More ABC Silliness in the Silly Season

It is officially the silly season again, when people tend to wear funny red and green hats and have way too many office parties, but perhaps the silliest of all the current seasonal excesses comes to us courtesy of the government-owned, taxpayer-funded and ‘progressive’-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) which still advertises itself as Australia’s leading media organisation delivering the ‘most trusted’ and ‘reliable’ news which has been rigorously ‘fact-checked’ and informed by ‘in-depth expert analysis’.

The ABC clearly excels at self-promotion but Australia’s state media giant is neither trusted nor reliable nor informed by genuine expertise nor even by real debate but you probably know that already, particularly after the ABC’s all-you-can-eat-buffet approach of pseudoscience, fear, panic and obligatory obedience to authority during the worst years of the Great ‘Covid’ Delirium, when the ABC (or ‘Auntie’, as it is affectionately known to its devotees) interrupted its regular programming schedule of Trump hatred and woke sermonising to misinform and propagandise the Australian population into meek submission to Covid hysteria and the disastrous government policy prescription.

Even now, just when the Reign of Covid Policy Terror has substantially subsided and all but the terminally terrified and the dedicated followers of ‘The Science’ and other Covid fashions have moved on, the ABC still refuses to accept that the ‘pandemic’ was nothing of the sort and that all the psychological manipulation, heavy-handed policing, made-up ‘rules’ and damaging ‘mandates’ were absolute garbage spun out of the perceived political need to be seen to be ‘doing something’.

Still stuck in a Covid time-warp, the ABC, which was a zealous purveyor of all the virus nonsense, is still at it with their latest offering on “How to stay COVID-safe this festive season, from the latest vaccine advice to tips for shopping and socialising” by one Jessica Riga, an (alleged) journalist at the ABC.

After five years, she sombrely informs us, “COVID-19 isn't going away yet” and “COVID-19 doesn't take a break over the festive season”. Apparently unable to locate any dissenting views, our ‘journalist’ cites just the one ‘expert’, the “infectious diseases physician and clinical microbiologist, Paul Griffin” who, although conceding that “case numbers are ‘essentially meaningless now’” (to which the obvious retort is “what do you mean, ‘now’”), delightedly reports that there are other indicators of “high levels of COVID-19 activity”.

Our carefully chosen ‘expert’ still rabbits on about the number of his patients “who have been hospitalised with COVID at the moment, including some with severe disease". This ‘evidence’ is all very conveniently vague, the better to create alarm without any definitional clarity or data-driven analysis needed. It’s all anecdotal noise based on meaningless PCR/RAT/LFT tests. That our expert’s patients could be in hospital because it was the Virtuous Vaccine of Deliverance that has made them crook or prone to worse infections, particularly if, as is most likely, they are the frail elderly with comorbidities, does not get a look in. Thanks to ABC ‘journalism’, we are left none the wiser about any actual Covid caseload this Christmas.

Fortunately, the policy wizards who gave us the made-up ‘social-distancing ‘rule of six feet of separation, the Magic Mask of Salvation and the Glorious Vaccine (and what is the Golden Oldie slogan, “nobody is safe until everybody is safe”, but an implicit admission that the stuff didn’t work) are on hand to keep dispensing more pandemic ‘wisdom’ in case everyone gets too complacent.

Top of the list of things you can do to defend against Covid over Christmas, according to the ABC is, no prizes for guessing, an “updated vaccine rolling out in December”, fresh from the approval mills of “Australia's national drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration” which “approved Pfizer's newest vaccine in October”. This latest, must-have pandemic accessory for the Covid hysteric targets the “Omicron sub-variant JN.1”. Well, that’s good to know, otherwise we would be left defenceless unless we could identify the latest virus villain, and its miracle antidote (is anyone, apart from ‘experts’, and the ABC, and Pfizer, of course, keeping track of all the ‘sub-variants’?).

The latest-model ‘vaccine’ “will be available for anyone over six months of age from December 9”, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief, even if it will, for some unfortunates, be their last breath once they upgrade to the JN.1 model.

But let’s not leave the Marvellous Mask out of the picture – we should all “consider masking up in busy shopping centres” over the holiday period or, at least, avoiding peak times because “masks are still something we should be very much comfortable using, particularly for high risk people because they do help to a degree”, says our alleged ‘expert’, despite all the copious evidence that masks don’t, and never have, worked against aerosol-borne viruses.

“And if you are sick, the expert advice is to stay home”, says the ABC, stating the obvious, although if it is just a cold, as ‘Covid’ probably is, that would be silly, joy-sapping safety-firstism. As would avoiding spending time with friends and grannies and young children be a joyless Yuletide experience which the ‘expert-informed’ ABC also recommends if anyone so much as suspects they have the Great Cough of Catastrophe. Some wondrous family get-together it would be this Christmas if we were to follow the ABC’s stale advice – is the average ABC journalist related to Ebenezer Scrooge by any chance?

The ABC’s cherry-picked expert tries to cope with Covid’s loss of ability to terrify the populace by saying that “obviously we've transitioned now with COVID-19 that we certainly don't want to dictate what people do over this holiday season” but, what the heck, a bit of mask paranoia and jab-frenzy will be good for old times’ sake.

After five years of ‘silly’ during the ‘pandemic’, the ABC is still at it this silly season. Is it any wonder that trust in the ABC is still swirling down the Covid-induced plughole of irrelevance. It’s a good thing they can count on all those taxpayer dollars keeping them afloat.