Pushing conspiracy theories is not in the interest of the people who elected him.
As we’ve written before, Coalition backbencher Craig Kelly — presumably annoyed that deaths caused by his relentlessly spruiked coal industry are taking too long — has dived headlong into spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
He spent a great deal of 2020 endorsing the drug hydroxychloroquine over the protests of Australia’s chief medical officer, and now he’s going after masks. Yesterday he shared a (non-peer-reviewed) paper looking at the side effects of mask wearing, which led him to the conclusion that forcing adolescents to wear masks was child abuse.
This drew the ire of the Australian Medical Association, whose vice president Dr Chris Moy who said misinformation like this was “torching the foundation of community health and science”.
Of course, going against public health advice would be bad enough for any elected representative, but Kelly’s Facebook page is one of the most popular of any Australian politician — which may not be unrelated to his relentless misinformation.
Kelly’s Facebook posts tick pretty much all the boxes that keep Australian doctors up at night: the focus on early studies that haven’t been peer reviewed; promoting mistrust in health institutions; emotively focusing on “miracle cures” like hydroxychloroquine, the antiseptic skin ointment Betadine, or the drug ivermectin.
