The problem began, as it so often does, with outsourcing. Overwhelmed by the complexity of the pandemic Australia’s political class wisely sought to tap expert medical advice. What wasn’t wise was proffering that advice as final and inviolable. This was gutless because making tough calls and accepting responsibility is the job of political leaders. It was also foolish because as anyone who has ever sought expert advice knows they often have vastly different views on how to solve the same problem. As the figures on iatrogenic harm show they can also get things badly wrong.

And so, state and territory chief health officers became the default rulers of the land and their collective wisdom added up to Australia adopting a de facto elimination strategy. Forget limiting the amount of death, COVID-19 became the only disease in history that no Australian is allowed to catch. And they wield fear as a tool of compliance in a way which any totalitarian would both recognise and admire. So successful have they been in engendering terror at the very idea of contracting COVID-19 that we now judge fully vaccinated elderly who catch the disease and suffer no ill effects as a tragedy rather than a triumph.

The success in suppressing the disease then led to the gold standard in risible expert advice: the two rulings on AstraZeneca made by the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation. This body took the narrowest possible view measuring the next-to-impossible chance of dying from COVID-19, in a largely COVID-free Australia, against the one in a million chance of dying from the vaccine; a risk that is orders of magnitude smaller than any trip to hospital.

That decision derailed the rollout. It signalled that the vaccine was unsafe for all which restricted to a fragment of the population the only jab manufactured in this country at a rate of a million doses a week.