Those debating whether the deadly schemozzle of pandemic mismanagement that has cast a pall over the last three years was due to a cockup or a conspiracy should abandon binary thinking. All the evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic, indicates that there were both cockups and conspiracies and they came not as single spies but in battalions.

In the UK, the ‘Lockdown files’, a trove of 100,000 WhatsApp messages released by the Telegraph over the last week, provide a portrait of former health minister Matt Hancock as a cruel careerist and a clown better suited to appearing on ‘I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here’, which he did for a fee of hundreds of thousands of pound, rather than running Britain’s pandemic policy.

The liberty of millions of Britons was curtailed based on the whims of decision-makers who, because they were not subject to parliamentary scrutiny, simply claimed they were following the best scientific advice.

Guilt and fear were shamelessly used to enforce the draconian dictates with Hancock writing that he would ‘frighten the pants off everyone’ with a new strain to get compliance.

A fan of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF), Hancock wrote that he hoped Covid would propel his career into the next league. He discussed with his advisers how ‘pushing on vaccines’ would be ‘the most politically beneficial thing’ to do. When Dame Kate Bingham who led the UK vaccine taskforce suggested in October 2020 that only people who were ‘at risk’ should be vaccinated, Hancock branded her as ‘wacky’ and ‘totally unreliable’.

In the US, the Twitter files made public by Elon Musk exposed a conspiracy between key members of Team Biden, agencies such as the FBI and Big Tech to help Biden get elected and to censor and smear those who criticised the government orthodoxy.

Evidence of conspiracies continues to be uncovered by House Republicans. The latest emails show that Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022 and Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, the third largest charitable foundation in the world, hid their roles in February 2020 in the writing of a scientific paper whose purpose was to cast as much doubt as possible on the fact that the Covid virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. Both pretended they played no part in the paper’s genesis but both prompted the scientists to write it, Farrar edited it and Fauci hid the fact that his agency funded research in a Wuhan lab to make bat coronaviruses more dangerous.

In view of Farrar’s role in obfuscating the origins of Covid, leading scientists such as Dr Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, has called for him not to take up an appointment announced last year to be the next chief scientist at the World Health Organisation.

Farrar also signed a notorious letter to the Lancet organised by Peter Daszak, the CEO of the EcoHealth Alliance who provided US tax dollars for research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The letter condemned as ‘conspiracy theories’ any suggestion that Covid-19 did not have a natural origin.

Conspiracies were not limited to promoting lies about the origins of Covid. As Dr Marty Makary, a professor of surgery and health policy at Johns Hopkins University said in sworn testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s first hearing on Tuesday 28 February, ‘The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government’.

Makary damned public health officials for lying to the American people that Covid was spread through surface transmission, that vaccinated immunity was greater than natural immunity, that masks were effective, that myocarditis was more common after infection than vaccination, that young people benefit from a booster and that vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates. ‘We’ve seen something that is unforgivable,’ he said, ‘and that is the weaponisation of medical research itself’.

The common link between the UK cockups and the US conspiracies is the total disregard for scientific evidence, which either didn’t exist or contradicted what policy makers wanted to do and so was ignored or discredited.

There is no comfort for Australia in any of this. Like Little Sir Echo it copied all of its pandemic policies from the US and the UK. The question is what to do now?

It is impossible to prevent cockups or conspiracies, but it is possible to make them more difficult to engage in by subjecting governments and their agencies to greater scrutiny. We could start by requiring that they table all health advice.

Agencies such as the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) need to collect more data about adverse events, for example, by requiring the same information that is collected in the US. It needs to publicly state the background rates for adverse events, the rate of these events for comparable drugs, and provide a weekly update on the rate of these events in new products so that dangerous drugs can be withdrawn as soon as warning signs appear.

The meetings of committees that advise the TGA should be publicly televised as they are in the US and anybody who advises the TGA or any other part of government on health should be required to publicly disclose any funding they receive from pharmaceutical companies or other interested parties.

The power of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency needs to be curbed. By issuing an edict telling healthcare workers that they must do nothing to undermine confidence in the government’s response to the pandemic, it pressured health practitioners not to report adverse events or tell their patients about the potential for adverse events.

The misinformation and disinformation laws tabled by the Morrison and now by the Albanese government are also a shameless attempt to curtail totally justified criticism of pandemic polices.

Too often over the last three years, Australians’ rights and freedoms have been violated in the interest of ‘public health measures’ that were harmful.

Only by making the work of the government and its agencies fully transparent can we start to restore confidence that we will be subjected to anymore conspiracies or cockups.