A strong list of news reports have emerged in signs that the Mainstream media is begining to realise that the extreme Covid 19 Lockdown and Mandates were harmful to
to poorer communities.
Newscorp’s Joe Hildrebrand wrote in an extroadinary article for news dot com which is owned by the Murdoch Press earlier this week, “The thing about the truth is that it always comes out. It may take years, decades or even centuries but reality has a way of asserting itself. Lies inevitably fall apart”.
Joe also writes “Lockdowns were wrong. School closures were wrong. Border closures were wrong. Poor people were hurt the most.”
Below are some direct quotes from Joe’s news report citing other Mainstream media sources including The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.
“Moreover the school closures were “likely to have significant adverse impacts on children’s outcomes in education, social development and mental and physical health”.
And again: “For children and parents (particularly women), we failed to get the balance right between protecting health and imposing long-term costs on education, mental health, the
economy and workforce outcomes.”
In regards to lockdowns and border closures and other restrictions it found they were effectively inhumane and should only have ever been used as a “last resort” — not the trigger-happy
response of state and territory governments, for which they were cheered on by their acolytes.
“Rules were too often formulated and enforced in ways that lacked fairness and compassion. Such overreach undermined public trust and confidence in the institutions that are vital to
effective crisis response.”
As The Australian newspaper reported, the review was exhaustive, consulting some 200 health experts, public servants, epidemiologists, unions, community groups, businesses and economists, receiving more than 160 submissions and comprising 3000 hours of research, policy and data analysis.
And as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported, it was poorer communities who were hardest hit, especially by the school closures.
The papers cited a Mitchell Institute study finding that one in five children in lower socio-economic postcodes did not have access to a laptop or computer at home and a survey of NSW teachers in 2020 found that only 18 per cent of teachers in low socio-economic status schools had confidence that their students were learning well from remote classes.
And the SMH also reported in 2020 — as I have often cited — that more than 3000 students simply disappeared out of public schools in NSW after the first shutdown.
A groundbreaking Daily Telegraph expose this month revealed 7000 NSW students, overwhelmingly from disadvantaged cohorts, who were not enrolled at any school.
University of Melbourne academic Professor Jim Watterston told the paper these were among 50,000 school-aged children in Australia who are “not recorded anywhere” and that the issue had worsened through Covid.