Australia needs to reset its public health advice, starting at the top
by Colin Kinner and Dr Blair Williams
12 May 2023
Last month saw the release of a report from the Parliamentary Inquiry into Long COVID and Repeated Infections. The report highlights the substantial harm that has been done by the government’s current public health strategy which has led to millions of Australians being infected with COVID, and hundreds of thousands developing Long COVID.
It makes several important recommendations aimed at reducing the impact of COVID infection and the incidence of Long COVID. However, the report falls short of calling out the core issue: namely that since late 2021, Australia’s pandemic response has been wildly unethical and based on wishful thinking that is disconnected from the emerging science.
A pro-infection policy
Australia’s current pandemic response hinges on facilitating COVID infection on a massive scale. Not just allowing widespread infection, but creating an environment in which most people will be infected.
This so-called “let-it-rip” strategy has been highly effective in exposing most Australians to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. The latest figures tell us that more than two-thirds of Australians and as many as 90% of Australian children have had COVID, with a growing number now on their second, third or fourth infection.
Since the “let-it-rip” approach began in late 2021, the federal government, in lock-step with state and territory governments, has systematically dismantled almost all public health measures designed to limit transmission of the virus — including mask mandates, isolation requirements, contact tracing, access to PCR testing and mandatory reporting of test results.
In parallel, public health communication has downplayed the seriousness of the virus and its long-term risks, which has led most people to accept the idea of widespread infection.
It is widely understood that the push for mass infection is based on the goal of achieving population-level “hybrid immunity”. The hypothesis is that getting most people vaccinated and then having them infected repeatedly will lead to a lower disease burden and eventually an end to the pandemic.
One could be forgiven for believing that hybrid immunity is a mainstream public health strategy. We frequently hear the commonwealth Chief Medical Officer and state Chief Health Officers quoted in the media talking about “very high levels of hybrid immunity”, “rich hybrid immunity” and even “building a wall of immunity”.
However, the push for hybrid immunity has been shown to cause substantial net harm, places people at unacceptable risk, and is based on dubious public health messaging designed to convince people to act against their interests.
It is regarded as such a dangerous public health strategy that thousands of scientists from around the world have signed a memorandum which calls on governments to abandon misguided attempts to achieve population immunity via mass infection, describing it as “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence”.
A net harm public health strategy
While COVID infections provide some degree of immunity, this immunity is short-lived, doesn’t translate well to new sub-variants and comes with some significant downsides.
One of those downsides is that the virus has killed a lot of Australians. Last year COVID directly caused over 10,000 deaths, becoming Australia’s third leading cause of death, behind dementia and ischaemic heart disease, and ahead of breast cancer, bowel cancer and road accidents combined.
As the Inquiry’s report highlighted, COVID also causes a wide range of long-term health problems.
The report noted that between 5% and 10% of COVID infections lead to Long COVID, a debilitating condition which can cause extreme fatigue, breathing problems, chronic pain, heart palpitations, memory loss and cognitive impairment. This condition can affect anyone, including children, and can occur even after a “mild” acute infection.
Using a mathematical model, Professor of Global Biosecurity Raina MacIntyre and fellow researchers estimate that a vaccine-only policy will result in the infection of “almost all Australians … at least once in the time window from January 2021 to August 2023.” By the end of the year, they predict that 1.3 million Australians will have Long COVID, including 44,000 children under four years of age.
With thousands of new infections and reinfections happening across the country each day, this number will continue to grow.
A COVID infection also increases the risk of many other serious health conditions — including heart attack, stroke, blood clots and neurological disorders. In kids and adolescents it significantly increases the risk of pulmonary embolism, myocarditis, thromboembolism, renal failure and diabetes.
There is increasing evidence that the virus causes immune system dysregulation via depletion of T-cells, which play a vital role in the body’s ability to fight infection. This in turn increases susceptibility to other infections such as Strep A, which has been surging in many countries including Australia.
Research has also shown that the harm from COVID is cumulative — that is, the risk of a person having adverse health outcomes increases with each infection.
As experts have been pointing out for some time, the benefits of “hybrid immunity” achieved through widespread infection are significantly outweighed by the harm done by infecting millions of people with this dangerous virus.
There was clear evidence that it was a mistake to adopt the “let-it-rip” strategy in late 2021. The fact that it is still at the core of our pandemic response in 2023 should be of grave concern to all Australians.
Vulnerable people are at unacceptable risk
When CMO Paul Kelly released his report on the fourth Omicron wave, he stated that the national COVID strategy will continue to “protect the most vulnerable”. However, this is not borne out in reality.
The current national strategy fails to recognise that high-risk people are part of society, and that all parts of society are rife with infection due to a lack of mitigations.
Australians with chronic health conditions still need to go to work, go shopping, access healthcare, take public transport, and their children still go to school. Yet each of these activities exposes them to heightened risk.
Moreover, hospital-acquired COVID infections are happening across all states and territories, in public and private facilities, with alarming mortality rates. Current public health policy is failing to implement basic mitigations such as air filtration, and is dropping mask mandates in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
The Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights states that everyone has a right to access care that meets their needs, is safe and respectful. Yet there is a real risk of catching COVID in hospitals. Though Australia does not publish the data, English data shows that 30 percent of hospital patients with COVID caught it in hospital. According to leaked Victorian Health Department data, the mortality rate for hospital-acquired COVID infections is a staggering 10%.
Australians didn’t consent to mass infection
By withholding factual information about the real risks posed by COVID, and downplaying the seriousness of the virus, governments have lulled people into a false sense of security and led most to believe the rhetoric that COVID is “not exceptional” and can be treated “like any other respiratory illness”.
This “COVID is mild” narrative has led most Australians to not take basic precautions against catching or spreading the virus. Many Australians don’t even know that COVID is airborne, and that it is spread mainly by inhaling virus particles breathed out by infected people.
The media has also failed in their role as the fourth estate to hold the government and public health officials to account. Many journalists have abandoned efforts to critically analyse public health advice, instead opting to simply repeat misinformation rather than ask pertinent questions.
As explained by Dr Blair Williams writing in Croakey, we are living in an age of “COVID hegemony” as governments, media and a small group of vocal doctors and scientists have manipulated public opinion to normalise widespread infection and gain acceptance of the let-it-rip strategy.
This gradual coercive persuasion is a global phenomenon. According to social psychologist Dr Jessica Offir, the withdrawal of COVID mitigations by governments around the world has been “carefully orchestrated to transpire as quickly as policy makers thought the public would be willing to shift, yet in steps small enough to make those who expressed concerns appear to be over-reacting to every individual step”.
The result of this deliberate behavioural modification strategy has been that the vast majority of the population are taking no steps to protect themselves or others, leading to consistently high levels of community transmission.
Meanwhile, those who are aware of the risks have had to resort to individual-level mitigations (including for many, some degree of self-imposed lockdown) in the absence of any population-level protections.
We need new public health advisers
Australia’s failed pandemic response has been described as our worst public health disaster since World War II.
Thankfully there are some in politics who recognise that the current approach to COVID is untenable, and who are calling for change.
Dr Monique Ryan recently spoke in Parliament about the failure to protect people trying to access healthcare, and called on the government to review its public health measures to better protect people in healthcare settings.
On the same day, Labor MPs Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah and Dr Mike Freelander, and Assistant Health Minister Ged Kearney, hosted a Clean Air Forum at Parliament House. The forum heard from some of Australia’s leading experts who provided advice on how to reduce the spread of COVID by ensuring we all breathe clean indoor air that is not contaminated by airborne viruses.
Federal and state governments urgently need to reset their public health advice and shift their approach to handling the pandemic. We need a renewed focus on reducing transmission, championed by public health advisers who value the lives and the long-term health of Australians above any political considerations.
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Colin Kinner is Director of the Clean Air Accelerator, a not-for-profit program to support startups developing clean air technologies. He spoke at the recent Clean Air Forum in Canberra about opportunities to reduce COVID transmission.
Dr Blair Williams is a Lecturer in Australian politics at Monash University and has written extensively about Australia’s pandemic response.
