To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late…

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever modern mass casualty event, still ongoing. 1/ https://t.co/eFdtpWiIOI

Here are the projections the Doherty group provided National Cabinet, of likely infections, hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths, across age groups, with low/medium/high initial ‘seeding’ infections, first at 70% vaccination rates. 6-month projections. /2 https://t.co/AoWKpY3Jzh

This assumed ‘baseline’ (i.e. minimal) other public health measures, as Cabinet had requested, and partially effective test-trace-isolation-quarantine (TTIQ). Note that the zeroes in the under 16 column mean there were no vaccinations planned for that age group, so no…/3 https://t.co/YwIunRpfvl

…projected data could be provided there. Just pause and look at the numbers in this table. The huge numbers of infections and deaths, across every age group. Mitigated next in the modelling by the same projections re-run, but this time with ‘optimal’ TTIQ. /4 https://t.co/9u1YylfJ4J

This is the projections with optimal TTIQ, and at 70% vaccination rates. Still numbers that in ordinary times would spell ‘public health disaster’. But there’s much more to this story yet, if you have the patience for it. Because the Doherty group then went on to model…/5 https://t.co/zWRtqPiEff

…the same numbers, but this time with 80% vaccination rates. Remembering National Cabinet were pondering what vaccination rate would be the trigger for ‘opening up’. That’s still a LOT of infections (particularly in children), and deaths. But National Cabinet’s focus was…/6 https://t.co/XKXl6XepVW

…always going to be the middle of these charts, hospitalisations. Infections and deaths? No interest. The previous Prime Minister had said multiple times that having enough hospital beds was the metric he would be using. We were going to get sick and die, like it or not. /7 https://t.co/13cJdSCnRO

As an aside, I don’t remember ONE media outlet asking any questions around this data, at the time, or since. About the *planned* mass infection and deaths. It was all there, in black and white. And there’s more. Because the assumptions the Doherty group made clear,…/8

…that we should start with a low number of ‘seeding’ infections, that we should use basic public health measures and optimal TTIQ (and even then there would be a very large number of infections and deaths), were ignored by National Cabinet. They let it rip, in late-2021. /9

Driven by a PM looking to an early-2022 poll, and a NSW government which became the Trojan Horse by ditching major public health protections in the last quarter of 2021. The infection and death numbers dwarfed even the worst (dire) projections in the Doherty modelling. /10

Even worse, National Cabinet and NSW let it rip while vaccination rates and had not even reached 70%, nationally, let alone the 80% best-case of the Doherty modelling. Australia’s vaccination rate didn’t pass 80% until late-March, 2022. Many defend that let it rip by saying…/11

…’o that was Omicron, not in the Doherty modelling’. But WA, which resisted the let it rip decision for longer, didn’t have the same explosion of infections and deaths that the let it rip States experienced, even with Omicron, until it too relaxed protections. /12 https://t.co/ObK53OVlO3

There are important questions to be asked here. If it wasn’t politics, the answers would send people to jail. Over 20,000 Australians died in 2022 alone as a result of the let it rip decision. They’re still dying, hundreds per week. Millions of Australians have been infected. /13

Many, multiple times. The clear cause of this debacle is politicians, and a combination of ideological belief about State interventions, and election-driven actions. But the expert community can’t escape accountability here either. The numbers in the Doherty modelling…/14

…for example should have prompted any expert to say ‘you should not do this’. It wasn’t said, the best we got was ‘if you are going to do this, make sure you have some basic public health measures in place, and do excellent contact tracing and isolation’. /15

None of which occurred, which surprised nobody with even the smallest experience of politics. And to this day other experts stand on the sidelines and cheer on the tsunami of infections and deaths, as we implement a single-page propaganda sheet from a US free-market…/16

…think tank as our national public health strategy. Read it, everything in it is our current ‘strategy’, in every detail. That’s what’s really gone since late-2021 in Australia, we didn’t ‘follow the science’ and then ‘balance’ the science against the economy. /17 https://t.co/Lq5PRpQKue

Politicians faked interest in the science until they had a vaccine that it could pretend was the ‘end’ of the pandemic. Since that time political ideology has been our public health response. A political ideology that doesn’t even believe the public is a thing. /18

And the same politicians are not even implementing vaccinations anyway, rates flatlined at let it rip and have never recovered. Just as we should have learned from decades of climate inaction, the ‘balance’ politicians speak about is no balance at all. it’s 100% focus on…/19

…the ‘economy’, and 0% on everything else. What measures remain, for Covid, in this ‘balance’? Anyone? People should be in jail for what’s occurred. I’m not holding my breath that will happen, when ultimate authority is vested in popularity and not outcomes. /end