COVIDIOT Liberal Members of NSW & Vic state parliaments openly supporting their threatening, aggressive QAnon and anti-vax "friends".

The Saturday Paper, Post, 17 November 2021, excerpt:

In Victoria:

• Up to 500 protesters occupying the steps of Parliament forcibly ejected a journalist and issued violent threats, including one speaker who said of Premier Daniel Andrews, “I look forward to the day I get to see you dance on the end of a rope” (The Age);

• Video of the protesters shows them gathered around a wooden gallows on Monday chanting “Freedom”, “Traitor”, and “Hang Dan Andrews” while attempting to place the head of an inflatable doll of the premier through the noose;

• Four state Liberal MPs mingled with the protesters on Tuesday, including Bernie Finn, who last week shared a doctored picture of Andrews dressed as Adolf Hitler;

• Finn posted a selfie with the mob, which he described as “a couple of thousand of my closest friends”;

• The protests are against a bill that gives the premier and health minister the power to declare a pandemic and make public health orders, with debate extending late last night (7News);

• It is all but guaranteed to pass after the government made amendments to secure the support of three crossbench MPs, including that parliament will be given immediate ability to scrutinise any order (The Guardian).

In NSW:

• Premier Dominic Perrottet dumped a bill seeking to expand the state’s Covid-19 emergency powers until 2023 (The Australian);

• It had been approved by cabinet but faced opposition from Liberal backbenchers in a bitter partyroom backlash;

• Health Minister Brad Hazzard had been pushing to retain the powers to require quarantine or self-isolation for people exposed to Covid-19 (7News);

• Perrottet said he’d defer the decision on extending the powers until 2022.

Are you sick & tired of the misinformation being aired by the Morrison Government and numerous COVID-19 conspiracy theorists? Well it seems the Australian Medical Association just might be

Australian Medical Association, media release, 6 September 2020:

AMA President Dr Omar Khorshid said extending COVID-19 restrictions across Victoria will help that State and the nation ultimately recover from the pandemic sooner. 

In response to Premier Daniel Andrew’s extension today of Victoria’s physical isolation measures, Dr Khorshid said the extended restrictions will also help quicken the path to economic recovery. 

“The Victorian Government has made necessary decisions based on sound medical advice, in the best interests of the nation’s health and the nation’s economy,” Dr Khorshid said. 

“The Victorian Government modelling shows what doctors already knew. If restrictions were lifted this week, the State would see infections rise again. 

“Some business leaders campaigning against isolation measures are ignoring medical evidence that easing restrictions too soon risks a third wave surge in further infections. 

“The fall in daily infections in Victoria proves current restrictions are working. Extending these restrictions best positions the economy for a sustainable long-term recovery. 

“Every Australian wants to see Victoria succeed in halting COVID-19, both for the health of us all and the long-term recovery of our economy. 

“The Premier has also flagged some changes to the curfew and extending the ability for outdoor exercise. These modest changes are sensible, but recognise the needs of social interaction for people living alone.” 

Dr Khorshid welcomed the further decline in infection of Victorian health care workers, and the benefit the extended restrictions will have in preventing health care worker infections. 

“Front line doctors, nurses, and aged carers have been working to keep Victorians alive as the pandemic has reached across the State,” Dr Khorshid said. 

“The extended restrictions will both help prevent further illness, and also take pressure off the strained Victorian hospital and aged care system,” Dr Khorshid concluded.

Covid-19 deniers come from the same anti-science stable as climate change deniers?

DeSmog blog, Executive Summary, 22 April 2019:

“Government should be doing little or next to nothing,” Richard Ebeling wrote in a post about COVID-19 republished on March 24 by the Heartland Institute. “The problem is a social and medical one, and not a political one.”

“I just think we're going to be fine. I think everything is going to be fine,” Heartland editorial director and research fellow Justin Haskins said about COVID-19 during a March 13 episode of the podcast In the Tank. “I really don't think this is going to be a problem even two to three months from now.”

On Dec. 31, 2019, “a pneumonia of unknown cause” was first reported to the World Health Organization’s China Country Office — and in the months following that report, the disease now known as COVID-19 spread to infect millions of people worldwide and seems well on its way to killing hundreds of thousands — while experts warn that the presumed death toll may be significantly higher than we yet know.

As the virus spread, so too did misinformation: baseless predictions that the disease would not cause significant harm, claims of miracle cures, and conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins. That misinformation was often circulated by white-collar professionals — including many who have a history of casting doubt on climate science or seeking to debate issues that were already laid to rest within the scientific community. The overlap was so striking that it caught the attention of both former President Barack Obama and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in March.

Some of that misinformation on COVID-19 came straight from President Trump. But a river of faulty information on the coronavirus also flowed from think tanks, experts (some self-proclaimed), academics, and professional right-wing activists who also have spurned climate science and sought to slow or stop action to respond to the climate crisis.

Some compared COVID-19 to the flu or other threats, suggesting that the flu was a larger threat and that action to slow the spread of the novel virus was an overreaction. As the toll from COVID-19 grew, others argued that the virus was the most important threat and that action to slow climate change was superfluous. Some circulated false or unproven cures and remedies while others touted the benefits of single-use plastics during the pandemic (without regard for the health of those living in places where plastics and petrochemicals are produced — like Saint John the Baptist parish, Louisiana, which on April 16, had the highest per-person COVID-19 death rate in the U.S.)

Some attacked renewable energy, some the Green New Deal, and others the World Health Organization (WHO). Some framed efforts to “flatten the curve” of infections as infringements on liberty or simply unnecessary while others persisted in using terms that the WHO has warned can lead to dangerous stigma and discrimination. And some climate science deniers have circulated conspiracy theories, like claims that the virus was a foreign “bioweapon,” that it’s linked to “electrosmog” and 5G networks, or alleged that “the World Health Organization has carried out the greatest fraud perhaps in modern history.”

The decades that fossil fuel companies spent funding organizations that sought to undermine the conclusions of credible climate scientists and building up doubt about science itself ultimately created a network of professional science deniers who are now deploying some of the same skills they honed on climate against the public health crisis at the center of our attention today.

Many of the operatives spreading COVID disinformation have influence because of the fossil fuel industry.

• People like Steve Milloy and Patrick Michaels and organizations like  the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland and Manhattan Institutes gained influence in the early heyday of climate science denial when the fossil fuel industry made a broad and concerted effort to mislead the public about global warming.
• We’re now seeing many of the same people and organizations utilize the tactics they honed in the 1990s to foment doubt about the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
• Many of the organizations now spreading misinformation received funding from fossil fuel companies and/or trade groups for years or even decades, as DeSmog and others have previously documented (e.g. Reason Foundation, Independent Institute, Texas Public Policy Foundation, etc.).....

COVID denial should forever discredit climate science deniers.

• These attempts to exploit a global pandemic to further the climate denial machine’s anti-science agenda will mean loss of life, and unnecessarily imperil frontline medical personnel by allowing the virus to spread further and more quickly. 
• Some climate deniers have pushed outright conspiracy theories on COVID-19: claiming, as Piers Corbyn did, that the pandemic is a “world population cull” backed by Bill Gates and George Soros; alleging, as a former member of British Parliament did, that COVID-19 is just a “big hoax”; or, like Alex Jones, seeking to profit directly off of COVID-19 through false marketing, according to the Food and Drug Administration and the New York Attorney General, both of which have warned Jones to desist from marketing a toothpaste he claimed “kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range.”
• Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit claiming that COVID-19 “was prepared and stockpiled as a biological weapon to be used against China’s perceived enemies.” Principia Scientific International claimed that economies were about to be shut down because “the WHO Director caused a global coronavirus panic over a basic math error,” (referring to early World Health Organization fatality rate numbers). Steve Milloy tweeted out a link to a New York Times op-ed by Dr. Cornelia Griggs, who described working in a New York City hospital amid the pandemic, calling her a “Hysterical doc” and writing “Stop the panic.” (Less than a week later, Milloy tweeted that “#Coronavirus has given us the #GreenDream: —Deprivation — Destroyed economy — Police state”). On April 10 — at a time when over 92,000 deaths had been reported worldwide — Bjorn Lomborg wrote that “Significant data indicate corona is no worse than the common flu.” And former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani tweeted out a list of leading causes of death on March 10, writing “Likely at the very bottom, Coronavirus: 27.” Six weeks later, more than 14,400 people in New York City had died after contracting the virus.
• Not only does their pandemic messaging undermine climate science deniers’ credibility, it also puts on display some of the faulty thinking that can be seen in their discussions of both topics — you see the same logical fallacies at play. There’s the rejection of basic modeling techniques (and early models on both COVID-19 and on climate have ultimately proved tragically accurate). There’s a failure to grasp the ways that an exponential problem can accelerate. There’s a willingness to make assertions that aren’t supported by evidence as well as a willingness to issue blanket assurances that things will be fine without taking into account the evidence. And there’s a reliance on ad hominem attacks and innuendo. These communications tactics used on both issues mirror each other.
• The individuals and organizations responsible for spreading disinformation on climate science and COVID-19 will forever cement their reputations on the wrong side of history....

In this series

• COVIDenial Executive Summary 
• COVID-19 Denial
• COVID-19 & Climate Comparisons
• Give Me Freedom or Give Me COVID 
• Climate Deniers & the 'China Virus' 
• Climate Deniers & Coronavirus 'Cures' 
• COVID-19 & Fossil Fuel Promoters 
• COVID-19 & Plastic Promoters 
• COVID Deniers & Attacks on Renewables
• COVID-19 Denier Attacks on WHO 
• COVID Denier Conspiracy Theories

COVID-19 denialists and minimizers

Yale Climate Connections, 14 April 2020:

For the climate community, observing U.S. national political leaders’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic has been like watching the climate crisis unfold on fast-forward. Many – particularly on the political right – have progressed through the same five stages of science denial in the face of both threats.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 15 April 2020:

As the Covid-19 crisis plays out across the world, a disturbing new form of denialism is emerging which seeks to sow doubt not just about the seriousness of the pandemic or the response to it, but about whether the virus exists at all.

Spurred on by conspiracy theorists and some right-wing media pundits, people using hashtags like ‘#filmyourhospitals’ and ‘#emptyhospitals’ are actively encouraging individuals to film hospitals and medical facilities—the implication being that, if hospitals appear quiet and calm from the outside, this ‘proves’ that the coronavirus crisis is being faked as part of a conspiracy to achieve some nefarious goal.

Google’s search trend data shows clearly the day the ‘empty hospitals’ narrative took off. The #filmyourhospitals hashtag was first tweeted on 29 March by a QAnon conspiracy theorist on Twitter. It was then amplified by others with large numbers of followers, including former congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero (whose Twitter account was recently retweeted by President Donald Trump).

‘Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending’, Tesoriero wrote on 30 March in a Facebook post in which she questioned why two Los Angeles hospitals she’d visited appeared quiet. The post had been viewed more than 118,000 times as of 14 April.....

The Telegraph (UK), 26 March 2020:

Two weeks ago an anti-vaccine Facebook group called ‘We Brought Vaxxed to the UK’ started to disseminate a new and dangerous contagion: misinformation about Covid-19. 

It’s posts promote xenophobia, conspiracy theories and erroneous medical information about the disease and how it might be treated. 

One post claimed China was using the outbreak to cull the elderly, another suggested hand sanitiser causes cancer and a “probiotic yogurt suppository” was recommended as a cure. 

The group is just one of some 50 social media accounts being tracked by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a charity dedicated to preventing false and divisive lies and myths spreading across the web... 

The Independent, 20 March 2020:

Here in northeast Kansas, in a small town set amid tidy farms and ranches, a Walmart worker named Brandon Crist was growing frustrated with the panic terrorising the American public. 

He didn’t understand the need for lockdowns, closing schools, limiting public gatherings and shuttering bars and restaurants. Altering almost all facets of life. 

As he often does, Mr Crist found a meme online that amplified his feelings and posted it to his Facebook page. 

“Does anyone know anyone who has the coronavirus? Not just heard about them but actually know them,” the meme said in bold white letters on a blue background. “Statistically none of us are sick ... yet concerts are cancelled, tournaments are cancelled and entire school districts shut down. Out of total irrational fear. If you have not previously feared the power of the media you should be terrified of them now. They are exerting their power to shut down America.” 

The post struck a chord with Mr Crist’s friends here in Wellsville and beyond, many of whom are similarly frustrated with the pandemic-induced havoc in their daily lives. “Amen!” said one commenter. “I’m not changing anything I do. This is BS,” said another. A captain from a nearby fire department, Dustin Donovan, liked the message, then added a hoax meme of his own.....