This week, Australia’s Climate Clown and Energy Minister Chris Bowen took his apocalyptic weather predictions to the United Nations and sounded the alarm on new forms of denialism.

Bowen took to his pulpit, declaring that ‘climate denial is still with us – but it takes new forms.’ As his contribution to the science of scaremongering, he categorised these new forms. The first he called ‘all too hardism,’ meaning that climate action was ‘all too hard’, and the second he dubbed, ‘no-one else is doing enough – why should we do this when the rest of the world isn’t moving?’

Naturally, Bowen wasn’t going to engage in such ‘denialism’ himself, arguing that the global energy transition was proceeding at a ‘very rapid pace’ and that renewables would overtake coal as the largest global energy source ‘sometime this calendar year.’

Bowen didn’t explain how this was possible, given that the International Energy Agency says that fossil fuels supplied about 80 per cent of global energy demand in 2023 but as if to provide a way out of the dilemma, the Australian Human Rights Commission has urged the government to regulate ‘false’ criticism of climate change policies, arguing it delays urgent action and erodes trust in science and institutions.

So it was fortunate, as a reminder of what happens when the government censors criticism of its policies that former Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton this week made a few candid admissions about some of the policies he insisted on implementing in Victoria during the Covid pandemic that no one was allowed to criticise.

In an interview with Neil Mitchell, Sutton admitted, for example, that cleaning surfaces, washing groceries and touching elbows were ‘probably never necessary’ but they were ‘the things that we learn as we go.’ Really? These were measures that only made sense if you were trying to prevent the transmission of bacterial infections, not respiratory illnesses.

If further evidence were needed of Sutton’s poor grasp of pandemic management, he said that the 262-day lockdown he imposed could have been avoided, ‘if we all wore masks and we all got vaccinated and we all kept distances without them being mandated.’

Here’s a news flash for Sutton, the Covid vaccines never prevented infection or transmission and Sutton should have known this from December 10, 2020, when Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, that ‘Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity,’ adding that ‘we really, as of right now, do not have any evidence that it will have an impact, social-wide, on the epidemic.’

Indeed, when the FDA issued a press release on the Covid vaccines in December 2020, it stated in black and white that there was no ‘evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-COV-2 from person to person.’

Moreover, only seven months later, it was clear from a study on an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in July 2021, that the vaccine offered no protection against infection or transmission since three-quarters of all cases occurred in fully vaccinated people.

Sutton admits that those who were most harmed by lockdowns were children, despite being the ‘least at risk’ from Covid, with schools closed and students forced into often inadequate study-from-home arrangements but, he claimed, children made a sacrifice for people who were most at risk, people on chemotherapy, people with immune suppression, the very elderly, those in nursing homes and that those people, ‘by God, needed the support of everyone’.

No doubt they did, but Sutton’s lockdowns and vaccine mandates put the most vulnerable at greater risk. Healthy unvaccinated people who caught Covid were at reduced risk of repeat infections, as shown in an Israeli study on Maccabi Health data published in August 2021, which found that natural immunity based on prior infection offered considerably better protection than two doses of a Covid vaccine.

Indeed, a Cleveland Clinic study on the effectiveness of the bivalent Covid vaccine offered in September 2022, showed that vaccine effectiveness was only 20 per cent at its highest and dwindled to a pathetic 4 per cent at its lowest, with the risk of Covid infection increasing in line with the length of time since the previous infection and the number of Covid vaccines previously received. In other words, the more boosted staff were, the more likely they were to suffer Covid infections.

The same proved true for children. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September 2022 showed that children aged 5-11 who had had a prior infection but were not vaccinated had a lower risk of being reinfected than children who had a prior infection and did get vaccinated.

So, coercing healthy people into getting vaccinated multiple times increased the likelihood of repeated infections, thereby increasing the risk they posed to vulnerable individuals.

In addition, Covid vaccinations exposed healthy individuals to the dangers posed by Covid vaccines themselves. The TGA admits that 14 people died as a result of a Covid vaccination, which is bad enough, but the real number is far higher. For example, the TGA admits that Covid vaccines can cause myocarditis but claims that no one in Australia has died of myocarditis as a result of a Pfizer vaccine. Yet, as reported previously in The Spectator Australia, Roberto Garin was a healthy man of just 52 when he dropped dead on 28 July 2021, eight days after his first Pfizer injection. Forensic pathologist Bernard I’Ons wrote in his expert report for the coroner that the deceased’s heart showed ‘a clear transition from chronic sarcoidosis to fulminating giant cell myocarditis’ that could be ‘histologically dated to the time period of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination’. Yet to this day, the TGA has refused to accept that the fatal myocarditis that killed Garin was causally linked to the Pfizer vaccine he received eight days earlier.

That Professor Sutton fails to understand the harm caused by lockdowns and universal vaccine mandates is bad enough. But when Sutton resigned as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, he joined CSIRO as Director of Health and Biosecurity planning for Australia’s next pandemic. The Human Rights Commission claims that false criticism of climate change policies erodes trust in science and institutions. What really erodes trust in scientific institutions is their inability to address their own and Australia’s scientific failures.