Ramesh Thakur
Free societies cannot exist without free speech. Nor can free societies survive without independent media able and willing to speak truth to power. Both these free speech pillars have been badly corroded over the last four years, as I argued in The Spectator Australia on 17 April 2021 and again in a Brownstone article on 15 March 2023. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Covid-19 a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020 and a pandemic on 11 March, by which time it had been detected in 114 countries and more than 4,000 people had died with the disease.
On 19 March, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared: ‘We will…be your single source of truth.’ Although Ardern was the only national leader to articulate the belief in governmental monopoly of health truth so baldly, almost all governments as well as the WHO acted on the same belief to impose draconian curbs on dissenting and critical voices for the next three years. The net result was to worsen the pathologies associated with lockdown, mask, and vaccine policies, ensuring that the cure has indeed turned out to be worse than the disease.
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