The phrase "the fog of war" refers to the difficulty getting timely and accurate information about what is going on in a military conflict, especially during the initial stages, as plans and strategies dissolve under the stresses of reality and the unpredictable responses of the adversaries, and each side pumps out propaganda and engages in "information warfare".

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic we have seen a succession of debates that, rather than being seen as matters best left to expert opinion, have taken on the features of an ideological war, with just about every major matter at issue resolving into a left/right binary.

The pandemic has cast into sharp focus the pathologization of public discourse in this hyper-polarized age, where just about everything has come to be seen through a political lens.

Let's run through some of the main controversies, starting at the beginning. How did the virus originate, and what was the right early response?

Most of us first became aware of the pandemic with disturbing accounts of events in Wuhan, with reports of extreme measures being taken to control a virus that was running out of control.

Notwithstanding this, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime reassured us with the patently absurd claim that there was little evidence of person-to-person transmission. How could this be so given the virus was raging through a major city? We now know that as early as December there were already cases in Thailand.

Courageous Chinese doctors and scientists who disputed this narrative were silenced or  "disappeared", with some suffering mysterious deaths. Early DNA samples and data records were deleted, scientific articles by Chinese scientists incompatible with the CCP line were removed from the web.

The Taiwanese, with their earlier experience of SARS, were on to this very early, explicitly warning the WHO in late December 2019. These warnings were ignored by the WHO, from which Taiwan is excluded in deference to the one-China policy.

The WHO, at least at the top levels, has shown itself to be a thoroughly corrupt entity, with senior officials more concerned with appeasing their benefactors, including those who play a key role in securing and maintaining their positions. Just another international body corrupted by CCP influence.

These same officials joined in the chorus of denunciation of countries that imposed early travel bans on China, with moronic statements like "viruses have no ethnicity". Racism again!

Who ever said they did? Viruses are, however, borne by human carriers, and limiting entry from pandemic hotspots is obviously a prudent measure. But the bans imposed by a number of countries, including the Trump administration and the Australian government, were denounced as "racist" and "xenophobic" by the CCP regime, sentiments faithfully echoed by the useful idiots of the Western Left, including presidential candidate Joe Biden.

With around a million Chinese nationals having entered the US in the three months before the ban came into effect at the end of January, you can imagine the effect if this had been allowed to continue.

But, of course, the cardinal principle for some people is that anything favoured by the Bad Orange Man is, well, axiomatically bad. The mere suggestion that he could actually get anything right is wont to cause heads to explode.

There is plenty to criticize about Trump's later conduct, and that of his defenders on the Right. However it is interesting to note that the advice he received at the time from Fauci et al was to adopt a "wait and see" policy rather than moving immediately to the travel ban.

Trump is rightly criticized for the complacency revealed in his early statements, but at least he got that one right—in defiance of his experts. And maybe that very complacency had something to do with some of Fauci's early statements that the virus posed "little threat" to Americans.

So, right from the start, we see identarian ideology rearing its ugly head. Travel bans—racist! As idiotic as it was pernicious, but it did not stop there. In Italy, the site of the most serious early outbreak outside China, where direct flights from Wuhan to Milan ferrying textile workers continued as the pandemic raged, Italian "progressive" politicians called on people to show their anti-racist solidarity by publicly embracing Chinese people. In America, Nancy Pelosi called on her California constituents to "crowd into Chinatown" on the Lunar New Year.

The amoral cynicism of the CCP regime and its sock-puppets in the WHO is demonstrated by the imposition of internal travel bans in China at the very time they were denouncing international bans. It is hard to interpret this any other way than a deliberate attempt to spread the virus internationally so that China would not be the only country to take a hit from it. Very few journalists in the West seem prepared to draw this obvious inference, the one exception I am aware of being Gordon Chang of the Gatestone Institute.

Yet the WHO has retained its authority, at least to the gatekeepers of the digital public square who run the social media giants, like Mark Zuckerberg, who in congressional testimony about the need to censor "misinformation" nominated the WHO as an authority that could be relied on. So if this principle had been implemented early in the pandemic, viewpoints that contradicted WHO claims on transmissibility could have been censored.

***

Getting back to virus origins, consider the debate about whether the virus was the result of "zoonotic" (natural) evolution in animal species, or had leaked from a Wuhan lab, with the further question in the latter case of whether it was actually engineered or genetically modified in the lab or merely escaped from it.

You are probably aware that, very early on, the great-and-the-good had designated the lab leak (let alone the lab engineered) theory verboten, just a "conspiracy theory". Misinformation, to be censored, as was duly done in mainstream and social media for a year until early 2021 when the Biden administration finally deemed it warranted at least an investigation.

So, we saw Fauci citing experts to the effect the lab leak theory could be pretty much ruled out. A group of researchers, led by a certain Dr Peter Daszak, a principal of a mysterious entity known as the EcoHealth Alliance, had a letter published in Lancet debunking the theory, followed by an article to similar effect in Nature Medicine.

Well that pretty much settled matters, for a while. Dissenting experts, and there were some, found it nearly impossible to get articles disputing this published in the most reputable journals. Others were intimidated into silence by the prospect of having their reputations trashed as spreaders of conspiracy theories.

There was always something odd about this level of confidence. What an extraordinary coincidence, if the zoonotic theory was correct, that a bat-based virus happened to pop up in close proximity to the world's largest collection of bat-borne viruses, kept at the Wuhan Institute of virology? And how come, unlike earlier zoonotic-origin viruses like SARS and MERS, no host animal has been found after two years and the testing of tens of thousands of animals? How could they be so sure?

With recent disclosures the whole worm's nest of influence and corruption has become plain to see, admirably laid out in Sharri Markson' book What Really Happened in Wuhan. In the past few weeks, recently released emails show that when the DNA sequence was first revealed a group of expert researchers in the field expressed the view privately that the virus looked like it could have been been engineered, that it was "hard to explain" how it could have arisen outside the lab.

This was communicated to Fauci, who immediately convened a teleconference to discuss the matter, details of which have now been disclosed. Forty-eight hours later, the same group of researchers publicly repudiated the view they had earlier expressed privately, joining in the chorus rejecting the lab-leak theory. What had gone on in the interim?

Had a new and decisive scientific objection to the leak theory emerged? None has been disclosed. What the emails and the teleconference proceedings did reveal was expressed concern about the impact disclosure would have on international relations and scientific cooperation, and the reputation of Chinese scientists. Some of the scientists who switched their view were later to receive millions of dollars in research grants from the National Institutes of Health.

We now know that the key participants, especially Fauci and Daszak, had been closely involved in the funding of the Wuhan Institute research via the aforementioned EcoHealth Alliance. From Congressional exchanges, we furthermore know that this partly funded incredibly dangerous "gain of function" research that deliberately engineers enhanced virulence and transmissibility. This in a lab about which serious concerns as to safety had been expressed earlier by US authorities. A recipe for disaster.

The lack of critical media scrutiny about this was remarkable, until you consider this was all unfolding in the midst of the US Presidential election, with the terrifying prospect that the Orange Ogre could be re-elected. A key part of the media narrative was that this terrible danger must be averted at all costs, and to sheet blame for the pandemic on any entity other than Donald Trump was unacceptable, especially given his publicly stated support for the lab leak theory.

This raises a number of epistemic problems for anyone interested in the truth about such matters. How much reliance can be placed on expert opinion, given that experts don't just have opinions, they have interests, pecuniary and reputational? What if there are conflicts in expert opinion, with certain viewpoints—even if backed by highly credible people—seeming to be suppressed?

What about the many cases in the history of science where mainstream opinion has turned out to be wrong and dissenting views vindicated? For a case in point consider the medical debate back in the 1990s about the causes of stomach ulcers, where the hitherto accepted opinion by gastroenterologists was that they resulted from stress and lifestyle factors.

Two Australian researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, disputed this view, arguing that ulcers were caused by a specific bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. Their view was ridiculed and condescended to for years by the mainstream—The Science was settled. Except that it wasn't. Marshall and Warren turned out to be right, and were duly awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2005. Their work spared innumerable people around the world the pain of stomach ulcers, and saved many people who might have otherwise died of stomach cancer.

For those committed to the scientific method, as opposed to believing in "The Science", the established science is always open to questioning and refutation. Censoring opinions should be anathema, especially when influenced by political and/or pecuniary considerations.

***

Which brings me to the next controversy—the use of repurposed generic drugs for prophylactic (disease prevention) or therapeutic (disease treatment) purposes as part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The case made by advocates of this involves recognition of the two-stages of Covid disease development—the initial "viral" stage where the disease gets established and replicates in the lung tissue of the infected person, and the second and much more deadly stage when the body's inflammatory response cuts in and manifests in an extreme form as the "cytokine storm" that actually does most of the damage.

For most of the life of the pandemic the treatment regime has involved doing very little other than isolation and monitoring the patient during the early viral stage, on the presumption that there is not a lot that can be done, with intensive treatment and possible hospitalization once the inflammatory stage is reached.

From around mid-2020 a group of very experienced clinicians and researchers argued that even before the recent approval of patented anti-viral drugs by Merck and Pfizer, there were worthwhile options, including monoclonal antibodies and some cheap generics with well understood risk profiles that have been used for other purposes on a large scale for many years.

Chief among these are hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which some experts have proposed as parts of a cocktail of drugs that includes other components, including antibacterials, zinc and vitamins D and C (especially the former).

The most prominent advocates of this approach in the US are Dr Pierre Kory and Dr Paul Maric, both of whom have treated large numbers of Covid patients, they claim with considerable success, and both of whom have extensive lists of peer-reviewed publications to their credit.

They have been joined by some distinguished epidemiologists, such as Harvey Risch, Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale Institute of Global Health, as well as two of Australia's most distinguished medical scientists —Professor Thomas Borody of Monash University, who followed up the work of Robin Warren and Barry Marshall on peptic ulcers by developing a successful treatment protocol for the ulcer-causing bacterium identified by the latter. Borody was among the first to suggest the value of ivermectin based on his in-vitro research.

Professor Robert Clancy, retired from the University of Newcastle, is one of Australia's most distinguished immunologists with a stellar record of achievement, including developing an oral vaccine for bronchitis.

These advocates cite a large number of studies that support the efficacy of variations of these treatment regimes, with substantial reductions in the rate of hospitalization and deaths.

However their argument has been rejected by medical establishments in most Western countries, though the story is somewhat different in a number of developing countries. The state of Uttar Pradesh in India (population 230 million) claims to have achieved spectacular success in suppressing the Delta variant last year with the widespread early use of an ivermectin-based drug cocktail at a time when vaccination rates were very low.

How to judge claim and counter claim? The "gold standard" in assessing the effectiveness of treatments is a well conducted, large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT). Just about all of the supportive studies are small scale, many observational rather than RCT, and some done in developing countries to which western medical establishments tend not to give much attention.

Given this reality, assessing this plethora of studies requires application of a technique called meta-analysis, a study of studies, to try and extract signal from noise, and some such analyses yielded positive results for ivermectin. However, by their very nature, meta-analysis studies are open to endless disputation, mainly about which studies to include given their variable quality, which inevitably involves a degree of subjective judgement.

Whether the advocates are right or not, the matter certainly deserved to be considered and debated properly. So why was this not done? Enter politics. You see, in an age of the politicization of everything, seemingly technical issues are not immune. For just about every issue, there is a "left-wing" and a "right-wing" position. And when one Donald J. Trump threw his hat in the ring by advocating for hydroxychloroquine, well that pretty much defined the view that all right-thinking people should take. An unfortunate intervention, to say the least.

The debate was so contaminated that even the broader issue of early use of generic drugs became tainted—and it is not just about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. A group of researchers in America has compiled a long list of drugs with some evidence of efficacy as preventatives and therapies.

In 2020 a committee of the US Senate convened hearings on the issue of early therapeutic treatments for Covid. The advocates came and gave detailed submissions, including a very interesting one from Yale epidemiologist Professor Harvey Risch on the relative value of observational versus RCT studies.

It should have been the occasion for a detailed debate between advocates and opponents, but unfortunately the Democratic side simply decided to boycott the proceedings after their ranking (most senior) committee member made a brief political statement.

So, in light of all this, how come we have yet to see a large scale Randomized Controlled Trial? After Dr Pierre Kory and his colleagues made their case to the National Institutes of Health in the US, this body changed its formal position from opposition to the use of ivermectin to neutrality (neither support nor opposition), but advocated precisely this kind of high-quality study.

So, why has this not been done? Such studies are enormously expensive, typically around $US20 million, and are generally funded by the pharmaceutical industry. But here we have to consider interests. The last thing "big pharma" wants is to see cheap generic drugs, with costs per course of treatment measured in cents, rather than new patented drugs they are developing. Bear in mind that Pfizer, for example, is estimated to make $US54 billion from vaccines and their new therapeutic drugs.

So it is a bit of a problem, to say the least. Politicization and pecuniary interests combined (and throw in the potential for "bureaucratic capture") make for a toxic combination when it comes to assessing treatments where there is little money to be made.

The only prospect of a quality trial of ivermectin still extant, as far as I know, is being conducted by researchers at Oxford University (the PRINCIPLE study). This, some dared to hope, might allow the issue to be settled definitively. However there was a strange report late last year on the medical resource site Medscape that the Oxford study had been "paused" because of a problem securing supplies of the drug, a very strange claim given large-scale production in India and other locations. Dr John Campbell, who runs the most popular YouTube channel dealing with the pandemic, contacted the head of the study and was advised that it was still proceeding, and expected to report in September.

It would be regrettable, to say the least, if the early-therapeutic approach is ultimately vindicated and could have saved many lives, especially before the vaccines arrived.

***

So what about the Right? I do not want to suggest that the politicization of the Covid debate is exclusively a problem on the Left.

There are the obvious problems like the flirtation of parts of the Right with the anti-vax movement, including portraying the early therapeutic approach described above as an alternative, rather than as a complement, to mass vaccination, a position that the formerly-Liberal federal MP Craig Kelly leans toward. Then there are figures like Senator Pauline Hansen, powerful influencers with a section of the population, who seem to take pride in their non-vaccination.

It is interesting to watch how the Fox News cable TV host Tucker Carlson treats the issue. Carlson is an extraordinarily effective polemicist, his weekday program now topping the ratings of any cable news program, demolishing his rivals on CNN and MSNBC. I thoroughly enjoy his spiels, especially when I agree with them, as when he takes on Critical Race Theory and "woke" ideology more generally.

And yet, when he touches on vaccination his tenor is, if not hostile, slyly deprecating, as when he always refers to the mRNA vaccines as "experimental medicine". This does not seem a reasonable way to refer to vaccines that have been through a pretty exhaustive series of trials and have now been in large scale use for some time.

There is an element of truth in this in the sense that mRNA is a new technology platform, and as such there is the possibility of problems arising in the long-term. However that has to be balanced against their highly protective effect in lowering the probability of infection and avoiding series illness in the short term, and reducing the risk of suffering "long-Covid", a problem about which more disturbing information keeps coming to light, in the long term.

I don't think this is helpful. Vaccine scepticism is a very real problem among the Right in America, and here. Even Donald Trump found himself being booed by his loyal audience at a rally in Texas when he advised people to get boosted. His Warp Speed effort to accelerate vaccine development was one of his administration's most significant achievements, as acknowledged by the then-director of the National Institutes of Health Dr Francis Collins, who is no admirer of Trump.

More generally, I do not agree with the somewhat cavalier attitude to the disease that you often find on the political Right, as when people like Sky news commentator Rowan Dean hold up Sweden, or the state of Florida, as exemplars, not taking into account the markedly higher Covid death toll, indeed the markedly higher overall rate of excess deaths from all causes (the more significant measure) to be found at those locations when compared to Australia.

The contrast between Sweden and its Nordic neighbours (Norway, Denmark and Finland) is pretty stark (check table below). Florida (population 22 million) has had 67,000 deaths, compared to Australia (population 25 million) with 4,700, but data like this tends to be glossed over.

The one point that I think needs a lot more emphasis is that we may not yet have seen the worst of Covid. There is no doubt the disease will continue to evolve, with most new variants likely to be less virulent. But what if we are confronted with the nightmare scenario of a variant that is highly transmissible, highly virulent (more likely to cause severe disease), and more vaccine resistant? Some epidemiologists think this is just a matter of time.

The takeaway? We should by now have established the necessary infrastructure to implement a rapid and effective closing of our borders, with a quarantine system with a network of purpose-designed centres. The entire process for handling new arrivals should be rigorously controlled, with dedicated vehicles with separate air circulation to avoid repetitions of the NSW Delta outbreak which started with a limousine driver. Things like the QR code system need to be kept in place, if not necessarily enforced during low-risk periods.

I raised these points in a comment in an article in The Australian newspaper last year. I have contributed the occasional article to this newspaper in recent years, most of which the readership seems to find pretty congenial.

Not this time! Just about all the comments in response to mine were along the lines "go and hide under a doona"!

Oh well. This is part of the reason why, while appalled by the rise of the identarian Left, I would never contemplate jumping over wholesale to the Right.

The American political theorist Thomas Sowell wrote a book, A Conflict of Visions in the late 1980s about how political positions tend to congeal into "packages" of policies, often with little obvious logical relationship to each other, with adherents pressured to adhere to all elements  on pain of peer-group obloquy and, on the Left anyway, possible social and professional death.

Sowell tried to find an underlying rationale for this curious phenomenon in terms of Left and Right having "open" and "constrained" visions of human potentiality respectively.

I don't think this theory works. How does left-wing opposition to discussing the early use of generic therapeutic drugs to treat Covid, or to entertaining the possibility the virus may have leaked from a laboratory, or right-wing aversion to vaccine mandates and stringent lockdowns, conform to Sowell's open and constrained visions? 

For an explanation how policy positions are ideologically entrenched we might be better served by considering the role of groupthink and peer group pressure in the fervid, social media-soaked atmosphere we live in today.

One where Donald Trump saying he uses hydroxychloroquine triggers an immediate Pavlovian reaction from his opponents to vehemently oppose consideration of any repurposed generic drug (Trump joked he would have done better to have come out against it). Not much contemplation of broad ideological visions there.