Truck stop

Socialist politicians are finding it hard to admit that the heavy hand of the state is no match for Covid-19. By Nick Cater.

In November 2020, Justin Trudeau assured Covid-weary, cooped-up Canadians relief was just months away. “When we get into the spring when there’ll be vaccines, we’re going to see the other side of this,” he said.

Some 15 months, 2.8 million infections and 23,000 deaths later, he faces the difficult task of explaining to Canadians why things didn’t exactly go to plan. It is a challenge faced by every national leader who asked citizens to sacrifice freedom and put their trust in the machinery of state. Politicians of the utopian persuasion such as Trudeau, who believe central planning is the solution to everything, are finding it hard to admit they’ve been outsmarted by Covid-19. They appear mystified by the bubbling anger and resentment from people who took them at their word and thought the vaccines would be the end of it.

The Freedom Convoy that has descended on Ottawa is the largest, longest and loudest demonstration against a Canadian government since the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Yet since this is not a movement with a university pedigree, the progressive elite to which Trudeau belongs is treating it with disdain. He described it as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”. Decent Canadians, on the other hand, “know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to ensure our freedoms, our rights, our values as a country”.

Mainstream media has happily played along with the fruitloopification of the truckies and their fellow travellers, condemning them by association with white supremacists, anarchists and Donald Trump. Homemade videos on social media, on the other hand, introduce us to people such as Barbara and Anna, who made the six-hour drive from Toronto to distribute thousands of Polish sausages and doughnuts. “We come from a communist country and came here because we didn’t want to have oppression,” Barbara says. “We wanted to live in a free country and for the last two years we’re living like prisoners.”

In Australia, as in Canada, the anti-lockdown crusade has developed into a resistance movement against vaccine mandates. It has allowed some state leaders to take the same course as Trudeau by falsely labelling the heterodox movement as “anti-vaxxers”, adding additional slander as necessary. By this means, they have avoided addressing the chronic failure of the Covid-19 master narrative that emerged in early 2020: that the only way out would be the arrival of a vaccine. Until then, economic and civil liberties would have to be curtailed to stop the spread and flatten the curve. Eventually, vaccines would arrive and the nightmare would be over, assuming everyone took them.

The unravelling of that narrative and its consequences are documented by Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge in a recent essay in online magazine Tablet. The insistence that vaccines would provide the only possible escape route made a fully vaccinated population a stiff-necked government objective. When persuasion appeared to be failing, coercion followed. He writes: “It may work to get more people vaccinated in shorter order. But it also conveys that the government does not trust its citizens to make good decisions on their own, a condescension that in turn – this is human nature 101 – eventually generates resentment, even revolt and the disengagement of significant segments of the population.”

In other words, coercive public health is a sure-fire way to build a groundswell of opposition to government measures that coalesces in movements such as the Freedom Convoy and its Australian variant camped in Canberra. “The other approach, participatory public health, sees the need for coercion as a sign that something in the public health outreach itself has failed,” Doidge writes. “Society’s leaders should not simply resort to force but rather confront the flaws in their own leadership.”

The master narrative seemed plausible a year ago when vaccination was at its early stages and the long-term efficacy was far from clear. Joe Biden, elected on a hubristic promise to end the pandemic, told the American people last July: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re protected. If you’re unvaccinated, you’re not.” As the northern summer wore on, however, cracks emerged, beginning in Israel, one of the most vaccinated nations on Earth. By mid-August, it had the world’s third-highest number of new cases per capita. Health Ministry data emerged to show the Pfizer vaccine, used in Israel extensively, was only 39 per cent effective in preventing Covid infections, though much more effective in preventing severe disease. This vaccine was much more leaky than expected.

Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing. The waning efficacy of vaccines and the need for extra boosters would not have been clear when the Doherty Institute modelled the effects of vaccination in the middle of last year. It was this that Australian governments relied on in their road maps for returning to life as normal.

Nor could anyone have foreseen the arrival of the Omicron variant in December, which has infected more than 10 times as many Australians than all the previous variants put together. The difference between wise and headstrong governments, however, is not their ability to predict the future but to expect the unexpected and prepare to change course to suit new circumstances.

Scott Morrison spoke with rare political honesty at the National Press Club last week when he admitted his government had made mistakes at various stages of the pandemic because it couldn’t see around corners. His speech was all but ignored by a scowling and self-fascinated press pack determined to make the PM grovel before it, and then grovel some more. It is a pity, because his speech demonstrated an element of humility we are unlikely to see from the likes of Daniel Andrews, Mark McGowan and Trudeau. “There is no set and forget in a pandemic like this,” Morrison said. “What may have been the right response at one point … may flip on you and it may not be the right response in a later phase of the pandemic. You must accept that you may lose a few battles along the way.”

Levelling with the public may be costly in the short term, as Morrison discovered. But it is the only way to tackle the deficit of trust that could yet prove to be the pandemic’s most costly legacy.