The Wisdom of Sir Humphrey

South Australia’s state government to review its handling of Covid

“Never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be”: Sir Humphrey’s cynical operating principle for government looks to have been activated again by the decision of the South Australian government to set up a review into the state’s handling of Covid.

Background

The SA Health Department has announced that the review will be conducted by the state’s ‘emergency management committee’ (which had carriage of the ‘pandemic’).   “It will assist SA Health to reflect on best practice, enabling us to be better prepared for future emergencies”, said the state’s Chief Public Health Officer, Professor Nicola Spurrier – the aim is to “determine best practice to keep South Australians safe and healthy”.  It will seek input from “key health staff”.

The review will be assisted by ‘independent experts’ from the management consultancy, BRM Advisory, which will pocket a breezy $75,000 for the jaunt.  BRM is well liked by governments in South Australia  - “we have acted for a majority of South Australia’s 68 Councils and State Government agencies across a number of key areas”, their website boasts, and, if they know what is good for themselves, they can continue their little gravy train ride courtesy of the taxpayer with a review that pleases the government and ensures future contract pickings with their state benefactors.

South Australia’s ‘Covid emergency’ officially lasted for 793 days (793 days too many – but more on that later) and “gave the SA Police Commissioner, Grant Stevens, the power to impose restrictions on the state, including border closures, lockdowns, social distancing limits, business closures and trading restrictions”.

My predictions for the review

(1)     Finding: ‘We did really well’

The review is to be an internal one, not a public one, as the state government reviews itself and only the views of “key health staff” will be sought.  Now, can you imagine any key health personnel saying ‘well, we stuffed up big time.  We must have been out of our tiny minds - there never really was a pandemic, as such things used to be understood, but we had to be seen to do something or risk lagging behind the pack of other ‘do something governments’ even at great and futile cost to our state economy, personal freedoms and civil liberties.  And, besides, we were just giving the politicians what we knew they wanted, even if what they wanted (Zero Covid) was barking mad.  Thus, I will be resigning in shame, embarrassment and disgrace’.  None of the “key health staff” will be saying anything like this, of course.  Not if they want to protect their career, they won’t.

The review will not seek the views of the victims of the useless but catastrophic ‘pandemic’ restrictions.  This is to be a review of the public health elite by the public health elite for the public health elite.  Guess who’s going to come out of that incestuous little setup smelling of pandemic roses as the review seeks to minimise the sheer radicalism and destructiveness of what these monkeys did.

They will rate themselves highly because to admit they got it so drastically wrong would be institutionally, professionally and personally damaging.  The victims of their decisions will remain voiceless and the consequences of the decisions of the public health ‘experts’ will remain unreviewed (apart from the ‘fact’, based on ropey modelling, that the restrictions prevented thousands of deaths by Covid).

(2)     “We could, perhaps, have done a little better in some areas but only minor tweaking is needed”

To maintain the facade of a rigorous, independent, objective review, there may be some government decisions that come under scrutiny as just a little bit over-the-top.  Perhaps, for example, the ban on drinking alcohol while standing but not whilst sitting, or taking your mask off whilst eating at a restaurant but putting it back on when leaving or going to the toilet (lest we forget those bits of craziness).  Or the magnificently dolally Plexiglass Supermarket Screen of Safety. 

The review may even let us have a chuckle over the egregious howlers by our chief pandemic wizard, Professor Spurrier (aka the Nutty Professor), who, in peak panic mode, once advised football fans ‘don’t touch that football’ if it got kicked into the crowd because, somehow, the players, fresh from their protected, virus-free ‘bubble’ yet still magically symptomatic, would infect the ball with their mere touch thus transferring the Virus of Doom to whoever touches it in the Outer. 

(3)     Questions that will not be asked

There will be no tough questioning of ‘key health staff’ about the sacred cows of Covid policy like border closures, or lockdowns, or mask mandates or vaccine mandates and passports.  Or the ban on leaving your house more than once a day and then not travelling more than 1.5 kms (yes, really, they decreed this and police patrolled the suburbs to check on mobile people’s distance from home).  Or any of the preposterous ‘virus mitigation’ policies that tumbled from the fevered minds of the ‘public health’ caste.

They will not be asked for how their definition of a ‘case’ of Covid is in any way a clinical one and how this new pandemic junk science contributed to the pseudoscience of virus ‘mitigation’.  Or what the cycle threshold was for the PCR test that made it the dodgiest metric possible of an infection.  They will not be asked about the Diamond Princess, the Covid Cruise Ship of Death which turned out to be an absolute fizzer to even the mostly elderly passengers.  Or questions like ‘was there ever really a pandemic?’  Or ‘was there ever really a killer virus?’.  Or ‘was it ever right to mandate bivalent mRNA gene-jabs that had been tested on only eight mice (which all died)?’

How about the statistical cover-up of the hospitalisation data by vaxx status or the uncritical acceptance of the TGA’s laughable claim that only fourteen people in all of Australia have ever been killed because of the Covid vaxx, and all driven by, as they admit in unguarded moments, that the release of bad news about vaxx harms and deaths would ‘encourage vaccine hesitancy’!

So, there will be no review of the double figure percentage excess mortality rate congruent with the vaxx rollout, the highest excess death rate since the Second World War when a whole bunch of young, healthy Australian men died suddenly (for which a little matter of a shooting war was unrelated, according to the logic of the Covid data analysts).

There will be no forensic, or even cursory, reflection on whether the state-orchestrated propaganda campaign about the New Black Death was deliberately designed to engineer compliance to the pandemic dictatorship of the Public Health Experts.  For to say that any of the fear propaganda, the dodgy science, the damaging and useless ‘virus mitigation’ measure were  ethically wrong in principle, scientifically fraudulent and politically authoritarian would be to make the government look utterly dreadful.

There will, however, be just enough criticism (very little, and on inconsequential second and third order issues such as vaccine distribution logistics, that are posed entirely within the hegemonic pandemic management framework) to lend the overarching strategy of totalitarian virus mitigation an undeserved legitimacy in the same way that the carefully calibrated, very small and very occasional win on the pokies lends the whole rip-off gambling industry legitimacy.

(4)     The review will be Woke

The review will be as woke as all get out.  Spurrier has indicated as much – she has, from the outset, “flagged a central concern will be how ‘to protect those more vulnerable across our diverse communities”.  A woke aura will suffuse the review not just because anything from officialdom has to be woke these days but because a woke focus (on inequities in access to all the ‘protective’ pandemic measures undertaken to ‘keep us safe’, in the language of the pandemicists) will be a distraction from the issues that really matter (the triumph of tyranny over freedom, the reign of pseudoscience over real science, the elevation of medical harm over actual health) whilst reinforcing the message that everything they did worked quite splendidly but just needs a bit of woke fine-tuning to be even better than splendid next time.

So expect a lot of earnest criticism about how the government could have  better ‘protected’ Aborigines and ethnic minorities by making them more subject to lockdowns, ‘vaccine’ coercion, etc.  The review will recommend that more [mis]information will need to be provided in more languages so that brown South Australians aren’t overlooked in future whilst special vaccination squads staffed with quisling Aborigines will need to go out country to bring the miracle jab to more black South Australians.

All of this assumes that the ‘pandemic’ response was the right one in its conception but slightly deficient in execution which can be addressed by being more ‘inclusive’ and directing more resources towards (and putting more pressure on) officially-designated woke Victim groups.

(5)     The review will be full of strategic silences

The following words will be nowhere to be found in the review’s final report: Sweden.  Florida.  Ivermectin.  Myocarditis.  Turbo-charged multi-site cancers.  Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

A post-hoc cost-benefit analysis of the ‘pandemic’ policy measures will also be missing, as they were missing-in-action during the three years of guess-work and policy theatrics.  Because all the destruction and disruption was for nothing, and because this can never be officially admitted, there will be no outcomes-based evaluation of the policies (at least beyond the ‘lives were saved’ Chant of the Experts).

(6)     Loyalty will be shown to the supra-state and supra-national health behemoths

National Cabinet, created ex-nihilo to shunt the already limited accountability of state governments even further behind closed doors, will be praised as the ideal vehicle for managing a ‘national emergency’ and not a way for the policy architects at state level to dodge responsibility and hide behind National-Cabinet-In-Confidence confidentiality clauses for the next thirty years.

Neither will anything be found wanting in the WHO’s proposed new pandemic treaty which will give birth to a one-world government for ‘pandemic management’ under a perma-emergency, allowing national governments to take shelter behind the WHO.  Divine revelation from on high courtesy of the Big-Pharma-controlled WHO will continue to pass for science and justify the actions of the faithful health bureaucrat in WHO member countries.  After all, the phrase “we were just following WHO/TGA guidelines” served the state government so well last time that it will be good for another run next go round.

Conclusion

The Covid policy debacle in South Australia, as elsewhere in the world, lacked all transparency so it would be the sheerest optimism to expect that an internal, behind-closed-doors review will do anything other than continue this secretive, authoritarian feature of the ‘pandemic’.

Instead of accountability we will get self-congratulatory back-slapping from this review which is the offspring of the very same ‘pandemic emergency’ that gave us 793 days of lockdown boredom, crushed small businesses, border closures, forced vaccination, health apartheid, manic ‘testing’, the loathsome mask, ‘social distancing’ absurdities too numerous to mention, and economic mayhem.

Health tyranny will get a big bureaucratic tick of approval and the same formula – foster fear, declare an ’emergency’, proselytise a ‘solution’ that doesn’t work but creates harm, censor the hell out of any dissenters, and go all police-state to enforce obedience - will escape unscathed, if even noticed, by the so-called ‘review’.

Let’s check back later in the year to see which of my predictions I have got right.  Until then, you get to vote on the following:

Three Wise ‘Public Health Experts’ consider their Covid handiwork