SYDNEY, Australia—Gigi Foster, an economics professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), believes the COVID-19 era revealed how critical it was for dissenting voices to organise and mobilise themselves.
In an interview with the Epoch Times at the Australians for Science and Freedom (ASF) Conference—Ms. Foster explained what motivated her to co-found the event.
“I realised early in the COVID-19 era that one of the most important things was going to be to organise people who didn’t agree. There were so many policies being implemented which kept people from communicating with each other”, Ms. Foster said.
“There was so much organisation on the side of authority and those were the organised structures that were used against us during this time.
Major Collateral Damage
Ms. Foster also said too much credence was given to the supposed effectiveness of COVID-19 mandates, particularly lockdowns, and not enough emphasis on the economic costs.“These lockdowns were never something that somebody had scientifically proven could work. They were the byproduct of models, simulations essentially, which were touted as science but in fact, the collateral damage of these policies was massive.”
“People at the time did not see the costs because they were so captured by the fear that they had of this COVID-19 bug, that COVID-19 was the only thing they saw. That for me was the most educational thing in the whole period, how blind people could be to everything else that mattered in normal times.”
Ms. Foster has been an ardent critic of the mandates enforced by Australian governments throughout COVID-19, primarily arguing that too much weight was placed on COVID-19-related deaths upon formulating policy prescriptions during the pandemic.
Given that most people saved by COVID-19 lockdowns were already of significant age and not in good health, Ms. Foster argues that new quantitative measures must be introduced to weigh up the value of life at varying ages and standards of health.
Ms. Foster’s research estimates that the measures taken by the government to combat the spread of COVID-19 saved at most 9,951 people. On average, a COVID-19 death represents a loss of three to five QALYs.
She also argued that death on its own was an insufficient barometer used to justify lockdowns, using total societal welfare to encompass mental health factors, the temporary halt of schooling, inflationary effects, and financial stress experienced by households.
Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing (AIHW) reported that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic up until 2022, there has been a substantial increase in demand for mental health crisis and support organisations.
Lifeline—a suicide hotline—reported its busiest day ever on Aug. 19, 2021, when the majority of Australia’s state and territory governments were imposing lockdowns, receiving a record 3,505 calls.
The organisation further reported that four of its busiest days in history were all experienced in the same week during the lockdown period.
There are also the inflationary pressures created by lockdowns and the stimulus packages that accompanied them.
“We had all this money printing and people just being paid to stay home and so way more money than needed for the economic activity that was taking place. That’s inflationary conditions being created right there,” Ms. Foster told the Epoch Times.
“When you stop people from being able to trade, you disrupt chains of production, you disrupt the links between clients and whatnot. Once you break those links and networks that exist in the economy that keep it humming all the time, it takes a long time to restore them.”
In co-founding ASF, Ms. Foster was joined by some of Australia’s most prominent academics and clinicians, most notably Professor James Allan, economist Paul Fritjers, Dr. Julie Sladden, and Professor Ramesh Thakur.
The organisation aims to offer alternative methods and frameworks to build public policy.
This includes a more holistic approach, combining empiricism and theory, and seeks to reinstill freedom of thought and inquiry into the scientific method, a quality its members believe has been absent for too long.
