Equally astonishing has been the willingness of governments to reverse most of their earlier policies, originally enacted at a time of far less COVID. At the drop of a hat. Without explanation or apology.

On the other hand, we are also witnessing a doubling down of the COVID class on vaccines and boosters, despite their marked ineffectiveness, and the international ramping up of the “pandemic preparedness industry”.

MOTIVATIONS

Hence there are several stories here, of different reactions and of different motivations for these reactions.

Let us start with the “moving on”.

COVID hardly featured in the election campaign, for example, in any way at all.

It was a huge non-issue, whether in terms of the imposition of draconian measures to stem a non-pandemic during 2020-21, the massive spike of cases this year, or the failure of government policies to make a dent in the progress of the virus at any stage.

In a classic example of the late political economist Anthony Downs’ “issue attention cycle”, we have seemingly just “moved on” from fretting about COVID. A flood, a war and an election or two have assisted in the shepherding process.

This ho-hum attitude in 2022 confirms my suspicion that, had we been spared the COVID hysteria in the media and everywhere else from early 2020, then just about no one would even have known there was a thing called COVID.  (A little like climate change).

Perhaps the Canadian podcaster James Corbett is right: “People don’t fundamentally change when they ‘wake up’…”

Hence people scratching their heads at the lockdown slip seamlessly from “what was that all about?” to “ho-hum”.

If you really want an example of the bizarre cognitive dissonances doing the rounds, check out this from the low-information Ben Fordham of 2GB: “Mark Latham is calling it. The One Nation leader says vaccine mandates need to go [clearly true]. There was a time when they were most probably needed. But that time is over.”

What? They were needed? They were never needed! They were always a con. And a vicious con at that.

And the current pandemic of the vaccinated proves it. Fordham surely must know this. He needs to use his platform to encourage the punters to turn on the politicians who pushed the vaccine mandates.

But perhaps the non-reaction to the spike reflects something deeper and broader than unthinking nonchalance.

There has been an equivalent non-reaction to governments backflipping on COVID theatre and COVID measures. There may be a reason for this.

Certainly, among the pro-lockdown punters, there has been a total unwillingness to reflect critically on what they did to us. Is it forgiveness? Is it a lingering faith in the compassionate motives of government?

POVERTY

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson suggests the following: “If the lockdowns plunged hundreds of millions into acute poverty it wasn’t because of the lockdowns; in some mysterious way the virus itself had forbidden those people to work. 

“Moving goalposts and after-the-fact justifications are not a new problem. We see this everywhere. Every project manager has experience of targets being changed, of weak excuses, unrealistic plans and budgets. And, of course, there is always the tendency to try to cover up what happened. But even so, the stakeholders not directly responsible for the execution usually realise failure when it happens. 

“But this is not happening now. We, the public, are the most important stakeholder and it is not us who make the decisions or are responsible for the execution. What is new is how we unquestioningly accept every new goal, every justification, how ready we are to forget today what we were convinced of yesterday, how willingly we go for the next booster believing, truly believing the reason the last one failed to protect us was just bad luck.

“We have collectively accepted a parallel world, a parallel set of truths, and however far it is from actual reality does not matter in the least. Our goal is not to eradicate the disease, not to live with it and minimize the harm it causes, our goal is to sustain our belief in the cult leaders, no matter how often they mislead us; with every lie, every shifted target, every excuse, our faith only grows stronger.

“With every excuse we accept, with every denial we echo, every misguided action we support, we entangle ourselves more and more deeply; by each step, we take a higher stake in the narrative, and the higher it gets, the more fiercely we defend our parallel set of truths; the harder it becomes to break away and accept reality.”

Not just indifference, then, but investment in a failed ideology that is, for some, too embarrassing to admit and for others, too hard to let go of.

The latter is “the stake in the narrative” of which Siglaugsson speaks. The first is a little like the famous characters of the “panic run” in James Thurber’s The Day the Dam Broke, a true tale of a whole town in Ohio, who, being taken in by the rumoured threat of a flood stampeded out of town. The threat proved to be a false alarm and the herd-like behaviour of the townspeople made them look like fools. Afterwards, it was never, ever spoken of again. 

The story was mostly buried by the local press; The Columbus Dispatch reported the chaos on page 8 – perhaps because many of the newspaper’s employees had themselves fled the scene. One reporter sheepishly admitted to biographer Harrison Kinney, “There was a silent agreement among us on the paper that the panic run was best forgotten.”

EMBARRASSMENT

These two reactions, embarrassment and deep investment in ideology, allow politicians like Mark McGowan (and possibly now Dominic Perrottet, oddly slower to do so than McGowan) casually to reverse vaccine mandates without anyone even blinking.

McGowan knows that the voters won’t turn on him, that their faith in his earlier fascism will continue. Just look at Ben Fordham. “They were needed then”.

Despite this apparent post-lockdown nonchalance, also seen in the much lower take-up of boosters than occurred with the earlier, equally useless vaccines, the powers-that-be are sticking to their silence and, on the very rare occasions when they are pressed, their cliches.

Vaccines saved lives! Vaccines reduced illness! As time has gone on, these responses have been shown to be vacuous and self-serving.

Not only did the COVID class make people get vaccines against their better judgement, they have forced the jab on little children, who do not remotely need it, they sacked the unjabbed themselves, they stood by when third parties sacked the unjabbed, and to this day offer no compensation, no apologies for the greatest public health fraud in the nation’s history.

Not only are they sticking to the script, they will not hesitate to use all the draconian, discredited COVID measures again and again in the future world of forever pandemics.

And, all the while, we will continue to sign over health policy to faceless international bodies like the World Health Organisation (WHO), controlled by China.

The Brownstone Institute author David Bell has referred to the recently emerged and now turbo-charged “pandemic preparedness industry”.

These new and powerful groups have a permanent channel of communication and shared interests with Big Pharma and with WHO, and often shared membership as well.

The absence of remorse for COVID policy failure on the part of public officials isn’t confined to Australia, nor is the determination to do it all again and to ramp up the supra-national public health architecture to embed even further the failed approaches of 2020-22.

The American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are leading the charge, as Jeffrey Tucker notes: “There is no remorse at the CDC. Far from it. The model of virus control deployed over the last 27 months is now part of normal operations. It wants it institutionalised.

“The bureaucracy has now codified this into a new online tool that instructs cities and States precisely of what they are supposed to do given a certain level of community spread. The new tool doesn’t say lockdowns as such but the entire model of containment via masks and distancing is baked in, and it can be easily expanded at will.

His headline reads: CDC Wants Its COVID Regime Made Permanent.

INFECTIONS

Ian Miller from the Unmasked Substack also takes up the issue of the malign doubling down by the vaxx class: “Remember when the COVID vaccines were going to entirely prevent infections? Those were the days, right?

“Joe Biden said that if you got the vaccines, you wouldn’t get COVID. Dr. Fauci said the vaccines were 100 per cent effective. Rochelle Walensky was on television news explaining that according to the real world data collected by the CDC, the vaccinated could not get or spread COVID.

“There are endless examples of experts and media outlets parroting the same talking points – the vaccines stop the spread of the virus to others, making the decision to get vaccinated a societal ‘good’.”

“They could not have been more wrong — the vaccines conclusively do not stop transmission or infection.

“Instead of accepting that inarguable reality and accurately communicating that getting vaccinated was exclusively an individual decision that did nothing to keep others ‘safe’, the self-proclaimed infallible leaders of The Science™ doubled then tripled then quadrupled down.”

Chilling stuff, and only too reminiscent of the attempts in 2021 by both the Victorian and NSW governments to massively extend their emergency powers. In Victoria’s case, to make them permanent and political. “Expanded at will”. Read it and weep.

As top-rating US broadcaster Tucker Carlson says: “We’ve seen this movie before. It’s a recipe for full government control of life.”

I cannot imagine that either Daniel Andrews or Mark McGowan would object to any of this. Perhaps Australians might, if they thought about it at all.

But no, they have all “moved on”, and moving on includes a total absence of reflection on what has been given up over the past two years.

Nor should we expect any apologies from the vaccine fanatics in the Murdoch press. Nor from the venal, career-obsessed, media-mentions-focused academics who continue to collect their pay cheques from the Gates Foundation and the Chinese Communist Party.