17 April

You don’t have to be very old to remember when Australia took pride in eliminating disease. Now gone in social media kidult society, where we celebrate ‘living with infections’. Because otherwise we can’t go out to restaurants, gigs and fly overseas on holidays for a while. (Eliminating cervical cancer was controlling an infection.) Australia eliminated Covid. We were one of the first in the world to do it. We discovered it’s actually pretty easy to control and eliminate. Simpletons confused elimination with eradication. We eliminated measles, it doesn’t mean it was eradicated from the face of the Earth. It just means it’s not in community circulation, with only occasional outbreaks. But Scott Morrison wanted to go to an election saying he’d ended the pandemic, and let’s all get back to gigs, and flying overseas, and restaurants, doing no disease control at all. He lost the election. He got a gong for his efforts in the pandemic, lol. He destroyed public health in Australia. He celebrated doing it.