At the end of October, 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for US$44 billion. That still left him with comfortably more than US$100 billion in the bank.

In the following couple of months Mr Musk proceeded to fire nearly four-fifths of all Twitter employees. Myriad diversity officers, people obsessed with procedure over substance, most all of those who’d spent the pandemic years at the beck and call of the Biden administration censoring, suppressing, mocking and ‘fact-checking’ any and all dissenting views about lockdowns, masks, vaccines. Musk fired them all, over three-quarters of his new firm’s employees, and you know what? Twitter’s core function worked every bit as well as it had before. Isn’t that astounding?

A few years back a book was written about ‘bullshit jobs’. These were defined as jobs held by people who if let go the company or organisation would function just as well as before, maybe better.

Now I’ve long argued that some half the people in any Australian university’s administration held these sort of jobs – and Lord knows a higher percentage in the public service probably. Fire them and either no one would notice or the place would work better. Many are obsessed with procedure and ‘benefit analysis’. No concern with declining productivity. Procedures over substance. Bullshit jobs galore. Thanks for the expose Mr Musk.

This past year also made plain to anyone with a functioning brain that the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (three of the most credentialed epidemiologists in the world, as it happens) were right and the public health clerisy were wrong – wrong on virtually everything related to the pandemic.

One of those three co-authors, Stanford’s Professor Jay Bhattacharya, recently stated that the biggest source of disinformation during the pandemic lockdowns came from governments. Let that sink in.

(And for those with a proclivity towards pondering related ‘expertise’ claims, note that the whole Albanese government approach to this awful Voice proposal is effectively to claim: ‘that government and its experts know best so we don’t even need to allow an adversarial ‘no’ and ‘yes’ Voice case to be put to the voters. Who cares that our whole legal system is built on the adversarial system? Anyone outside our hand-picked group of experts might ‘misinform’ you poor shmucks.’)

Anyway, back to the Covid pandemic and it’s plain Bhattacharya is right, at least if by ‘government’ he meant to include supra-national bodies as well. Remember near the start of the pandemic when Big Government and Big Tech and Big Media were scaremongering and pushing lockdowns with all their might and the World Health Organisation told us all that 3.4 per cent of people who got Covid would die? (Look it up for yourself, they were mooting a virus more lethal than the Spanish Flu.)

Well, a new study just reported that the median fatality rate for people under 60 years old (unvaccinated too) was in fact 0.035 per cent. Put differently, the WHO was off by 100 times. Even Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson (the man whose models massively overstated the lethality of mad cow disease, foot and mouth disease, and of course Covid too), didn’t overstate things as much as the WHO.

Government health people also misled us on whether having had Covid already was better protection than the vaccine (it is and always was). They misled on masks. No randomised control study has yet shown that masks make any difference, just some useless mannequin studies. Go and look at what even Fauci and other top public health types said about masks before February 2020, and even a bit later. What new data came in to make them change their minds? None! The list goes on and on.

We now also know that most all of the claims made on behalf of the effectiveness of the vaccines were radically over-stated, while the dangers were suppressed. Given that any healthy person under 65 had more to worry about from the flu why would you impose vaccine mandates rather than let individuals decide for themselves? The evidence is now clear that for many not taking the vaccine was the right call (and I took the first two but no more). Nor did this choice increase transmissibility or in any way hurt other people.

The Twitter file dump also now shows us that so-called experts and government health types were censoring and suppressing dissident doctors like Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, among the world’s most credentialled epidemiologists – at times in favour of doctors who’d effectively been public servants or news presenters for decades. Go figure!

Alex Berenson, formerly of the New York Times, in 2022 showed us how the Biden administration suppressed and censored views from top doctors and scientists that conflicted with the government line on vaccines (and masks and, well, near everything).

Here’s something the end of 2022 thus leads us to ask: What would the pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been open debate in the press and on social media? Because we now know that Sweden got it completely right in leaving individuals to make their own calls and not aping authoritarian China. Sweden has the OECD’s lowest cumulative excess deaths from start of pandemic to now. Australia has done worse and is now doing much worse on that ungameable criterion; it’s just that the ABC that then reported ‘cases’ now chooses not to report excess deaths.

So, a Liberal government connived in shutting down the economy in a way that ruined much of the small business sector while transferring massive wealth from young to old, and from poor to rich, and created a cost of Covid crisis. Not a lot of belief in freedom, individual choice, and the dangers of overweening government in today’s Liberal party is there? My guess is that in two decades almost no one will admit to having been in favour of lockdowns, readers.

Meanwhile, 2022 saw Mr Musk release Twitter files that proved beyond doubt that Big Tech, at the urging of the political types, censored debate, and not just on almost all of the Covid response. The FBI and much of the Washington bureaucracy also pushed Big Tech to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story to help Biden win the 2020 election. The released details make Nixon’s Watergate look like a child’s misdemeanour compared to the felony-level corruption here. And yet the New York Times, Washington Post, and almost all of the mainstream media (including much of it here in Australia) have not reported on the Twitter revelations at all. Not a peep.

So, thanks again Mr Musk, and 2022, for showing us that whole chunks of the media really are Pravda-like political actors, untrustworthy and not much more than left-wing PR firms.