Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
"The costs of our lockdowns were 68 times the benefits" - Gigi Foster
1.3k Plays2 years ago
Update: Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
The pandemic may be coming to an end, but the virus of groupthink that infected our institutions still runs rampant. Host Will Kingston chats with economist and author Gigi Foster about how Covid exposed an egregious failure of competence and courage in the sciences and academia, where the scientific method and academic debate were shamefully tossed aside. The question is, can they be saved?
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Buy The Great Covid Panic here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Spectator Australia and Australiana Series
00:00:00
Speaker
The Spectator Australia magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivalled authority. Subscribe today at spectator.com.au forward slash subscription.
00:00:27
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life.
COVID Impact and Institutional Failures
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm Will Kingston. Reflecting on COVID, I see two stories. The first is hopefully reaching its conclusion. A nasty but by no means historically lethal virus emerges out of China. A wave of fear grips the world. Western governments respond with draconian interventions that weren't aligned with previous pandemic planning.
00:00:56
Speaker
and they have consequences that we will be suffering from long after COVID is seasonal and endemic. We know that story. The story we don't know as well is closer to its beginning, and it's arguably more scary. It's the story of how our societal institutions became so beholden to groupthink that they discarded their traditional roles and let the first story happen, becoming de facto tools of soft authoritarian states.
00:01:22
Speaker
The media went from scrutinisers to cheerleaders, and opposition political parties went mute.
Gigi Foster on COVID: Critique and Analysis
00:01:28
Speaker
But perhaps the most egregious failure of competence and courage was in the sciences and academia, where the scientific method and academic debate were willfully tossed away. As we now discover so many truths that turned out to be false, with deadly consequences, there remains very little accountability for these modern day zealots.
00:01:48
Speaker
At least one prominent academic had the moral courage not to fall into this trap. Gigi Foster is a professor of economics at UNSW. She works in diverse fields, including corruption, lab experiments, behavioral economics, and Australian policy. She's authored several books, the most recent of which is titled The Great COVID Panic. It's striking in its scope. It's one of the very few pieces of analysis that bothered to examine interventions like lockdowns with a holistic cost-benefit analysis.
00:02:17
Speaker
and the findings are damning for all Western governments. Gigi, welcome to Australiana. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate the invitation. I'd like to chat about both of those stories that I referenced in the intro, the failure of COVID intervention specifically, and then the wider and ongoing failure of our institutions. Let's start with COVID.
00:02:40
Speaker
Some people will listen to what you have to say and dismiss it as the benefit of hindsight, but that's not true, is it? Let's go back in time. The WHO declares a pandemic in March 2020. Governments start locking down soon after that. When did you first have concerns about the policy response?
00:03:01
Speaker
pretty much as soon as we were hearing about these society-wide lockdowns. So anything that was going to be applicable to all population members seemed to me to be alarmingly wrong because the data, even then, even in March 2020 and February 2020, made it very clear that this was a virus that was not dangerous to young, healthy people. And so I said very surprisingly to my producer on my ABC podcast in late March
00:03:30
Speaker
2020 just directly on the air that I thought lockdowns were the wrong response to COVID. And we should be focusing our attention on the vulnerable who were the elderly and aggressively protecting them, which is, of course, essentially what the Great Barrington Declaration came out and declared in October of that year. And I thought it was just common sense. I mean, I truly didn't think it would be much of a, you know, there wouldn't be much of a storm raised up by that comment. But as it happened, not only my producer was somewhat taken aback, but certainly my co-host, Peter Martin,
00:03:58
Speaker
was pretty much flummoxed by that comment and the readership or the listenership of the ABC just delivered huge amounts of mail back to them saying this woman is a danger to public health and she should be taken off the air and she should retract what she said.
Public Fear and Political Response During COVID
00:04:12
Speaker
And that was the beginning of me recognizing that this was not a scenario in which we were going to be able to have
00:04:17
Speaker
rational scientific discussion about what we were doing. This was something different. This was something I had not seen in at least as stark relief previously. It was going to need all of my tools of analysis to understand what was happening and how I could best fight the damage that I knew was going to happen from these processes. You mentioned that your
00:04:41
Speaker
response would have been essentially the focused protection of vulnerable people. And my understanding is that in the cracked glass in case of emergency strategic pandemic plans that most countries had, that was the essence of those plans. How did that thinking change so quickly to widespread quarantine of the healthy?
00:05:06
Speaker
Well, it's very interesting. Some people think that what happened is that populations were essentially enslaved by their governments, that the governments themselves were the first movers, shall we say, towards lockdowns. I think in the West, that's not the direction of causality. I think what happened, and we saw this if you were here in Australia in March 2020, what happened is that the population became extraordinarily fearful.
00:05:29
Speaker
extremely scared, really frightened, really anxious about this threat that had been ballooned out of proportion by the media stories.
00:05:38
Speaker
how people had been falling over in China and everyone's dying in Milan and New York has got too many bodies and they can't bury them. All these schools are very scary stories. People just really bought into that. And so they were the people, those actual everyday people on the street who pressed politicians to save them from the COVID threat. And you can see this change in the politicians' tunes by looking at the statements that came out of
00:06:03
Speaker
even Australian government mouths in March 2020. Earlier, even up to almost mid-March, the Australian people were getting all sorts of reasonable messages from their governments about, well, this is kind of a nasty virus, but if you're not older and sicker, you're probably OK, and wash your hands kind of thing. But then this really changed after the Ferguson report came out, the modeling that said huge numbers of people are going to die, and after people
00:06:31
Speaker
in Australia took that on board and just the fear just ramped so far up that the politicians felt, well, we have to be seen to do something here. It was the politicians logic, right? It wasn't, well, let's take a scientific approach. It was politics all the way. And so that's why it was that moment that courage was in absence in the Australian politics, right? That's when
00:06:53
Speaker
a politician who truly cares about his people in his country recognizes what's going on, recognizes that the people have been led down a garden path by these overblown media stories, looks at the actual data, realizes this is not the path to go down, and then embarks upon a contrary messaging campaign
00:07:12
Speaker
whereby he tries to tamp down the fear and he puts in place a logical plan of action that does make it look like something is going on, something's being done to address this fear, this threat, but it's in a proportional way. It's not this radical draconian restriction of freedoms that we've never seen before in peacetime Australia. And so that's what didn't happen. And once that failure happened, we were kind of on a path dependent trajectory.
00:07:37
Speaker
for many, many months and in fact years here in Australia. And we can talk about how that went here relative to other countries. But I think that was the key thing. It was the fear of the population. And in fact, in our book, The Great COVID Panic, we have a character with three characters to try to show what happened to different people, different kinds of people in the pandemic and how they reacted. One of them is Jane, and Jane is very important. She's the fearful member of the public.
00:07:59
Speaker
who basically is the force that presses the politicians to make that choice. Are you going to be courageous and a leader, or are you going to just pander to your own political needs?
00:08:09
Speaker
I've read the book and Jane actually caused me to reflect a lot on that initial public response. My thought was that this may be the first time in modern history where as a society, we have prioritized individual safety over a set of collective values. If you think back to our grandparents' generation in World War II, they knew that sending young men off to war, they were going to be running into machine gun fire.
00:08:39
Speaker
but they did it anyway because of a set of beliefs. Why do you think as a society we did at some point make that flip from individual safety or a focus on collective freedoms to that just single-minded focus on the safety of the individual?
Societal Values and COVID Response
00:08:57
Speaker
There's been a lot of talk about this and I'm trying to understand it. It's not as though we haven't had these kinds of group think examples in history. Obviously, the 1930s in Germany was a perfect example of group think as well.
00:09:09
Speaker
and the collective versus individual thing, you know, that tension has been in history as well. But I do think that there are some modern elements of society that have precipitated a bit of lack of standing up for some of the basically the enlightenment values that certainly in my generation, I mean, I'm generation X, we were still taught about enlightenment values and the importance of thinking critically and rationally and scientific approaches to things and having faith and realizing that,
00:09:38
Speaker
whatever you try to understand your world, you are only inevitably going to be able to understand a small fraction because there's this incredible complexity going on, right? And it's way bigger than you. It's way bigger than your brain. So to be a scientist, you have to have humility and you have to know that, you know, whatever you say, whatever you conclude is always subject to caveats. You're never certain in science. That's the difference between science and sort of a religious faith, right? Where there's this sort of non-testability aspect.
00:10:05
Speaker
Well, that is really not something that we teach much anymore to be honest. You know, that kind of approach, that kind of philosophy to living and to thinking about one's world. And of course, we've seen the fraying of community fabrics. We've seen the retreat into social media by young people. We've seen the reverse Flynn effect where people have been getting dumber because they
00:10:26
Speaker
seems to be partly because of social media and sort of the distractions of the modern age. And the thing is we don't really subject people to many risks these days in most professions. There are a few professions, and in fact, they were the ones who tended to be resisting some of the lockdowns because they regularly deal with many more risks than what COVID poses. But in a lot of professions, certainly yours and mine,
00:10:49
Speaker
Risk to life is very rare to encounter and so people kind of got out of the habit of that I mean and we even have antibiotics, you know, they didn't have antibiotics back in the 30s, right? So there's sort of a safer kind of cocoon that has grown up around people and plus the the weakening of community ties and notions of you know of success interpersonally and
00:11:11
Speaker
being truly what delivers happiness in this life rather than sort of success on the professional scale at some money or something like that.
Rebuilding Post-COVID: Education and Community
00:11:22
Speaker
And I think all of those things were contributing factors and because I think that I've actually been trying to work towards a number of
00:11:29
Speaker
changes and new initiatives since the COVID period, since we started on this madness, to try to remedy some of that. So I'm very active in education programs, for example, and trying to start new resistance groups that are promoting values of science and freedom, because those are the things we've lost. And also to promote the idea of love and empathy for one another.
00:11:51
Speaker
because that connection with one another, that's something that has been decayed as well by many of the sin stories that have been promulgated by the elite who want to stay in power. What's the way to control people that's best used and most successfully used across history? Well, you divide them, right? So you divide the whites from the blacks and the men from the women and the old from the young, and pretty soon everybody's fighting amongst themselves and not worrying about the fact that they are enslaved by somebody at the top who started all of these sin ideologies going.
00:12:19
Speaker
So for all of those reasons, I feel like I have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do in the resistance over the next five to 10 years.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yes, I agree and I think that's a very good summary. The point around risk and the general risk aversion of people today is particularly interesting and it's not just the risk aversion of individuals, it's the decisions of governments that they can make a risk calculus for consenting adults as opposed to giving that decision back to the people. I'm a fanatical rugby union fan and English rugby is in turmoil at the moment because
00:12:55
Speaker
The governing body of English rugby has unilaterally lowered the tackle height for rugby players from the shoulders to the waist. And the big response to that has been, we know that things like concussions are a potential risk in rugby.
00:13:13
Speaker
What we're saying is, as consenting adults, we choose to take that risk and play that game, and that in some respects is part of the thrill
Government Role and Compliance Culture During COVID
00:13:19
Speaker
of it. So it was a problem in COVID, but I think it is more generally, I think you're right, a problem that risk aversion on the individual level certainly has increased, but governments then are filling that void and saying, well, we're going to make risk decisions for you.
00:13:33
Speaker
very much so. And it's quite ironic, really, because in normal times, there is actually a role for governmental economists in back rooms to do evaluations based on costs and benefits for whole of society policies. In fact, that was conspicuously absent during the COVID period, which is one of the reasons why I wrote my actually what is my most recent book,
00:13:53
Speaker
which is with Sanjeev Sablok called Do Lockdowns and Border Closures Serve the Greater Good, which is a cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns in Australia. And we wrote that because for two and a half years there was crickets from the governments in Australia trying to defend their policies. I mean, I was expecting this naively for many months.
00:14:10
Speaker
finally realize it's not happening. And so at a social level, at a whole of society level, we do expect accountability of our governments through that mechanism, through the mechanism of showing us the, you know, show us the data. What's the expected cost of this policy? Overall, what's the expected benefit?
00:14:28
Speaker
But that's for a social level policy. When you're talking about the risks that an individual person takes, or indeed that a profession would take, it's much more difficult, much more nuanced. Because once you get to a level where the government is dictating exactly the level of risk that any person can take, as you say, you suck the joy right out of things. You don't accommodate human nature. Many people are more risk loving than others. I mean, we have a spectrum, thank goodness. Not everybody's the same. And so that's why freedom is important for heaven's sakes.
00:14:58
Speaker
Now, of course, we do have some overall rules, for example, seatbelts, right? That's a really good example. Or, you know, speed limits. And again, with those things, the government has been accountable to the people by saying, look, here's our data. We think, you know, overall, the benefits of having these things, you know, compared to the cost, I mean, is it really that costly to put a seatbelt on? And of course, with this, you know, the Audubon, some other countries like Germany don't have
00:15:24
Speaker
some of those constraints on people's behavior. But in Australia, we've chosen to have that. We are a bit more of a nanny state in general than a lot of other Western democracies. But certainly in COVID, that got really, really ramped up to a level that has never been seen before. And I think it's now permeating the political discussion. We've seen that, for example, with Jim Chalmers' recent
00:15:43
Speaker
you know, diatribe about how he's going to dictate the ideology that he wants into markets. I mean, what is going on, right? That's sort of, yes, what I think is the right way to behave is the way that everybody must behave. I mean, that is just nuts. That's why we in kindergarten. So the Australian people, unfortunately, I hate to say this, but we have brought this upon ourselves by being so complicit, being so passive, valuing compliance for compliance's sake.
00:16:08
Speaker
not recognizing the value of the, shall I say, tall poppy, but just different poppy, the value of the poppy that has a different color. We need to have that poppy because that poppy is going to be the source of innovation, the source of growth eventually in all of our institutions and our way of life. And so this notion of command and control, we've got to beat it out of not just the politicians, but the people as well.
00:16:31
Speaker
I'd summarize this whole issue as the don't kill grandma argument. I had so many difficult conversations during COVID with people where I tried to make the point that governments every day weigh up the balance, I guess, of the quality of life for the majority with the likelihood a particular policy will save or extend the lives of a minority. During COVID,
00:16:54
Speaker
The response to that was simply, well, I don't want grandma to die, even if it means shutting shops or closing down schools. And to your point, very, very few politicians had the courage or I guess the communication skills as well, to be able to make that point to the public. How would you have framed that in a way where you'd hope to try and change hearts and minds?
00:17:14
Speaker
Well, look, that's an excellent question. And I was trying to do this for years during this period. I was trying to communicate alternative messages. I was saying in many of my media appearances like this sort of thing that what we needed was a new political message. I was trying to voice my
00:17:30
Speaker
advice to politicians even though I never got a call from a politician during this period but I was trying to voice it through media to say look you can do this you can you can craft a new message and it needs to be we have got this virus's number we are in control of this virus we know things now even if it's not true we know things now that we didn't know in March 2020
00:17:51
Speaker
that are relevant to setting our policy. And, you know, that is still going to be somewhat true. For example, we learned about the value of proning. I remember that coming out in mid 2020, right, leaving people, you know, on their on their back was not so good. So you put them on the stomach instead that lets them breathe better and that was better for recovery. So, you know,
00:18:07
Speaker
There are some things that we've learned. We've certainly learned about the spread and ways that you can combat it. We have a whole early treatment store of knowledge now, which is basically suppressed by the mainstream media. But we certainly learned a lot there, thanks to the good work of good doctors around the world. So you can certainly spin that story. We now know more than we did.
00:18:29
Speaker
And we are also aware, unlike our knowledge in 2020, in March 2020, that these lockdowns and these other costs are very high. We are hurting ourselves every day that we continue these various restrictions, whether it's the masking or the compulsory vaccinations or the lockdowns or whatever. And so for the sake of Australia, we really need to stop that initial
00:18:55
Speaker
policy setting and we need to pivot to something else. And I really do think it could have been done. And instead what we saw was basically the turnover of politicians. You know, we had turnover in New South Wales, for example, and Paritay was much more able to chart a different path, right, than Berjiklian was. And I think it was just the path dependence. You know, she felt unable to strongly pivot. She was afraid she was going to be skewered in the media and by people.
00:19:23
Speaker
for being wishy-washy or something like that. Whereas the reality is that strength is the ability to reevaluate data and come to a different conclusion, recognize when you're wrong, and change course so that you don't cause more damage. Admitting that that's what had happened, so much damage that happened, I think was seen as politically untenable for her.
00:19:43
Speaker
And that was the tragedy. As soon as this started rolling, you just want to stop it as soon as possible, because the longer it goes on, the more people become complicit in it, the huger the damage is, and the much, much, much more difficult it becomes for any politician to extricate him or herself from that reality.
00:19:59
Speaker
And so that was why it was very frustrating and just, you know, I mean, maybe want to tear my hair out just every month, it would go by in 2020. Because I could see this was just setting up this path dependence, and we were going to be in it as you know, longer and longer, the longer that it's, you know, lasted. So it's a real mess. Now, of course, we see some signs of hope, and I am quite hopeful, but it certainly had lasted a lot longer than I initially expected.
Evaluating COVID Policies: Cost-Benefit Analysis
00:20:24
Speaker
One tool at our disposal to be able to have this conversation with the public in a more intelligent way is qualities, which I wasn't aware of until doing some reading on your work. Can you explain what qualities are and how they can be used to have this conversation in a more holistic way?
00:20:40
Speaker
Sure. So a lot of people put up the false dichotomy early in 2020 that people like me who were arguing against lockdowns were prioritizing the economy over lives, right? That there was implicitly a trade-off of lives versus the economy, right?
00:20:53
Speaker
And of course, that makes it sound horrific. No wonder that I was called a neoliberal Trump cannot death cult warrior. But the reality is if you're going to make a comparison of costs and benefits, which is what we do when we evaluate government policy, you need to have apples to apples comparisons there. You need to have apples in your costs and apples in your benefits side. And that's the only way to do the comparison. You can't really compare what is the value of somebody's job versus the value of somebody's sickness or something. That doesn't make any sense.
00:21:22
Speaker
So qualities are a currency that measures human quality of life, essentially, and health. And that can be used on both sides of the equation. So you can measure the presumed benefits or the estimated benefits of lockdowns by estimating how much life would be saved or made more healthy by having the lockdowns, and also by estimating how much those lockdowns are costing in terms of that same currency. How much are we causing extra suffering, mental anguish, etc.
00:21:49
Speaker
Now, the quality measure is used in normal times by governments around the world, including Australia, because we need to make those kinds of social decisions, I was talking about earlier, about allocation of resources to different line items that can promote human life and health. And so when we, for example, negotiate with drug companies, we tell them, look, we are willing to buy a particular drug or intervention that you may have invented only if it will cost us less than a certain threshold amount per quality.
00:22:19
Speaker
So the drug company will say, this drug will give you three qualities on average if you prescribe it to the person who has illness X. We say, OK, well, three qualities. So we don't want to spend more than, say, 300,000 Australian dollars for that because that's our social willingness to pay, the social level willingness to pay. So we use qualities normally in normal times. It gives us a sense of what we're willing to pay when we see those kinds of transactions that our government undertakes, of course, in a place like India or a poorer country like Africa somewhere.
00:22:48
Speaker
maybe chat or whatever, their threshold value for a quality is going to be much lower because they're just for a country, right? So that's where quality of life varies within comp, right? I mean, that's how it happens. So that quality was there. Now, it's difficult in the lockdown situation, the lockdown context to measure everything that matters using a quality because the quality is really just about health.
00:23:10
Speaker
It doesn't really capture that well, the kind of general malaise and mental stress that you would have having been locked down in your homes, right? Your physical health might be fine, but your mental health isn't so great. So we use a different currency that is translatable to the quality and also to dollars, therefore, right? So we have a
00:23:29
Speaker
possible mapping across dollars, qualities, and this other currency, which is called the WellBe, which is relatively new. It was invented back in about 2018 by my colleague Paul Freiders and his team at the London School of Economics. And it's called the WellBeing Year. And essentially, it measures people's life satisfaction. So there are questions about, overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays on social science surveys all around the world? And that question was asked of people during lockdowns. It was asked, of course, previous to lockdowns.
00:23:56
Speaker
We can see that lockdowns cause a decrease in that response that we get to that question. And so we use that to come up with an amount of damage done to people in this wealthy currency. And that can be translated to qualities and the qualities can be translated to dollars. And that's how we are able then to come up with
00:24:14
Speaker
a cost benefit analysis in which on both sides of the ledger, we have the same currencies, whether it's dollies, dollars, qualities, or wellbies, we can express it anyway. And when we do that, in the book that I published last year with Sanjeev, Do Lockdowns and Border Closures Serve the Greater Good, we estimate that the costs of lockdowns in Australia have been at least 68 times their plausible benefits. So that's the scale of misfiring that we're talking about.
00:24:38
Speaker
It's an absolutely staggering number. The question I actually had next was, with all the data that we have, how would you summarize the efficacy of lockdowns? But I think you've just done it in one very, very startling sentence. Yeah, it's very staggering. And we're not the only researchers to have found this. There have been papers around the world now, at least half a dozen or probably closer to a dozen now, for different countries evaluating the efficacy of lockdowns.
00:25:07
Speaker
And no one using anything like a robust cost-benefit analysis has found that lockdowns of whole healthy populations were on net beneficial. Most people find ratios ranging from something like four or five to 200 to one in terms of costs to benefits. So the result for Australia is actually pretty much kind of in the middle, the weekend. It's not extreme, sadly, by any stretch of the imagination when you
00:25:33
Speaker
contextualize it against those other papers around the world. But, of course, the scientific community, generally speaking, still has not accepted this. There are a few of us who have been writing these papers and clamoring from the rooftops to try to get attention for this, but it's been a slow battle and a really hard road to walk because
00:25:50
Speaker
most of the mainstream is still captured by the ideology, particularly in Australia, that lockdowns were successful because we didn't lose that many people to COVID in 2020 and 2021. And the GDP figures didn't look as bad as some other countries. And therefore, that's, you know, case closed, that's the end of the story. And that's just tragically incomplete as an analysis.
Leadership and Systemic Issues in COVID Management
00:26:09
Speaker
This is a very good segue actually into the broader question or the broader issue, I suppose, of the failure of our institutions, starting with the political class. Every single Australian state and federal leader abrogated their responsibilities at one time or another by saying, well, we will follow the science, as opposed to taking that quality led view, which incorporates the economic side, psychological side,
00:26:37
Speaker
scientific side to say this is our rounded policy response. Do you think, well, do you blame a bad crop of politicians or do you blame a political system in 2023 that makes that sort of nuanced political discussion nigh on impossible? Yeah, look, I tend not to blame individual people. The components, the parts of the resistance that clamor for the head of particular leaders, I think are barking up the wrong tree because the reality is that
00:27:07
Speaker
human nature is complex and everybody can be equal in the right circumstances. Every person can be.
00:27:13
Speaker
I don't think that Australia was well positioned culturally to be able to manage this. We hadn't had really truly courageous leaders for probably a generation, at least in this country, who I would really trust in a time of, for example, war or something to do the right thing for the country. And so I'm not hugely surprised that we didn't see that kind of leadership come out. It would have been an exceptional situation if we'd seen that in Australia. And you did see a few of those in other countries. In Sweden, you saw Anders Tegno, who was not a politician, but certainly
00:27:41
Speaker
you know, advocated for the welfare of his people. And I think Sweden ended up handling COVID better than any other country in the West. DeSantis is another good case study, of course. Exactly. DeSantis in Florida. And you had what was her name in South Dakota. There was a lady there who resisted. So there were a few politicians around the world in different regions, but not in Australia. So
00:28:00
Speaker
Yes, culturally, I was kind of, you know, I suppose, you know, you can say that that was expected because we just aren't a particularly courageous people, despite our Paul Hogan, you know, exterior. At the end of the day, we just, you know, look for Daddy to save us, I think. And the politicians are kind of the same. They're looking for the great action that they can do that will save their faces. And there's really a problem with accountability, right? There's just nobody wants to be accountable for anything in large organizations all across Australia. And that is a big problem. Nobody wants to, you know,
00:28:30
Speaker
just man up and take responsibility for things. But I do think that the main problem really going forward to fix is not to select better people for politics, because there's always going to be a problem of getting the wrong people in politics, but rather to fix the institutions or at least try to amend some of the institutions
00:28:49
Speaker
that led us down this path. And one of the big problems, of course, is, you know, during this period, it was possible for all of these mandates and rules and regulations and diktats to be passed by bureaucrats, essentially unelected bureaucrats, right, with no parliamentary oversight whatsoever. What we were able to do as people was simply to let our voices be heard during elections for the leadership, the political leadership.
00:29:13
Speaker
And when we did that, sadly, we returned to office with landslide margins, the very people who had been, you know, repressing us. And so in some sense, you know, maybe it wouldn't have helped that much to have more voice from the people on these kinds of issues. But
00:29:28
Speaker
That's called the Dan Andrews conundrum, I think. Indeed, or the McGowan. Those two are just the most standout examples. And that shows you the political impossibility in some sense for any politician who cared about his career more than he cared about Australia to actually stand against this. You'd have to honestly care more about Australia than about your career to have resisted. But at the same time, I think moving forward, we need to have institutions that
00:29:55
Speaker
take in the opinions of diverse Australians all over the place, different kinds of people, not just those who pass muster for the political class, who are then able somehow to make their voices heard in decision making. And so I have some ideas about that in the great COVID panic, which, you know, with my co-authors, Paul fighters and Michael Baker, but I think it'll be, you know, the years of work towards those more directly democratic institutions being formed or taking hold in Australia. And in the meantime,
00:30:23
Speaker
Gosh, I mean, really, we have a lot of work to do, just getting people to recover from the psychological trauma that they've been through. So that's honestly job one. I mean, job one for me is helping people recover from this absolute disaster. And that means including the people who were complicit, like the everyday Jains. They've been psychologically traumatized and abused by the governments. They need help. And if they're going to ever admit what actually happened, they were promoting and advocating for policies that directly hurt themselves, their parents, and their children. Wow, that is a psychological burden to bear, right?
00:30:53
Speaker
So those people need help, and we need help for all the other people who are directly hurt by lockdowns. As a second stage, and perhaps simultaneously working towards it, is that we need that kind of institutional reform and figure out how to get more diverse voices into policymaking, more checks and balances, more direct democracy.
Vaccine Policies: Ethical and Accountability Concerns
00:31:12
Speaker
I'll get to that second step of what that future world could look like in a second, but I need to vent my frustration around that first step first.
00:31:22
Speaker
The use, and this is specifically around accountability, the use of social structures to coerce people into taking a vaccine has made a lot of people very angry, but it's made a lot of people even more angry when they've discovered that the key assumption that underpinned that policy turned out to be incorrect. And that assumption was that the vaccine can prevent or reduce transmission. We now know that that is not the case.
00:31:50
Speaker
So there isn't that social good argument that was put forward to say, well, look, your bodily autonomy is less important than protecting the wider population. Now, for mine, there doesn't appear to be any accountability for people who are putting forward that argument that led to people losing their jobs.
00:32:07
Speaker
that led to people in some cases having to go against their religious beliefs. This to me is an absolutely outrageous state of events. How do you go about finding that accountability as we move forward? I completely agree with your assessment of the situation there, and it's absolutely one of the worst offenses of this period.
00:32:30
Speaker
And I would even say, even apart from whether or not the vaccines prevent transmissibility, even if they did prevent it, which we know now is not true, even if they did, I find the argument that you must have this medical intervention because it's good for everybody else, even if an expectation is bad for you, I found that argument just is
00:32:49
Speaker
Rotten to the core it is it is absolutely the most dangerous slippery slope that we could embark upon as a people because you are essentially saying that the the person who is getting this medical intervention is the property of The the state the whole state to do as they wish as they deem is good for everybody else. I
00:33:09
Speaker
with. And that's just not acceptable. That's the kind of argument that led to some of the most horrific destruction in the Holocaust, for example. And so I just reject that totally. Now, on the transmissibility thing, there are people who will have made that argument in their own head saying, well, you know, maybe it is dangerous for me, but I'm going to do it anyway, feeling courageous, feeling pro-social, feeling, you know, they were feeling altruistic towards other people. That's what made them do it. They did it out of love. And now they realize that
00:33:39
Speaker
That whole motivation that they had was essentially something by which they were manipulated by the state. That is a horrific
00:33:49
Speaker
shock as well. And it makes you really, really lose trust and faith in your institutions, I would think. I mean, this is the sort of natural psychological reaction one would have when having been found to have been betrayed by the people who you trusted to do something that was obviously quite impactful upon your own bodily autonomy.
00:34:11
Speaker
So to have been manipulated by your own care for other people into doing something that had no scientific basis for political reasons, I mean, that's just horrific.
00:34:20
Speaker
So how do we get out of that? Look, we are not yet in Australia, I think, at the point where we can actually see accountability happening in the next year or two. I think the narrative has to play out a little bit more. We have to see a few more months of data certainly coming out before we really have any calls for
00:34:43
Speaker
people who were advocating for these shots on baseless grounds to actually face justice. But I do expect that, and I said this actually in a podcast with John Anderson and Jay Bhattacharya a few months ago,
00:34:55
Speaker
I do expect that at some stage, at least the Pfizer executives will face jail time. I hope that that is true. And I certainly, I mean, it's almost a foregone conclusion that they're going to face large fines. And of course, they have paid those fines before, right? Pfizer is quite famous for having paid humongous fines in the past for various
00:35:14
Speaker
different kinds of abrogations of trust. And whether or not Australian politicians or bureaucrats who had a hand in doing this will actually face justice. Well, I would like to think so. I would like to think that there will be some crimes against humanities style court cases. But at the moment, what I've seen from the evidence so far in Australia is that our court case
00:35:34
Speaker
whole court system is pretty corrupted, pretty captured by the narrative. It's very rare to find a judge who will actually judge something courageously based on the actual content rather than resorting to kind of letter of the law arguments and, and not not seeking justice, but just seeking, you know, compliance with technical requirements as what he's, you know, trying to verify, and I think that's dangerous. And so if you look at history, it's also unlikely
00:36:01
Speaker
really that the people who perpetrated the worst crimes will truly face the music. Usually what happens is perpetrators of great crimes get away with it in various ways.
00:36:11
Speaker
They slink away with their winnings, and the people who were harmed have to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and keep moving on. That's what usually happens. So I hate to say that, but that's what history tells us. I think it would be great to see at least a few people during this period held up as examples, because maybe that would also help future politicians to think twice before visiting this kind of betrayal on the Australian people again.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yes, I agree. I re-listened to that podcast with John Anderson last night, and I've got in my notes here that very line, I expect fires of leadership to face jail time underlined to discuss with you. Perhaps take that next step and explain, well, if they did something wrong, was this a case of malicious intent? Did they know they were doing something wrong and they proceeded anyway? Was it a case of negligence? How would you expand on that claim?
00:37:04
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm an economist, not a lawyer. So I can't chart to you what the legal arguments are going to be that will actually result in this. But what I can tell you are a few things. One, the quantity of anger and desire for justice that has been brewing in the hearts of the people who were harmed by these injections is enormous. And these people are not all dead yet. They have lost people, some of them. And some of them are disabled. There's a whole contingent of people who have
00:37:34
Speaker
lost family members or friends and who have been injured seriously and had their lives completely altered by this this theme and so there's a huge public demand for some kind of justice so that's ingredient one that is very important to actually seeing that some kind of justice is delivered secondly it will at the end of the day seem to be for everybody you know from the perspective of most people harmed seem to be
00:37:59
Speaker
the responsibility mostly of the head of the pharmaceutical company that delivered this drug to actually call out whether there were problems with it. And that could have been at the beginning. It could have been a little bit later on after the rollout began. It could have been a little bit later on, but there should have been safety monitoring, and that was partially Pfizer's responsibility. And Moderna, I mean, you might say BioNTech or whoever, whichever farm, I'm just using Pfizer as the sort of
00:38:22
Speaker
stand in. So, you know, there is, I think, a natural sort of perspective that will develop that even if Pfizer employees at lower levels, or even if the FDA or other government agencies, you know, may have had a hand in foisting this upon us, that ultimately the main party responsible is the head of a company that made this product. I think that will often be what the mental, you know, gymnastics will be that people
00:38:50
Speaker
end up at that conclusion. And finally, is it true that we've never seen any pharmaceutical companies face jail time? Yeah. But we've seen other kinds of heads of big business that have done the wrong thing serve jail time. We've seen some white collar crime criminals.
00:39:08
Speaker
do jail time and this is worse than a white-collar crime. This is bodies and deaths and things like that. This is real stuff, so it's not just papers and money. I think there is the possibility that it will happen and I think it would be of great comfort to some people at least, but at the same time, it's going to be nowhere near holding accountable all of the people who are actually complicit because if we were going to do that, we would be
00:39:32
Speaker
handing out fines and jail times and sentences to, you know, probably 50% of the population of Western countries. Because everybody was, you know, complicit, almost everybody, right, in various ways at some point.
Influence of Industry on Scientific Research
00:39:43
Speaker
And, you know, the degree of that complicity varied, but probably half of us would have done something that could be claimed to have directly hurt somebody else.
00:39:50
Speaker
The separate related point here is whether pharmaceutical companies use money and influence to be able to change or to nudge both scientific studies, as well as to sponsor everything from talk shows to ads to encourage people to get vaccines.
00:40:10
Speaker
was a conflict of interest, firstly, in the scientific community, something that you observed? Oh, it was obvious. I mean, those things are completely obvious to a monkey, honestly. If you look at how these things go, right? I mean, the amount of money Pfizer gives the FDA, the amount of money that
00:40:27
Speaker
most scientists who are involved in the studies that were conducted that were favorable get from Pfizer or other drug companies. And unfortunately, I have to say this is a this is a trend within science more generally. So, you know, as an economist, I think of myself as a scientist in the field of economics. And fortunately, we don't I mean, I don't get any kind of external funding at the moment. I haven't for years. I used to get some from the Australian Research Council. But even then, that's a government body. We don't tend to get a lot of money from
00:40:55
Speaker
you know, particular big private companies. But in medicine, you know, you get that all the time. That's kind of almost a almost a de rigueur. You know, if you want to become a professor, you have to accept some money from some big company at some point as part of a grant that just generally does happen. And so that means that most of the scientists who are at the tops of their fields at the top universities
00:41:18
Speaker
really cannot be claimed to be unbiased in their evaluation of their own study results or the design of their own studies. That's a big problem. Where is independence? Where do we get an independent view? How do you even come up with that? This is one of the reasons I've been encouraging people on the street to see themselves, to empower themselves, to feel they have the right to query the scientific literature themselves. They should not simply
00:41:42
Speaker
Passively out to the notion of this is a peer-reviewed scientific article therefore it must be correct right i mean that's just nonsense it's become more and more nonsense over the over since i've been in this profession actually and now you know i look at sconce at any.
00:41:57
Speaker
review journal article because most of the time, at least one, if not all of the authors have some kind of bias and conflict of interest. And just declaring the conflict of interest doesn't make it go away. This is another Australian disease, right? We have this Australian disease of, well, if we declare it and you can manage it, then it's fine, right?
00:42:17
Speaker
No, it still exists. You're just pointing out the elephant. You're saying, oh, how lovely is this elephant in this room? It is a lovely elephant. Let's go and eat over here. Whoops, the elephant knocked our plates over. Oh, well, at least we know the elephant's there. Well, that'll make it better. I mean, come on, right? So the need to have independent voice in science is very pressing. And that's one of the things that concerns me most, really, about moving forward and rebuilding trust in science, because at the moment, there's very little basis for that trust.
00:42:44
Speaker
Well, this is the problem with going from scientists to the science, and it's something which became more and more obvious as the pandemic continued.
00:42:55
Speaker
it will continue to have implications in areas such as climate change, where there are too many people who are willing to say that, say, the science around climate change is settled because a vast majority of scientists think the same way. What you're saying is that the vast majority of those scientists are not a fair representation of the scientific community because they're just the ones who have taken money to be able to then run those studies and then come out with particular outcomes. Is that probably right?
00:43:23
Speaker
No, definitely. And if you think about the incentives, which is an economic concept, the incentives in play to actually give voice to alternative perspectives, there are very few. And this is one of the reasons why you don't have long-term randomized control trial studies of a lot of, for example, nutraceutical products or natural health products, because who is going to fund that?
00:43:44
Speaker
No drug company is going to fund that. No drug company wants that to be known. In fact, drug companies will pay money to suppress that kind of study. So is it really such a wonder that we don't have good evidence about alternative possible solutions to various problems? And certainly climate change is another one where if you happen to be a big voice in that area,
00:44:07
Speaker
You have probably taken money at some point from somebody that has a bias towards finding the mainstream line. And if you take a different line, you will find yourself out in the cold very quickly. So punishment is meted out to those who do not toe the line. And that's not science.
00:44:23
Speaker
That's not science. That's politics. So we got to get out
Intellectual Diversity and Integrity in Academia
00:44:27
Speaker
of that. We got to get out of that mindset and actually be courageous in science as well. Just as we need courage in politics, we need courage in science. We need people willing to lose their jobs for speaking the truth and to lose their funding for speaking the truth. And we need institutions that will still allow those people, even if they do lose their jobs, to still have a voice and ideally not to lose their jobs just because they speak something different. And so another sort of little
00:44:53
Speaker
initiative of mine is to try to increase diversity of thought on campuses, increase the ability, the welcoming, the tolerance of campuses for alternative points of view, and get away from this cancel culture mentality which shuts down everything that a university should be about.
00:45:09
Speaker
which is critical thinking, investigation, taking risks intellectually, being prepared to have been wrong about something and changing your tune, having open debates. I mean, all of these things which are, you know, which is what I joined the academy to do, right? This is what is exciting about being a university professor. It's not exciting to walk in and feel as though you have to conform to the monolithic view of the way the world works every day. That's brain numbing and depressive. I don't want that. I don't want to be living in that misery, right? I don't want that for my children.
00:45:39
Speaker
There's a whole other podcast's worth of content around that issue, which hopefully we can get you on to talk about. But I want to touch on, I guess, another reason for group thinking academic communities. You've described it as, and let me get this right, the self licking ice cream problem. Explain the self licking ice cream problem.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, self-licking ice cream cone. So essentially, people think of peer review as this gold standard, right? That if an article by a scientist has been peer reviewed, then independent peer reviewed is what it's called, then it must be correct, essentially, or must represent our current knowledge, at least.
00:46:19
Speaker
The problem is that actually, and having been a scientist now for near on twenty years, I can say this with confidence, most of the time what happens is that editors who are only human use referees whom they know who are only human and those editors and referees therefore are kind of a network and they tend to have gotten those positions because they published
00:46:39
Speaker
well, supposedly, in past years and possibly still now. And they will have published well and been known to others. And others will want to know them. And so there's sort of a networking aspect to who am I going to submit this paper to? Do you know the editor there? Do you know, oh, I know this editor's husband. I think maybe she would be amenable to this kind of font size. So you play to the editor. And you want to get certain referees. You hope to get certain referees. And you try to befriend people who might be your referees in the future. So this notion of independent peer review
00:47:09
Speaker
it's actually quite difficult to come up with truly independent peer reviewers in many fields nowadays because of all of this networking that happens in the back room. And actually, if you're interested in this, I would highly recommend a book that came out, a second edition of it called Rigged, which the first edition was called Game of Mates, which is all about corruption and gray gifts and kind of like not exactly illegal corruption, but sort of this networking aspect of Australian culture that permeates industries across the country and really ends up defrauding the Australian people.
00:47:39
Speaker
through this kind of, you know, mateship. We think of it as a good thing, and mateship is a good thing when, you know, in the right circumstances, but it can also lead to essentially what should be an open, transparent, pro-social process, becoming a process that is inward-looking and delivering benefits just to those in the in-crowd.
00:47:58
Speaker
And so the ice cream cone self-licks. People publish in some of the top journals in my field, and only the people who refereed and edited and other people who have published there really can make any sense of some of those papers. Econometric is a classic one. It's very technical. And so people publish there, and then the people who have reviewed or
00:48:18
Speaker
I maybe edited that paper. We'll submit another paper which cites the other people who are also, you know, who authored that paper and the people who reviewed the paper. And when you get your referee reports, you're told you need to cite this person, this person, this person, all of whom are often in the co-authorship network of the reviewer, right? So there's a networking aspect to science, which when everybody is receiving money from particular vested interests, becomes an even bigger problem, right? So we have this problem in economics, but in health science, I think this is an even bigger problem.
00:48:48
Speaker
So that's a major obstacle to the creation of really valid and trustworthy scientific research. And that one doesn't have an easy answer. Again, it's something I'm working on in various ways, but it's a really entrenched problem, a cultural problem. And I don't have a perfect answer to it. I'm just trying my best to be as independent as possible and a barrack for
00:49:11
Speaker
independence and alternative systems and the giving of respect to non-peer-reviewed research, just as much as peer-reviewed research, in fact, if not more.
00:49:20
Speaker
Well, the very frustrating thing about this is that a lot of people, when they hear the accusation that some scientists may be compromised by grants funding, and similarly when they hear the self-licking ice cream cone scenario, they will call it a conspiracy theory or a set of conspiracy theories when really it's just a basic, it's basic human nature taken to its unfortunate nth degree.
Conclusion: Open Dialogue and Encouragement
00:49:47
Speaker
Exactly. And in fact, this notion of calling someone a conspiracy theorist, this is something we've seen in the past. And of course, it's come up a lot during this period. It's this, it's a cancel culture technique, you you bought somebody into a, you know, a box that has a label on it that everybody can agree is about like anti vaxxer or something like that. You
00:50:02
Speaker
say, okay, well, therefore everything this person says can be rejected. Easy, right? That's mentally very easy. It doesn't require you to engage with their arguments. It doesn't require you to respect that they may actually have some legitimacy behind their perspective. And it's simple. It's the lazy man's approach to coping with information that is displeasing.
00:50:24
Speaker
Yes, yes. And that too is non courageous, right? I mean, we just have a crisis of courage around here, right? And we need to learn to talk to each other again, across boundaries, across beliefs, across perspectives. Because if we don't, we are never going to be able to take advantage of the diversity that we have in this country, which is a huge advantage, if we were to use it properly. But if instead, we just suppress everybody we don't like, or everybody who doesn't conform with a particular line, we lose
00:50:51
Speaker
all the potential of that diversity and we create horrible social, you know, fractures, which are going to make for an unhappier and less wealthy and just less positive Australia. So it's just senseless. We need to stop all that.
00:51:07
Speaker
I think that's a really powerful message to finish on. Gigi, the work that you've done is outstanding, not just for its insight, but for the courage of your convictions. The book that I've read, which is wonderful, is Great Covid Panic. You can get it at thegreatcovidpanic.com, but this conversation has certainly inspired me to dig deeper into your body of work.
00:51:33
Speaker
Please keep fighting the good fight because what you're doing is incredibly important.