What Australia's Covid Frontman Regrets

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Society & Culture, Education, Comedy Interviews, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the Hantavirus and Ebola pop up in the news, what did we get wrong during Covid? Dr Nick Coatsworth was the Australian government’s deputy chief medical officer during the pandemic’s first wave, when he regularly appeared on radio and TV to provide the public with information. He became the face of the vaccine rollout. Today, he’s more reflective. He shuns vaccine mandates, wants a national Covid inquiry, and opposes policies that would ban health “misinformation”. Earlier in his career, as an expert in infectious and respiratory diseases, Nick led humanitarian teams in the Congo and in Darfur for Medicins Sans Frontiers - an experience so horrifying it left him with PTSD. He’s now a resident medical expert at the Nine Network on Australian TV, as well as a practising doctor at Canberra Hospital, where he was previously its director of infectious diseases. Nick and Josh bring you up to speed on Hantavirus & Ebola, and wrestle with lockdowns, lab leaks, contact tracing, quarantine, misinformation, vaccine mandates, and what we need to learn from a pandemic we don’t reflect on enough.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ebola and antivirus, they are legitimately scary viruses. They remind us that we can be in trouble.
0:07.0	And that's the core of the fear that drove a lot of the COVID-19 response.
0:12.0	What were the big mistakes that mandates? Like, if someone who's going to lose their job,
0:16.3	you are forcing them to have it. I am ashamed that I put that logic forward. And if we're going to bring
0:22.3	some of these people back, I think we would need to go out and say, you will never be forced
0:27.7	to have a medical treatment again in this country.
0:34.1	You've noticed how little we talk about that period?
0:39.4	We all went through the most traumatizing global upheaval in a generation.
0:47.2	And as soon as it was over, none of us talk about it.
0:50.4	We don't reflect on it.
0:52.4	It's just like it's some kind of cognitive thing where we're just
0:56.0	pushing it away into a little corner of our psyches and we don't want to address it. We haven't
1:01.6	had a royal commission about it. We haven't had a way to learn, you know, what should we do for next
1:06.4	time? What should we not do next time? It's just like, thank fuck, that was over. Let's just
1:11.0	forget all about it and move on. And just let's, let's unpack exactly what, what that does.
1:16.5	I mean, the first thing to say is that this wasn't just a health event. This was, you know,
1:21.7	in the terms of the political science stuff that I've been doing at the ANU recently, this is a huge,
1:26.3	it's called a critical juncture.
1:28.3	It changed everything. It changed our view of how much governments can actually support us and
1:34.8	shifted it towards a more big government, us towards a more big government mentality.
1:40.1	It shifted the way we think about healthcare. It shifted the way we think about politics, but most importantly, it polarized us. And I think there's a differing view on the left and the right as of politics as to what is responsible for polarization. And, you know, we take the vaccine example. There will be people on the left side, and this is
2:03.0	the dominant side of public health and health policy, by the way. It is dominant left in this country,
	...

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