This is from Adam Creighton in today’s Oz: Hysteria of Covid to endure for years, says top Trump medical adviser.
Scott Atlas, who was a top health adviser to former president Donald Trump, has warned that “destructive and ineffective” Covid-19 restrictions could loom over economies for “years” because of an “unscientific obsession” with stopping cases.
Dr Atlas, a former medical doctor and now Senior Fellow in health care policy at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said Australia had illustrated the folly of lockdowns and the “shocking power of governments to shut down everything – schools, businesses, personal movement and even the right to see your own family”.
“Australia had an explosion of cases with some of the most draconian policies imaginable,” he said, speaking to The Australian about his new book, A Plague Upon Our House, which is highly critical of the US Covid-19 response and two of Mr Trump’s other health advisers, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.
“As an American, and I think it applies to Australia, I think it’s shocking how people acquiesce to this sort of thing.”
There was also this letter to the editor that highlighted so many of the issues that matter to so many amongst us.
I cannot yet add my voice to the chorus rejoicing in Australia’s relatively high vaccination cover. Rates of 80 per cent and 90 per cent are milestones, not destinations. With one in five or one in 10 unvaccinated, the risk to those more vulnerable, many elderly, vaccinated but with waning immunity is unacceptable.
The same proportions of children attending daycare and pre- and primary school will come from homes with unvaccinated, highly mobile young parents and adolescent siblings. Until they can become eligible for vaccination, children under 12 deserve to be fully cocooned by immunised adults.
As a clinical immunologist, I know that people who can’t be vaccinated on medical grounds are vanishingly rare. We now have hard data to support this: 19 million Australians have received at least one dose and only 556, or 0.003 per cent, have met the criteria for permanent medical exemption.
The main focus now should be on helping across the line those who have been convinced that the vaccines aren’t safe for them. This is for their benefit as well as the community’s. In my experience, almost all are reasonable people, unreasonably influenced by others with loud voices and self-appointed expertise.
It saddens me to still hear of women considering pregnancy or who are pregnant avoiding vaccination based on internet opinion when there is irrefutable evidence of a higher risk from Covid in pregnancy – of maternal death, miscarriage, premature birth and stillbirth.
Please, more focus on how far we still have to go and less on how far we’ve come. I’ll start rejoicing when we reach 99 per cent; that is a destination of which to be proud.
Professor Graeme Stewart, Westmead Institute for Medical Research, NSW