Australia Under Lockdown—Again

How is Australia’s coronavirus policy going to turn out for the country?
 

Major cities in Australia have been subjected to lockdowns over the last few weeks as state governments try to stop a rise in covid-19 cases. The town of Alice Springs—one of the most remote towns in the world—joined Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin and locked down on June 30. Fear of a possible outbreak of the more contagious, but less deadly, Delta variant is a driving factor of the latest lockdowns.

Nearly 50 percent of Australians have been placed under stay-at-home orders because of only a few hundred cases of coronavirus. Only one person in Australia has reportedly died from covid in 2021 so far. The Australian federal and state governments have stood out from the rest of the world by enforcing a zero-covid policy.

Will this unique policy work out well for the nation?

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s goal initially was to “flatten the curve” of covid-19 cases and deaths. One year on, the Morrison government is enforcing a different policy—that of zero covid cases, causing the country to suffer under government-imposed lockdowns while the majority of the developed world loosens restrictions.

The prime minister announced on July 2 a four-stage plan on how the country can have fewer lockdowns. His plan relies on high vaccination rates. Morrison said that once “Australia gets vaccinated, Australia is able to live differently.”

Sky News television presenter Rita Panahi said on July 2 that the Morrison government’s actions show “how far Australia is from having a proportional, sane response to covid-19.” Panahi suggested that the Morrison government is treating the coronavirus “like the Black Death.” “Instead of moving toward normality like the rest of the developed world, we are halving the numbers allowed in,” she said. “What a pathetic capitulation. And sadly, it’s another example of the prime minister giving in to the premiers instead of leading the nation.”

Are COVID-19 Vaccines Safe?

Federal and state leaders are frustrated by low vaccination rates across the nation. There is a high level of vaccine hesitancy in Australia.

Influential Australian businessman Clive Palmer sent out letters to mailboxes across the nation warning of the dangerous effects of covid-19 vaccines. The letter included shocking statistics from the Australian government’s Therapeutic Goods Administration confirming 210 deaths and 24,000 adverse reactions from the vaccine. These figures are for Australia alone. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed that over 5,000 people have died from getting the jab. The U.S. government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System has received hundreds of thousands of complaints from adverse reactions to covid-19 vaccines.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (fda) has not officially approved the vaccines; it has only approved them under Emergency Use Authorization (eua). The fda website says that “under an eua, fda may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met.” Australians are right to be concerned about the negative effects of an experimental drug.

To put covid-19 into perspective, let’s compare it to the normal flu. The Australian government has reported that this year, cases of the flu are at “historically low levels.” The government reported in May that in the year 2019, there were more than 289,000 cases and 700 deaths of seasonal flu in Australia. The total number of covid-19 cases recorded in Australia as of June 30 is about 30,600. The total number of people who have died of (or with) covid-19 is reported to be about 900. Including all causes of death, about 160,000 people die in Australia each year. This equates to about 3,000 deaths each week. These statistics show that covid-19 is not as dangerous as the radical left would like you to believe.

Do Lockdowns Work?

Prominent doctors have disproved the idea that lockdowns are effective at decreasing covid-19 deaths. A study published in July 2020 by the Lancet medical journal concluded that lockdowns were ineffective. The study used data from the 50 countries with the most cases of covid-19. Researchers found that lockdowns were not associated with a reduction in death rates. “Full lockdowns and widespread covid-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality,” the study concluded. However, researchers did find that increased death rates were associated with smoking and obesity.

The Frontiers in Public Health medical journal published a study in November 2020 that found similar results. “The death rate [of covid-19] appears not to be linked with the responses of governments,” the researchers concluded.

Many have taken advantage of the pandemic to push a big-government agenda. Left-wing and “conservative” state premiers have used the virus to exercise police-state powers. The power-hungry leaders of the radical left do not give up power easily. It should come as no surprise that the idea of harsh lockdowns originated from the Communist Party of China. Even if some state premiers become less authoritarian, nasty precedents have been set.

Australians need to wake up to the fact that a zero-covid policy means frequent lockdowns and a slippery descent into a police state.

Where to Find the Truth

Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry spoke about Australia’s coronavirus situation in his June 30 Trumpet Daily program. In this program, he exposed the uncertainty that Australian government health officials have about covid-19 vaccines.

He wrote in the July 2021 Trumpet issue, in an article titled “Gotten Your Jab Yet?”, that “one ingredient has been missing from the vaccine rollout: honesty. The government’s gigantic, oppressive ‘cure’ has been worse than the disease. But nobody in the radical establishment will say that.”

In this article, Mr. Flurry exposed how the reaction of people to covid-19 “is revealing a lot about our society and ourselves. It is showing us how quickly the world can change, how much we take our rights for granted, and how much or how little we value truth.”

Mr. Flurry highlighted the fact that for humans to have good health, they must keep certain laws that God has created in our bodies. “Regarding your health, your body, your life, you need to understand the truth. The truth is that physical, biological laws exist,” he wrote. “Obeying them causes the effect of good health. Breaking them causes the effect of poor health.”

To learn more about how you can have lasting, good health, read “Gotten Your Jab Yet?