A leading figure in the international response to the pandemic has described repeated use of lockdowns during the first two years of the COVID crisis as a failure of narrative and policy. | EXCLUSIVE by Chip Le Grand
Dr David Nabarro, the WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19, said a “middle path” was open for governments to suppress the spread of the virus through less-restrictive public health measures.
Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation’s special envoy on COVID-19, says lockdowns were an effective way for governments to buy time to prepare their health systems at the start of the pandemic, but should not have become a default response to outbreaks.
Then health minister Martin Foley, Premier Daniel Andrews and chief medical officer Brett Sutton during Melbourne’s sixth and final lockdown.“You might want to restrict movement a lot at the beginning because you are trying to reduce the spread of the thing, but the key thing is not to do it for too long,” he said.
“I think Dave Nabarro is right: you use all of the more-sustainable, less-intrusive mechanisms to do what you can without using lockdowns as your only or largest tool,” he said. “But he is really talking about Europe or North America and not the so-called COVID-zero states.”Former health minister Martin Foley defended the use of lockdowns before vaccines were readily available and said that by the end of 2021, they were no longer a proportionate or necessary public health measure.
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