates has been squarely blamed for a drop in vaccination rates in Australia more generally (not just for Covid vaccines).
“The erosion of trust is not only constraining our ability to respond to a pandemic when it next occurs, but it’s already, we know, bled into the performance of our vaccination programs, including our childhood vaccination programs,” said Butler.
“Since the beginning of Covid…we’ve seen a reduction of seven or eight percentage points in participation in the whooping cough vaccination program for under fives and measles vaccination program for under fives, which means we are well below herd immunity levels for those two really important diseases.”
Nice to see a politician finally admit the role of government in driving this trend, which is too often blamed on the boogeyman of ‘misinformation.’
Read the COVID-19 Response Inquiry Report.
Read the COVID-19 Response Inquiry Report Summary.
For further commentary, check out Alison Bevege’s response to the report on her Substack, Letters from Australia.
Republished from the author’s Substack
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
Freedom Convoy
Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich, Chris Barber found guilty of mischief

From LifeSiteNews
Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.”
Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been found guilty of mischief for their roles as leaders of the 2022 protest and as social media influencers, a Canadian federal judge has ruled.
“The Crown has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Lich and Barber have committed mischief,” said Justice Heather Perkins-McVey, the federal judge overseeing the pair’s mischief trial, during the verdict hearing Thursday.
The Democracy Fund, who has been helping the defense in the case, also noted on X, “Mischief is proven beyond a reasonable doubt here. Both Lich and Barber are guilty of mischief.”
“When freedom of expression collides with the need to uphold public order is when the line is crossed,” the judge said during court.
Perkins-McVey seemed to agree with the Crown’s case that Lich and Barber’s influence on the Freedom Convoy constituted public mischief but did dismiss the Crown’s Carter Application accusing Lich and Barber of conspiracy outright.
The government’s “Carter Application” asked that the judge consider “Barber’s statements and actions to establish the guilt of Lich, and vice versa.”
A “Carter Application” requires that the government prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there was a “conspiracy or plan in place and that Lich was a party to it based on direct evidence.”
Lawyer Eva Chipiuk noted that Perkins-McVey “acknowledged that there was disruption on Ottawa and said its citizens and that downtown was jammed, loud and busy.”
Court will reconvene later today for additional information to be revealed.
Lich and Barber both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews reported extensively on their trial.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September of 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.
Lich and Barber were arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa for their roles in leading the popular Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates. During COVID, Canadians were subjected to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, extensive lockdowns and even the closure of churches.
Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich recently spelled out how much the Canadian government has spent prosecuting her and Barber for their role in the protests. She said at least $5 million in “taxpayer dollars” has been spent thus far, with her and Barber’s legal costs being above $750,000.
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