What Australia's Covid Frontman Regrets
May 21, 2026
13 min
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460 of 468

May 21, 2026
What Australia's Covid Frontman Regrets
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Josh Szeps Episodes Around May 21, 2026
Episode 460 of 468 — walk the feed in the order it was published.
13:45This episodeWhat Australia's Covid Frontman Regrets
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.
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