They were the divas of the pandemic bio-security theatre crowd in Australia, with their names set up in lights every night of the week in a long-running season feted by all the critics and lapped up by all the show-goers. They made you feel that they were ‘The Science’. They fervently believed in the efficacy of every preposterous ‘public health’ intervention called for in the script. They were the Chief Health and Medical Officers in every state and federal jurisdiction in Australia.

Their position afforded them the absolute power to micromanage the personal health choices and lives of 26 million Australians for four years. Many are still basking in self-glory and self-justification. They remain comfortable with their performance during the Covid years.

The ‘public health’ expert caste saved many Australians from viral doom thanks to the restrictions they imposed. No one’s business was destroyed, no one lost their job, and no one had their lives pointlessly upended. No one died or ever got sick from their quasi-religious vaccine evangelism…

None of these bad things ever happened, all thanks to their unceasing efforts to ‘keep us all safe’. Efforts such as the order to only leave home once a day and not travel more than a specified distance from home (in South Australia, 1.5 km was at one time deemed to be the safe limit beyond which there be Covid dragons). All the three-seater benches being taped off so that only two could sit on them at a time. The mask mandates that made life hell for self-respecting and free-breathing citizens.

The virus-free eating areas where a mask was not required when sitting but had to be worn when standing up or going to the loo (even though a short person standing would be at the same height as a tall person sitting). The police, with tape measures in hand, enforcing the ‘density limits’ for shops (resulting in long queues outside supermarkets). The kilometres-long traffic snarls during the drive-through ‘testing’ mania.

The quasi-religious QR sign-in ritual for contact tracing. The compulsory isolation and quarantine attendant on a mostly meaningless ‘positive’ PCR result, enforced by police making unannounced calls to check you hadn’t taken your diseased body out into the world like some latter-day Typhoid Mary. The magnificently bonkers supermarket check-out Plexiglas Screen of Safety.

If there was a high water mark in the flood of damaging ‘pandemic’ nonsense that engulfed Australia, it may well belong to the South Australian Chief Public Health Officer. Their advice, delivered in all solemnity to football crowds, was that they were to ‘duck and do not touch’ any errant footy that came their way over the fence at Adelaide Oval because it may have been infected with the virus from travelling Collingwood players from the plague state of Victoria, who had been granted a travel exemption in June 2021. A Covid lackey was subsequently rolled out to say this remark had ‘been taken out of context’ and that you could, probably, safely touch the footy providing you used hand sanitiser. This ‘clarification’ was nonsense raised to the power of bat-droppings crazy.

I do not believe our public health policy wizards, who found themselves thrust into unaccustomed positions of power, thought about anything other than this one pathogen. They appeared to be smitten with a wild fanaticism over a virus that is the equivalent of a cold for most people and a flu for some. They did not predict or account for the carnage their advice caused. They took us on a medieval jaunt back to a world of demons and magic and incantations and superstitious rituals and witch-burnings of dissenters. They wiped out three centuries of the Enlightenment and scientific progress. To these sins, they remain unrepentant.

Some deity or other was said to be slow to anger but quick to forgive, an admirable motto, but one I struggle to reconcile with regard to our public health bureaucrats.

There is some consolation in the fact that most Australians are not really listening to them anymore, including their sort-of-half-hearted advice to keep up with the latest booster (in Australia, a mere 3.3 per cent of Australians aged 18-64 were ‘fully immunised’ as at February 2024 and only a third (33.6 per cent) of people aged 75+ (those allegedly most vulnerable to the Worst Disease Ever) have bothered to get the recommended up-to-date jab. We are over it.

The health bureaucrats’ power to disrupt and damage our lives has collapsed further than the Pfizer share price, so there is some satisfaction in that. But there is no accountability.

Australians were royally conned by our High Priests of Covid hysteria, who will not apologise because either they are genuinely blind to the futile madness they instigated, or they wish to escape confronting the social wreckage they were responsible for.

The latter may explain why the Australian Senate has, for a third time, rejected a federal Senate motion proposing an investigation into excess mortality during the Covid vaccine rollout. The usual suspects (Labor, the Greens, and some independents) voted it down with only the Covid Good Guys (Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation) supporting it, along with the usually ‘progressive’ ACT independent, David Pocock. They were joined by the Liberals and the Nationals, who are a bit late to the party (remember Scotty from AstraZeneca?) but better late than never…

What’s that old saying? Oh yes, ‘Nothing to fear, nothing to hide.’