We need to talk about Australia

Guest Post by Alex Berenson

Australia should have been the world’s ultimate public health and Covid vaccine success story – the nail in the coffin for Team Reality and the Great Barrington Declaration.

Australia did just what the Bill Gates-funded gurus wanted.

It locked down early and hard and stayed that way for almost two years. It closed its borders and responded to local outbreaks with even tougher restrictions. Australian police used drones and automated license plate readers to check if people were more than a few miles from their homes.

The restrictions largely “worked.” (Putting aside their cost to civil liberties, education, and mental health, of course, since those don’t matter to Covid fanatics.) Through the fall of 2021, Australia had few Sars-Cov-2 infections and almost no Covid deaths.

(Faith in science! It’s a thing:)

When Covid vaccines became available, Australia took an equally aggressive stance. The country’s six states segregated unvaccinated people, barring them from shopping, going to restaurants, and even entering libraries. States also forced Covid shots on many workers as a condition of employment, making up to 75 percent of workers get jabs.

Australians did not universally support the rules. Thousands of anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protestors jammed Melbourne and other major Australian cities last fall.

Still, despite Australia’s reputation as an outpost of rugged individualism, it is actually more like Canada than the United States. Polls routinely showed that a majority of Australians supported the restrictions and were pleased with their government’s overall response to the coronavirus.

In fact, during the spring and summer of 2021, most Australians were primarily concerned that they did not have enough access to vaccines. More than 95 percent of Australians 16 and over ultimately took the shots – mostly Pfizer’s mRNA jabs. The acceptance extended to boosters, which nearly 70 percent of Australian adults have received.

And for almost two years, the elite media have held Australia up rapturously as an example of how the United States should have behaved and how many lives lockdowns and vaccines could have saved (never mind that Western European countries, which had lockdowns and Covid vaccination rates similar to Australia’s, have death counts similar to America’s.)

In May, the New York Times asked:

What went right in Australia and wrong in the United States?

For the standard slide-show presentation, it looks obvious: Australia restricted travel and personal interaction until vaccinations were widely available, then maximized vaccine uptake, prioritizing people who were most vulnerable before gradually opening up the country again.

(Cultures of trust, even better than anti-virals!)

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But now Australia’s Covid success story has a new ending – and it may hold very hard lessons for vaccine advocates.

Since December, when the Omicron variant arrived, Australia has had an unending Covid wave. And after falling in April and May, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are soaring again as Australia, which is in the Southern Hemisphere, enters its winter.

Of course, Australia’s overall Covid death toll relative to the size of its population is still far lower than the United States or Western European countries.

But for the last several months it has had more deaths per-capita, and nearly all those people are vaccinated. In the last six weeks, 656 people have died of Covid in New South Wales, Australia’s largest state. More than 85 percent were vaccinated, and most of them had been boosted.

Even more concerning, Australia has also had a large increase in non-Covid deaths. During the first three months of 2022, Australia had almost 20 percent more deaths than normal. Even excluding Covid deaths, deaths were almost 10 percent above normal. Figures for April and May from Victoria, its second-largest state, suggest excess deaths have risen even further since then and may be running 30 percent above normal – a stunningly high level.

It is hard to overstate what the unspooling crisis in Australia may mean for vaccine and lockdown advocates. Because it so successfully contained Covid in 2020 and 2021 and then used mRNA and DNA/AAV vaccines so aggressively, Australia is a near-perfect test case for what Omicron and future variants will do to a population that was mass vaccinated before being exposed to Covid.

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Clearly, the vaccines have failed. The question now is how long the Omicron wave will last, and how many deaths Australia may have by year-end. The rise in overall mortality is also telling, because the excuses that public health advocates have offered in other countries – health-care delays or “long Covid” – do not apply in Australia.

For now, Australian national and state governments continue to push boosters – and to publish honest data showing just how poorly the shots are working.

No points for guessing whether the honesty or the booster campaigns are likely to end first.