James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. His published legal research has been about the lawyer class and their woke agenda. In particular, he has been a sharp critic of the High Court of Australia, which has not only had a woke orientation in recent years, but from the very beginning, has been centralist, making decision after decision eroding the rights of the states. Thus, Professor Allan has a sharp sense for the detection of Leftist corruption.
He recently gave a talk at the Covid Revisited conference in Sydney, where he made the point that the Covid situation has exposed the medical profession as having the same sort of betrayal as the legal profession. The lockdowns and closures of schools and businesses did nothing to halt Covid. But the economic costs were enormous, with late March 2024 study by Stanford University's Hoover Institute finding that the total cost to the U.S. economy of the educational loss from Covid school closures being $31 trillion. The same harm has experienced in Australia. And all of this was fuelled by the health professionals, who based their alarmism upon modelling that a few brave statisticians showed to be flawed in the early stages, but all went ahead.
Thus, Professor Allan gives his rankings of the villains in the Covid tyranny. Lawyers and judges come in fifth, especially judges for putting paternalistic policies over liberty. Then there are academics who supported the status quo. Then doctors and the health and medical profession, then politicians and finally journalists, the most corrupt of them all. I think though that top of the list should have been Big Pharma itself, who for profits kick-started the entire mess, which has been well documented by Covid critics. Oh, and the globalist elites who saw Covid as one more step in their Great Reset agenda.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/04/the-medical-profession-betrayed-us/
"It is important to admit when one has been wrong, and more so when one has been badly wrong. So let me start with myself. I go back to the years before the Covid pandemic. For a long time, part of my work-related, peer-reviewed legal writings had focused on the failings around the English-speaking world of bills of rights and of the judges – committees of unelected ex-lawyers if we wish to be precise – and, indeed, of the lawyerly caste itself. And I believed that things were only going to get worse. That was in part due to what was happening in the law schools around the Anglosphere. Let's just say that the law schools, and universities more generally, were uncontestably getting more woke while viewpoint diversity was collapsing – just look at last year's Voice referendum and the fact that this country has some three dozen law schools yet the number of law professors across the whole country who came out openly against the proposal could be counted on one hand, one machine operator's hand in fact. But the country as a whole voted nearly 61% "No". In short, I was a fully signed-up member to the well-known sentiment that William Buckley had conveyed some years back when he said that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty. For me, make that also the lawyerly caste that gives us our top judges. Put differently again, I was no great fan of juristocracy or of kritarchy or of lawyers as a group when it comes to driving public policy.
But before 2020 I had been quite a big fan of the doctorly caste. During my seven or eight years on New Zealand's University of Otago ethics committee, and from interactions more generally, I believed as a general proposition that doctors tended to focus on the evidence. That they did not tend to over-moralise and then attempt to impose their own moral worldviews on others. That they were better at standing up to groupthink and panic, and certainly better than the lawyerly caste. They put a hefty weight on individual autonomy, sometimes through the prism of the doctrine of 'informed consent' (about which I have grave doubts, as it happens, since 10-plus years of education is really not able to be summed up in a 10-minute little overview so the patient can give 'informed' consent – the proper question to the doctor is "what would you do if this were your son?"). But nevertheless I reckoned doctors valued individual autonomy and a large degree of patient choice. They also, as an aside of sorts, seemed to me to take a real interest in the arts and literature in a way that is dying out in the universities – including in those parts of our universities supposedly devoted to them such as history, literature, classics, even philosophy and which are dying out in part because the academics who staff them want to deconstruct and woke-ify even their own fields of expertise. Still, and in summary, I was big fan of doctors and the doctorly caste. I certainly thought that as a group they were better than the lawyers.
And here's where we come back to my starting claim, the importance of admitting when one has been wrong. Because let's face it. Boy, was I wrong about doctors! The pandemic and Covid plainly showed the preponderance of them, as a class, to have been as pusillanimous, panicked and even principleless as the rest of our elites. Let's take the risk of having all of our blood pressure readings go through the roof and recall the nearly three years of governmental thuggery, heavy-handedness, imposition of idiotic and often irrational rules and resort to lockdown lunacy – not to mention that those imposing these sometimes inane and often unprecedented public health measures virtually never paid the costs of what they were imposing. The police heavy-handedness verging on thuggery did not affect them. The school closures that shut down schools in a way that will see many children, especially the poor ones, disadvantaged for life did not much affect them – and under a fortnight ago, in late March 2024, a new study out of Stanford University's Hoover Institute came out and found that the total cost to the U.S. economy of the educational loss from Covid school closures will be $31 trillion, leave aside that the closures were completely needless and ineffective at preventing Covid transmission.
There will be a proportionally enormous cost here in this country. And don't forget that Australia's educational results pre-Covid were already woeful – we scored below Kazakhstan – so it's not as though we could afford any drops in scores and attainment, let alone precipitous ones. In addition to the police thuggery and school closures, the people who brought us lockdowns did not pay the costs of devastating the small business sector. Somehow that seems worse when it is a supposedly Right-of-centre political party doing the devastating of its core constituency in favour of the public service and while fostering an ongoing 'work from home' mindset across society that has gutted productivity – no serious person really believes that working from home, in general terms, produces as much as working from the office – and that led to last year's biggest drop in living standards in this country in decades. Nor did a single public health type or politician or top bureaucrat take a big pay cut, or even a small one, all while seemingly flipping coins to decide which were, and which were not, essential businesses. Oh, and let's not forget that while doing all this they were mouthing the inane, false (but rhetorically effective) phrase "we're all in this together", a phrase that was factually wrong on all sorts of levels including poor vs rich, young vs old, and private sector vs public sector. Basically, the lockdown imposers had no skin in the game, to borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb. They didn't bear the costs of their decision-making. If they had, we would have had different, more liberal decisions.
Or what about the sort of massive government spending and increased debt and all the money printing during the lockdown lunacy? These measures effectively – in part via asset inflation – transferred huge wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich. The pandemic years were the best years ever to be a billionaire. Again, the decision-makers had no skin in the game. Or what about, in a comparative blink of the eye, throwing away everything I had ever heard about the importance of informed consent during my years on a university ethics committee in order to push vaccine mandates? All in all, these years amounted to "the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in at least 200 years", to paraphrase the retired U.K. Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption.
Which takes us back to doctors. The pandemic response was largely brought to you by public health types and by modellers. Imperial College's Neil Ferguson was the modeller who years earlier had given us modelled predictions as regards BSE ('mad cow disease') and foot-and-mouth disease that massively overestimated everything – by orders of magnitude. This was well-known at the start of the Covid pandemic. Yet it made no difference at all to the British and American Governments' willingness to treat Professor Ferguson's forecasts wholly unsceptically and almost as holy writ. Apparently hugely overestimating what the actual deaths will turn out to be, however repeatedly, does not affect one's career as a fêted epidemiological modeller one iota; it seems, in fact, to bolster one's position and burnish one's credentials. Perhaps, though, if instead of overestimating actual outcomes by orders of magnitude you were to underestimate by just one death, well then we'd see some ramifications.
I need also to mention the incredible inroads into free speech and the marketplace of ideas during the pandemic. Censorship, shadow bans, social media blackouts, the legacy press operating more as a latter-day Pravda running the lockdownista line on everything and without even a hint of a trace of a soupçon of an echo of scepticism and questioning as regards that day's offerings from the public health cadre and Government ministers. Heck, I even had a couple of published, peer-reviewed law articles offering a sceptical view of the pandemic response rejected for listing by SSRN (presumably because only public health types were then deemed suitable to comment on this fiasco, and only lockdown cheerleader ones at that). Or consider the vitriolic response to anyone who suggested that the virus that was found a few hundred yards from the front door of a lab doing research on just this sort of virus – the only known one in that country – might, just might, have actually escaped from that lab. Mirabile dictu! Instead, charges of 'racism', were the accepted line or response from our elites, along with mocking anyone who suggested this as the source. Even a former head of MI5 asserting the lab leak theory was censored and banned on social media. Or remember how the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were treated by their university colleagues, by the press, by social media. Mr. Fauci called these three "fringe epidemiologists", although one day before the pandemic started Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University would have been widely picked as the world's most eminent epidemiologist. And the other two would have made the top 10 list, those two being Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Professor Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University (then, not now, as Harvard recently fired him for being right about everything). During the frenzied panic and demand for conformity of the lockdown mania years even the most credentialled people in the world were censored, shadow banned and threatened with losing their jobs if they proffered an opinion outside the Government and public health line. So much for any concern about free speech! Gosh, it was even a political party with the name 'Liberal' and a Prime Minister Morrison that to their eternal shame offered up the first iteration of the free speech suppressing and truly woeful ACMA Bill, the one that uses the bogus notions of misinformation and disinformation to try to set up a privileged set of people who will tell us what is and is not true – despite the fact that Professor Bhattacharya maintains to this day that the biggest source of disinformation throughout the pandemic was government. These are bleak times for freedom of expression.
And so if you are all sufficiently depressed, we are nearly ready to turn to the occupations and castes who in general terms were principleless, panicked and power-hungry. These were the various types of elites who let us all down so badly during the pandemic in this country and across the democratic world outside of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota and a tiny few other jurisdictions. First, though, let me just pre-emptively deal with a response one hears regularly. This is the line that goes something like: "Well, yes, in retrospect we made a fair few errors but at the time, in conditions of uncertainty, we made the safe, responsible choices that uncertainty demanded." This is simply wrong. It is public policy nonsense in fact. Indeed, right from the start it seemed silly to me, verging on crazy, to think that in conditions of great uncertainty what you ought to do is to proceed directly to some version of an inverted precautionary principle on steroids, thereby mimicking the authoritarian response of the Chinese politburo – and in the process throw away a hundred years of data that informed the then pandemic plans of the British Government (and the WHO for that matter) and that unambiguously rejected lockdowns. The smart response in an information vacuum is to carry on as you are making changes at the margins to protect those most at risk as you wait for more information. This is how virtually all of us behave all the time in general life. Nor do we focus obsessively on just one cause of death – let's say from car accidents – and so impose 5 kph speed limits that would undoubtedly save a decent number of lives currently lost in car crashes, but at the same time cause markedly more deaths (rising to myriad more) due to returning us all to the middle ages in terms of being able to move goods and people around efficiently. And anyway, from very early on it was known that this virus was over a thousand times more deadly to the very old than to the under-30s. In most countries, for most of the pandemic, the average age of those dying from Covid was over the country's life expectancy. For governments to proclaim that "we are all in this together" was not true in any sense that could lead to the sort of policy response we saw everywhere in the democratic world outside of Sweden, Florida, South Dakota and a few other outliers that got their responses more or less correct (a fact that today's cumulative excess deaths data, from start of the pandemic to today, brings home in the bluntest fashion going). Put bluntly, nothing that we knew in March 2020 justified going down the incredibly authoritarian, "let's run government on the Chinese Politburo model" path that our elites opted to take. It wasn't caution. It was stupidity, a complete lack of commitment to both the liberal and the democratic components of 'liberal democracy', an incredible naïveté about how handing huge, unfettered power to government and public health cadres affects the likelihood of their ever confining lockdowns to just a fortnight, and – let's be honest – an awful lot of cowardice on the part of an awful lot of people.
And lest anyone thinks this is all pure hindsight on Allan's part, I will remind doubters that from virtually day one this native born Canadian, who has lived in Australia for two decades, was an open sceptic of the lockdowns in the pages of the Spectator Australia, the British Lockdown Sceptic website (now Daily Sceptic) and once or twice in Law and Liberty in the U.S. and in the Australian here. In fact, it was that early scepticism that led me to meet the incredibly insightful Ramesh Thakur, whom we'll hear from tonight, as we were fellow travellers right from the start. I think we got just about everything right, if I do say so for myself and Ramesh.
I just have space and time to comment quickly on the various castes most responsible for the panicked, power-hungry, pusillanimous and principleless response to Covid in Australia and around the non-Swedish, non-Florida democratic world. This is highly contestable but in terms of the Top Five of occupations as regards being panicked, principleless, power-hungry and pusillanimous, my rankings, finishing with the very worst occupation and so starting with the least worst, is:
Fifth worst: Lawyers, Judges and the Lawyerly Caste. Yes, there was next to no chance litigants anywhere in the democratic world were going to be able to use a bill of rights to roll back thuggish, heavy-handed governmental Covid regulations through the courts. I said so in print at the start of the crisis and I believe events have proved that true. My take was that we would have to wait till everyone calmed down and the panic subsided and then you would see the judges discover a tiny bit of a willingness to overturn some of these rules and regulations. But as far as the Covid years were concerned the entire edifice of human rights law, and all its accoutrements, was totally useless. Worse than useless in fact, thereby going a long way to proving the enervated, emasculated worth of bills of rights. You buy one and you are simply buying the views of the unelected judges. And they panicked as much as the rest of our elites. But the lawyers and judges come least bad in my list because I do not think we really should even want to live in a world where the lawyerly caste could decide these sort of issues through the courts. And that is true even when we strongly, even vociferously, disagree with what the Government is doing, as I did throughout the pandemic. The remedy here had to be political. Elect a Ron DeSantis or the Social Democratic Government of Sweden and let them stand up to the panic and show what should be done. There would be nothing left for democracy if a handful of unelected judges could dictate policy here. So only fifth worst.
Fourth worst: Here I'm putting the university caste, including the modellers at Imperial College. Yes, many of them disgracefully imposed vaccine mandates (explicitly or implicitly). Yes, the treatment of your Bhattacharyas and Guptas at the world's top universities was shameful. But the competition here is fierce so I'm scoring them just outside a podium finish.
Third worst: Doctors get the bronze medal for the four 'P's of being panicked, pusillanimous, principleless and power-hungry. Sure, the public health wing of the doctorly caste carried more than its fair share of the load here. And maybe this scoring was a tad affected by our disappointment with an occupation that had looked so good before Covid. But it's more likely that the gold and silver positions were denied the doctors because at least a noticeable chunk of them were dissidents and sceptics, including the terrific Anders Tegnell. Some even lost their practising certificates because of their bravery. And that would influence anyone's scorecard.
Second worst: This was a tough call. But in the end I gave the silver medal for most pusillanimously panicked and power-hungry to the politicians. A good few who had come into politics preaching their commitment to freedom and to the individual showed that these protestations weren't worth the paper they hadn't been written on. They were too lazy and too fearful to do their jobs the way Governor DeSantis of Florida did. Or the way the Swedish Government did. In fact, they shamed themselves while pretending they'd implemented good policies. They deserve to be voted out everywhere.
Absolute worst: The Jimbo gold medal goes to the journalistic caste. Here is a profession or occupation supposedly dedicated to questioning power and to bringing a sceptical mind to all assertions but especially those by government. It is a job that values an open mind and not taking on trust what the elites are telling us. It is an occupation that is meant to be fearless, not cravenly fearful. So in a close finish the journalists get the gold medal for being pusillanimous, panicked and principleless."