On 29 July, Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment one hundred and eleven times in three hours before a Senate committee – answering nothing about gain-of-function funding, nothing about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nothing about the diary Rand Paul had released days earlier, including the entry of 1 February 2020 recording that nine of eleven scientists on a call about the likely origin of Covid thought deliberate insertion possible. America’s doctor sat in silence while Josh Hawley invited him to name the colour of his tie.

The Fifth is not an admission. But the spectacle punctures something. The pandemic’s governing claim was that a few credentialled people knew, that their knowledge was settled, and that dissent was wicked. The man who embodied it will not defend it.

Australia had no Fauci. It had a letter.

On 19 April 2020, four economists – Chris Edmond and Bruce Preston of Melbourne, Steven Hamilton of George Washington, and Richard Holden of UNSW – wrote to the Prime Minister and National Cabinet. Signatures reached 288. One sentence did the work: ‘Some commentators have expressed the view that there is a trade-off between the public health and economic aspects of the crisis. We, as economists, believe this is a false distinction.’

Recall the first lesson of every economics faculty in the country. Economics is not the study of money; it is the study of scarcity, and therefore of trade-offs. Opportunity cost is not a footnote to the discipline, it is the discipline. Two hundred and eighty-eight economists signed a document announcing that, on the largest allocative question of their lifetimes, it did not arise.

Then came the part that ought to end the argument. Twenty-seven days later, Holden and Preston published in the Conversation under the headline, ‘The costs of the shutdown are overestimated – they’re outweighed by its $1 trillion benefit’. They proceeded to do exactly what the letter implied was a category error. They put a dollar figure on a human life, costed the shutdown at $180 billion, valued the benefit at $1,103 billion, and announced the result: the shutdown wins.

So the distinction was not false. It was a trade-off they would draw, price and publish the moment they knew which way it fell. The April letter told the public the question was illegitimate; the May article answered it. That is not scholarship but advocacy with a footnote.

The sum rested on an assumption that people do not act in a self-interested fashion. To reach $1.1 trillion, Holden and Preston supposed that absent lockdown 90 per cent of Australians would catch the virus, yielding 225,000 deaths at an assumed one-per-cent fatality rate. Yet people withdraw from restaurants and shops of their own accord when they believe they might die. Their argument required Australians to behave as though the virus did not exist.

I said so at the time, in the Australian on 13 May and at length in Quadrant. Holden is my colleague. His 225,000 deaths implies 882 per 100,000 – some 3.7 times the toll of the 1919 influenza, which killed around 12,000 here without antibiotics or intensive care. The chief medical officer’s own estimate of lives saved, given to a Senate inquiry that month, was 14,000. One sixteenth.

The age profile matters more than the headline. The median age of an Australian death attributed to Covid was in the mid-eighties, at or above life expectancy. Paul Frijters drew the inference: valuing each at a full statistical life of $4.9 million inflates the benefit column by close to an order of magnitude. Governments do not do this anywhere else. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee has weighed quality-adjusted life years for decades and nobody calls it callous.

Which brings me to my colleague Gigi Foster, the Economic Society of Australia’s Young Economist of the Year for 2019 – a year before she became, in the estimation of social media, a crank. Her offence was to insist that lockdowns be assessed as governments assess a freeway or a drug listing: by counting costs and benefits on both sides of the ledger. She told a Victorian parliamentary committee in August 2020 that lockdown would destroy more life-years than it saved, and has since produced with Sanjeev Sabhlok the cost-benefit analysis no government here has commissioned.

For this she was called a granny killer and asked on national television whether she was advocating that people die. Let me be precise, because precision is the point here: nobody at UNSW was disciplined, and Foster holds her chair still. But universities have subtler instruments than dismissal. Holden is today Vice-Chancellor’s Professor and Chief Societal Economist at UNSW, and President Emeritus of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Foster was left to be a punchline. No rule was broken. Everyone learned the lesson.

I draw no equivalence between Holden and Fauci. Nobody suggests the economists concealed anything; the letter was public, signed and sincere. The parallel is epistemic. Both turn on one error – that expertise means presenting a united front and treating doubt as a hazard. Fauci privately entertained a hypothesis he later helped consign to the fringe. The 288 disowned in public a concept they teach every March, then used it anyway.

There has been no second letter, no 288 signatures on a retrospective asking whether the recommendation was right, when it stopped being right, and what it cost in schooling, in surgery deferred, in Melbourne’s 262 days.

Nor has anyone else supplied it. The Kruk inquiry reported in October 2024 under terms of reference that expressly barred it from examining any state action not taken jointly with the Commonwealth – barring it, that is, from examining the lockdowns. That is not an inquiry. It is a perimeter drawn around the question.

So let us have a royal commission, with the powers Kruk was denied: to compel documents, to take evidence on oath, to ask each premier what modelling he relied on and who supplied it. Commonwealth gross debt went from $534 billion in March 2019 to $894 billion by the end of 2022, JobKeeper alone accounting for $88.8 billion, and the states borrowed hundreds of billions more. Let it ask the 288 what they now think. Fauci had a lawyer’s reason for silence. Our economists have none.