996 page Australian Government Covid inquiry report: don't deceive yourself: the beast is not sitting down.

The whitewash continues.

It would be easy to relax and say, well, the beast is taking a rest now from imposing pandemics and compulsory vaccination and censorship upon us. But I don’t think it’s that simple, folks. I think they’re gearing up for the next one, probably to spring it on the unsuspecting populace, just when we think we’re home and hosed.

What’s really annoying about this Covid report is that it’s issued in a DOCX format — so making page number references for anything you want to find later is pretty hard, especially if your computer doesn’t have the arcane fonts they’re using. Why didn’t they issue it as a pdf? Well, they don’t want to make it easy for people to criticise this pompous bureaucraticon, do they?

Action 19 - the communication strategy for use in national health emergencies is a bit suspicious, to say the least; I’ve bolded the important bits, and my comments are in [bracketed italics]. Oh no ! I’m starting to write in the style of the stupid Easy Read document!

Action 19: Develop a communication strategy for use in national health emergencies that ensures Australians, including those in priority populations, families and industries, have the information they need to manage their social, work and family lives.

Timing: in the next 12–18 months

Lead: relevant department or entity/s with the Australian Centre for Disease Control

The strategy should:

• create a central public health emergency communications hub that serves as a single source where the Australian public can find integrated information about the emergency response around the country [they appear to be following Jacinta Ardern’s lead: “We are your single source of truth”]

• be informed by behavioural science and risk communication expertise [They’re going to use the best data and science to lie to us better]

• proactively seek to ensure consistency of messaging between levels of government, providing supporting rationale and evidence for different approaches [They’re going to make sure every government department is saying the same thing, especially the Port Hedland Town Council]

• leverage existing communication channels through professional bodies, unions, local government and advocacy groups [Can’t have the pilot’s union or some other advocacy group giving the wrong message]

• meet the diverse needs of communities across Australia, including through co-design

• include mechanisms to coordinate and consolidate communications, considering the timing and frequency of announcements

• include a strategy for addressing the harms arising from misinformation and disinformation, which incorporates:

  • information environment and ongoing narrative monitoring to combat misinformation

  • transparent engagement with social media companies [transparent to the social media companies — but not to us —anyhow probably comes down to — shadow ban anyone who says the wrong thing! ]

  • promotion and coordination of policies to increase the resilience of the information environment

  • partnership between government and trusted organisations, experts, media, and other influencers to pre-bunk and debunk misinformation

• build on the principles of crisis and risk communications and have clear communication goals, including:

  • being timely, transparent, empathetic and consistent, promoting action and effectively communicating risk to foster trust [Yes — you could do things like mandate everyone to take an experimental vaccine and threaten them with losing their job if they don’t. That would be great, really fosters trust.]

  • being inclusive, addressing inequities in accessing information, and supporting two-way communication [ Inclusiveness is great — and so is two way communication — the facebook posts will go straight to the Misinformation Commissioner, who will immediately communicate to facebook that they should shadowbox that person. ]

  • reflecting an evidence-based approach relevant for the contemporary information and media environment

  • embedding ongoing evaluation practices to ensure communication activities are effective, are appropriate, and are meeting the diverse needs of the Australian public

• account for the distinct communications preferences and requirements of priority populations – including:

  • reflecting the key role of community and representative organisations in communicating with priority populations, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community organisations; peak bodies for children, young people and education providers; culturally and linguistically diverse community organisations; Disability Representative Organisations; peak bodies for older Australians; and community service providers [yeh what with so many Aboriginal people saying the vaccines were Satanic — well we can’t have that, can we?]

  • funding community and representative organisations to tailor and disseminate communications through appropriate channels and trusted voices [He who pays the piper calls the tune.]

Yeh and look we did it wrong last time: we could have done so much better at combatting misinformation:

Building and maintaining trust [Page 120 —under section 5.Learnings ]

• Trust and confidence in government decision-making was negatively impacted by a number factors, including inconsistency in response by different jurisdictions, lack of clarity or acceptance of evidence supporting key decisions, misinformation and disinformation, perceived ‘politics’ being played and perceived unfairness of responses. [yeh it was just a perceived unfairness when they broke the Nuremberg Code and coerced us to take an experimental medication. It’s not as if any human rights laws were actually broken. And inconsistency in responses in different jurisdictions was damaging: if you were in Melbourne and had rubber bullets fired at your or Western Australia and couldn’t go to the bottle shop or the toilets in a cafe, it really looked bad when you didn’t have rubber bullets fired at you in the other states and territories.]

• There was an acknowledged need for greater transparency… [You don’t say!]

• Under the Biosecurity Act 2015 (Cth), in determining whether the Minister for Health should exercise his emergency powers, his decision-making process was informed by public health advice and consultation with a core list of ministers…. The protocol for the Minister for Health’s decision-making should be made public to increase public trust in the considerations that go into decision-making. [Yes otherwise, the Minister will be solely to blame when the trial starts.]

Here’s another “you-don’t-say” passage:

Government leaders held daily press conferences, released case and death statistics and some modelling, and later released statistics on vaccine uptake. However, the perception that governments were not transparent was a strong theme in what the panel heard.

In the future we need more transparency which means more trust … they need to communicate more, for example why we are doing this or stopping this. – Focus group participant

Focus group participants said that governments resisted releasing information that may have contradicted the policies they were pursuing. This opinion led to a view that government did not trust the public to understand or interpret information correctly. A lack of transparency around vaccination prioritisation decisions reduced trust in government, particularly among people with disability. The panel heard that a lack of transparency also increased the perception that the government was hiding adverse information. This view fuelled the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

A proper piece of bulldust for you on my page 282, although the bolded passage probably presages a Pandemic Amnesty in the near future for the apologetic government, and reminds me of this little article by Emily Oster two years ago in the Plandemic, I mean, Atlantic:

This turgid bureaucratese is typical of the whole report, the bolded bit may presage an apology:

The divided opinions on the thoroughness of the vaccine review process and the safety of vaccines approved under this process remain, reflected in and reinforced by ongoing campaigns in social media. Vaccine adverse event data are difficult to interpret in the context of a pandemic, especially where new vaccine technologies are used, both of which contribute to an elevated level of anxiety in the community. High rates of reporting of vaccine reactions continue to be promoted as indicators of vaccine failure, even though these are mainly short term self-resolving reactions, and we have no comparable vaccine rollout data to compare with. Fear of the vaccines kept just under five per cent of the eligible adult population from being vaccinated, and for some this cost them their employment if in an occupation where vaccine mandates were in place. Others who were reluctant to have the vaccine but who complied with mandates were vaccinated under duress and this can also increase the severity of vaccine reactions, acting to confirm their fears. It is not unreasonable to expect some people to choose not to be vaccinated, and this needs to be accommodated in vaccine and disease control policies. What was unusual in COVID-19 was aiming for a global adult vaccine rollout in a short period of time, and the proportion of the population who fluctuated in their vaccine intent, leading to unprecedented public discussion and information-seeking on vaccines. Misinformation on vaccines was rife, and would also have played a role (see Chapter 11: Communicating in a crisis).

Altogether this is a sickening read.

Photo by Andrey Tikhonovskiy on Unsplash