Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / What Australia's Covid Frontman Regrets

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What Australia's Covid Frontman Regrets · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And it's an uncomfortable
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  conversation we have never really had with ourselves. The conversation about what went down
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  during COVID, what it did to us, what it did to our faith in institutions, our faith in
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  each other. And this conversation today is an especially useful one because it takes place
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  with one of the major forces in Australian COVID policy and one of the most prominent
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  faces of the COVID pandemic in Australia. Nick Cotesworth was a household name at a household
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  face. He was Australia's deputy chief medical officer working for the federal government,
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  a kind of an Anthony Fauci, if you will. He helped formulate Australia's initial COVID response
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  and then he transitioned into becoming the face of the vaccination program encouraging Australians
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  to get vaccinated. And since then he's become quite reflective about policy overreach,
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  about the inability of governments to bring everyone on board. He's become critical of policies
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  that mandated vaccinations. And he has a lot of thoughtful contributions about what we can do to
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  insulate ourselves against the next pandemic by looking carefully at the last one. This is a
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  premium episode, a huge thank you to everyone who keeps the lights on, who keeps this show going
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  conversations.substack.com. We value it immensely. This conversation is particularly
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  scintillating, psychologically, sociologically and scientifically because Nick, as well as,
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  I mean, long before he was the face of the COVID pandemic in Australia, he was already a leading
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  expert in infectious disease and respiratory disease. He had worked for Med San San Frontier where
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  he led humanitarian teams in the Congo and in Darfur. He saw things that were so shocking that
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  they left him with PTSD at the young age of 25. He's now a resident medical expert at the
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  nine network where he breaks down medical issues for the Australian television viewing public,
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  as well as a practicing doctor at Canberra Hospital where he was previously the director of
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  infectious diseases. I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one the only Nick Coatsworth.
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  You've noticed how little we talk about that period? We all went through the most traumatizing
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  global upheaval in a generation and as soon as it was over, none of us talk about it. We don't
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  reflect on it. It's just like it's some kind of cognitive thing where we're just pushing it
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  away into a little corner of our psyches and we don't want to address it. We haven't had a royal
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  commission about it. We haven't had a way to learn, you know, what should we do for next time?
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  What should we not do next time? It's just like, thank fuck that was over. Let's just forget
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  all about it and move on. Let's unpack exactly what that does. I mean, the first thing to say is that
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  this wasn't just a health event. This was, you know, in the terms of the political science
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  stuff that I've been doing at the ANU recently, this is a huge, it's got a critical juncture.
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  It's changed everything. It changed our view of how much governments can actually support us and
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  they shifted it towards a more big government, us towards a more big government mentality.
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  It shifted the way we think about health care. It shifted the way we think about politics,
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  but most importantly, it polarized us. I think there's a differing view on the left and the right
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  as if politics is to what is responsible for polarization? We take the vaccine example.
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  There will be people on the left side, and this is the dominant side of public health and
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  health policy, by the way. It is dominant left in this country, who will say that anti-vaccine
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  sentiment is driven by RFK junior, by social media, and that's where it all came from.
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  And I sit on the centre right, wasn't always the case. I sort of find myself out here now on the
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  right side of politics, but I would say that COVID was the critical juncture, and we had a
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  there much smaller number of people who were in the anti-vaccine sort of sentiment group
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  before the pandemic than we did afterwards, and a lot of it was to do with how we reacted to
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  the pandemic. Now that is not, the my view is not the mainstream view I would say in public health.
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  What were the big mistakes that stoked to that? Mandates. Like I remember
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  the, you know, talking about this to people, and it was such species logic that I was invoking
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  that I am now ashamed of it, and the conversation went something like this. So I would do talks
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  both for government and in a private capacity to large organizations where they would have,
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  you know, thousands of their employees and inevitably the mandate question would come up.
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  Why am I going to lose my job? That means you're forcing me to have the vaccine. And I would sit
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  there and say, well, no one's forcing you to have it, you can still say no. That was just absurd
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  logic. Like if someone is going to lose their job, you are forcing them to have it. I am ashamed
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  that I put that logic forward, and I realised the folly of my ways. I got so many negative emails
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  that I think they had to shut down my A&U email account. This was sort of before the mandates as well.
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  But they opened it up, and I got this email from a lady who was employed in New South Wales
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  in Australia, not in one of the richer parts and one of the poorer parts of Sydney,
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  and had been an administrative officer with a company, which I won't name, but it's a subsidiary
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  of a very big Australian company. She'd been with them for 10 years. She was pregnant,
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  with, I think it was her second child, and she had said to human resources, I will take this vaccine
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  after I've delivered my baby, but I do not want to take it now. And she was sacked, and she called
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  me because she wanted a letter to our Fair Work Commissioner in Australia, which is a sort of
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  umpire, a ombudsman when you're falsely dismissed from your job. She wanted me to write a letter
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  of support to her to say that effectively she was in the right. This lady was not Josh asking for
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  10 years worth of payout. She just wanted her leave to be paid out. And she then had to move from
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  Sydney to rural, rural New South Wales, like her entire life was uplifted by these mandates. And so
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  you know, it'd be interesting if one day she listens to this. I remember that, and that is
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  substantively one of the things that shifted my view and realised what a mistake we made with
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  mandates. What were the mandates? We had to get two vaccines, otherwise we had our movements
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  restricted. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, had sort of, I would say devolved responsibility to
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  individual companies, so they could make their own mandate policy. That was problematic because
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  a lot of the major Australian companies, like this one that that lady worked for, made their
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  employees have the vaccine, otherwise they couldn't be in the workplace and they would be fired.
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  When it got to emergency services in healthcare, we extended the mandates into three doses for
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  healthcare, and some emergency services went to fourth or fifth dose mandates, which have been
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  challenged legally, understand successfully challenged, because they, again, they weren't based
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  in any sort of science or reality. So I think those were the mandates, and ultimately we can,
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  we should go out. If we're going to have confidence, bring some of these people back.
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  Okay. I think we would need to go out and say, you will never be forced to have something
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  you know, a medical treatment again in this country. I think we should say that.
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  Can you say that in light of the fact that we don't know what the virality or lethality
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  future pandemics might be? I mean, I always sort of wrestle with this myself because my instinct is
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  to be sympathetic to what you're saying. And then I just sort of think, well, suppose that
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  Ebola, you know, was rampant or something that was extremely contagious and extremely lethal.
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  Then you would, I mean, I sort of, you know, during the pandemic, I would push back on
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  disingenuous American libertarians who were critical saying like, it's my human right not to
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  be subjected to a lockdown. And I would sort of, I always think whenever there's an absolute like
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  that, I get a bit queasy. Like if there was a remote community in, let's suppose someone comes
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  back from Africa and they have a very, very virulent, deadly and also contagious strain of Ebola,
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  and they are, they work in an Alaskan mining village and they're in a remote part of Alaska.
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  And the town all gets a ball on and they're all bleeding out of their eyes. Are you saying that
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  they should be able to get on a flight to mainland, the mainland United States to the lower 48 states
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  and spread that even if you know that a hundred million people are going to die as a result,
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  or would you quarantine that Alaskan mining town until and not let people out? And if they say,
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  well, yeah, okay, one quarantine, the Alaskan mining town, I'm like, okay, so we agree that
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  we agree that your human rights are, you know, subjected to other considerations. Now we just
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  have to decide on what is enough to validate that, you know, that lockdown. And so, you know,
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  there is presumably a pathogen that's sufficiently bad that you wouldn't want people walking into a
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  big, coming to work in a big building with lots of other people, possibly carrying it. And I
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  don't know what to do with this ambiguity. It's a great, it's a great thought experiment,
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  but I'd sort of counter on two levels, fundamentally different things to say someone's movement is
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  restricted, quarantine, been around for centuries, where I don't think there'll ever be an
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  strong argument against quarantine for high pathogen, highly pathogenic viruses or bacteria,
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  but I think on the other hand, actually delivering something, giving someone a treatment and using
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  a force function like you're going to lose your job if you don't take it, that's a fundamentally,
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  to me now in my thinking, clearly shifted, that's a fundamentally different proposition to quarantine.
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  Now there is also, and we can have the thought experiment, so what happens if there's a 10%
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  lethality amongst teenagers, for example, and we do know that giving the vaccine reduces transmission.
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  That might be a very particular example where you've got at this highly pathogenic, highly lethal
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  virus that the vaccine blocks transmission. We may have to, that would be the circumstance that you
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  would consider mandates again. However, you've got to think about, say there's 10 years between now
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  and then, what about all the people that you've lost to a no longer taking measles months
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  rebel of vaccine, and you're down on herd immunity? Is it not better? Is there not a public policy
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  argument to get them back, which I think you can get a significant percentage back by saying,
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  we will be convincing you, educating you, advising you strongly, but you will always have the
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  option to say no and the government's not going to go ahead and use a force function to deliver
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  you a medical therapy. Should that apply to help public health care workers?
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  That's a very, very interesting question. Look, my gut feeling is that we should always,
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  so our starting position has to be you can say no, and then you've got public, you've got
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  health care workers who are directly exposed, and there are places at the moment that
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  sort of mandate influenza vaccines and that sort of thing. So that's actually happening now.
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  Yes, I mean, and even to send your kids to school, I think you do have to be vaccinated,
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  don't they? I mean, no job, no pay does exist, absolutely. It starts to get blurry, doesn't it?
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  What were the characteristics of bothered people about COVID-19? I think the rapidity of the vaccine
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  and development. Now, I was completely confident with it, and I had a discussion with someone on
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  social media only two days ago, I would do it again, as a 42-year-old, being I did not want to be
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  exposed to COVID based on what I knew without antibodies. So I would take that vaccine again,
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  if it happened tomorrow, absolutely. But the early studies, they were good, but people were right
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  to sort of look at them and go, I'm not sure there's enough people who have been tested here.
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  There was, I think there was a legitimate reason to turn around and say, I'm a little bit worried
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  about this, and there were people who did that and they weren't given an option. So I think at
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  that's the context that we're talking about. When we're talking about vaccines that have been
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  around for many, many decades, and this is again where the absolutism is a problem, because
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  people can't differentiate between COVID pandemic here of vaccines and the measles vaccine.
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  They put it all into one law. Now, measles vaccine, if you don't get herd immunity and a kid gets
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  measles, they have a one in one thousand mortality, doesn't matter how healthy they are, we know that.
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  So there is a strong public interest in having policies that strongly encourage people to get
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  measles vaccine. And you can argue that, you know, measles vaccine and not getting child care
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  funding, there's a difference between that and losing your job with a novel vaccine in a pandemic.
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• 16:02
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