“Fair cop,” admits the ABC’s resident coronavirus expert Norman Swan. “I probably did cause some vaccine hesitancy.”

Swan is reflecting on months of controversy over Australia’s vaccine rollout in which he was an active and early critic, sounding the alarm over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca jab and its involvement in a very rare but dangerous clotting disorder.

The doctor is in: Norman Swan has helped millions of Australians better understand the COVID-19 pandemic.Credit:Nic Walker

In February, federal Minister for Health Greg Hunt batted away a question about whether Swan was Australia’s leading anti-vaxxer, and Swan says a Coalition MP he knows well texted him accusing him of being “single-handedly responsible for vaccine hesitancy in Australia”.

But Swan says his vaccine coverage was all about giving the public the transparency it should have got from the government – a telling insight into how he approaches his role in the pandemic.

“When you try to bury it, anxiety goes up,” he says. “So what do you do? Don’t report it? Or you actually report it for what it is? It’s not as bad as they originally thought, but it’s real. Did that cause vaccine hesitancy? It probably did. But how is it going to wash out in the end? You can’t keep this secret from people.”

In the end Swan was right – or at least not wrong. In a dramatic evening press conference on April 8, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia would move away from the AstraZeneca vaccine for under-50s and make Pfizer the preferred option.

Such has been Swan’s fate throughout the pandemic. Through his smash hit Coronacast podcast, regular appearances on ABC radio and television and on Twitter, he has been out in front of the government urging tighter restrictions or different courses of action. Sometimes he was proven right, other times not.

His forthright commentary has earned him a legion of devoted followers, and he is celebrated by a large and loyal audience for explaining the world of COVID-19 at a time when many people feel confused, sceptical or plain overwhelmed. Swan, 68, has become such a public figure that when he received his first AstraZeneca jab this month it was a television event, filmed for an ABC News Breakfast segment.

At the same time, Swan’s analysis irks others who see him as alarmist, and puts him on a collision course with the Morrison government. His detractors protest he is not an epidemiologist and doesn’t have access to official data. Early in the piece, people close to Morrison described Swan as “dangerous”.

It’s true Swan is not an epidemiologist. He trained as a physician but has been a journalist most of his life. Still, he is widely praised in the field as having excellent access to expert sources and being very well-read, including of international studies.

A photo of Norman Swan from the 1980s when he joined the ABC’s Science Unit.

Journalists are accustomed to presenting and synthesising other people’s views. But Swan has taken on a hybrid role of journalist and expert, in which he is called upon to give his own views, informed by expertise. It is not without precedent but it is unusual.

“I don’t think it’s unique but yes it is striking,” says journalism academic Margaret Simons. “You wouldn’t normally expect to see an ABC journalist as a panelist on Q&A. But I think the point of comparison is other experts such as foreign correspondents or your transport reporter in the middle of a transport crisis.”

Simons is a regular Coronacast listener and finds Swan “totally indispensable”. She doesn’t think his formal qualifications matter. “He’s not an epidemiologist and he’s not a vaccine specialist, but what he is is a journalist who talks to those people a lot.”

Swan says he relies on a group of five or six experts to steer his coverage and they are “generally not the people that the Commonwealth has been consulting”. But he is only prepared to name one: Kamalini Lokuge, a highly respected field epidemiologist and an associate professor at the ANU who worked with the Victorian government to halt Melbourne’s devastating second wave.

The Coronacast host finds it challenging to straddle the boundaries of journalist, expert and ABC personality. “It’s bloody difficult,” he says. “It’s probably the hardest bit out of all of this – trying to keep it to analysis and commentary rather than … your personal opinion.”

Swan says his most important job is to explain and secondly to hold those in power to account. He made a decision early on that he didn’t want to be “in the room where it happens”, trying to get access to ministers or uncover scoops.

“The risk is once you’re in the room you get co-opted by the system,” he says. “I felt that you could report on this pandemic from the science and what you knew about epidemiology. Within reason, that’s proven roughly right.”

Norman Swan as general manager of the ABC’s Radio National in Ultimo in 1992.Credit:Bruce Milton Miller

Swan was born in Glasgow and studied at the University of Aberdeen. He came to Australia in 1978 for a year’s training as a registrar in paediatrics at what was then the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, but stayed on and segued into media, becoming an ABC lifer.

He joined the broadcaster in 1982, and as general manager of Radio National in the early ’90s he reinvented the wheel by bringing in left-field talent like Wendy Harmer, Geraldine Doogue and Phillip Adams. Harmer was a stand-up comedian who had only dabbled in radio but Swan gave her a drive slot with producer Laura Waters. “We just ran amok,” Harmer recalls. “Jon Faine, bless him, he loved it. The rest of the group were absolutely appalled that I’d been inflicted on the listeners of Australia.”

Despite spending his career at the ABC, Swan retains some tabloid instincts. For six seasons he was the on-screen doctor on Network Ten’s reality weight-loss show The Biggest Loser, dispensing advice about exercise and counting calories.

Swan won a Gold Walkley for exposing fraudulent research by obstetrician William McBride. In 2013, he took a brave stand against the ABC’s own Catalyst program after it disputed the causal link between saturated fats, cholesterol and heart disease. “People will die as a result of the Catalyst program unless people understand at heart what the issues are,” Swan warned. The ABC later found the program breached editorial standards and removed it from the internet.

Swan had three children with his former wife, paediatrician Lee Sutton. One of them, Jonathan Swan, is a former Herald and Age journalist who now covers US politics for Axios. In 2016, Norman’s daughter Anna was involved in a horrific bike accident during a family holiday in Italy. Last year Good Weekend magazine reported the trauma had contributed to the breakdown of Swan’s marriage with his second wife, Karen Carey.

But the pandemic has made Swan a celebrity. He is now stopped at Woolies by fans who want to thank him.

Swan, who lives in an apartment in Sydney’s Double Bay, says he has tried to run from the fame. “The idea of a journalist being a celebrity is anathema, and very dangerous. Where celebrity becomes dangerous is where you think you’ve got power. The reality is you don’t.”

Really? Swan clearly has had an influence in Australia’s management of COVID-19. Coronacast maintains about 2.6 million monthly downloads. Swan may not have his hands on the levers of power, but he helps shape the narrative.

Norman Swan at his apartment in Sydney’s Double Bay.Credit:Nic Walker

That influence led Morrison’s office to call Swan’s bosses in March 2020 suggesting he speak with former chief medical office Brendan Murphy to address differences in their advice to the public. On March 21 last year, the day after Morrison closed the borders and the day before the states enacted mass lockdowns, Swan predicted as many as 8000 cases by the following weekend, with the “true number” being as high as 80,000.

“No magic fairy will bring that down. Fourteen to 20 days behind Italy. Believe in maths not magic,” he tweeted. For his fans, the stark warning made him a hero telling truth to power. To critics, it was unjustified fear-mongering.

People who harbour doubts about Swan tend to point to this tweet as evidence, because Australia clearly avoided the doom he predicted. Swan says it’s the tweet his “trolls” keep regurgitating. But he makes no apology. The warning came before Morrison was dragged into a lockdown of non-essential services by the premiers. It is entirely feasible if governments had resisted lockdowns for longer we would have ended up closer to where Swan expected.

“What was different about Australia that we wouldn’t have ended up in that place? Nothing,” Swan says. “No serious epidemiologist thinks any different from that. We didn’t end up there because we did the full lockdown, to everybody’s credit.”

It’s a logical fallacy to assert, as some of Swan’s detractors do, that our successful suppression of the virus proved him wrong. “When prevention works, nothing happens,” he says. “I made the prediction that in six weeks I would be criticised by the shock jocks. It only took four weeks.”

Swan says he ultimately had a friendly call with Murphy, whom he has known for nearly 20 years. “There was no rancour, no anger, no ticking me off. I suspect Brendan was asked to give me a call and he did. We had a chat and that was it.”

The other example Swan’s critics highlight is his response to Sydney’s Avalon and Berala clusters just before Christmas. On December 21, he said it was “breathtaking” the NSW government hadn’t made masks mandatory and called for all of Sydney to be locked down.

“You’ve just got to lock down greater metropolitan Sydney,” he said. “Christmas, let me tell you, will be a super-spreading event in Sydney if we don’t get this under control.”

The government had already locked down the northern beaches and imposed limits on Christmas gatherings. It was ultimately able to control the outbreak. So was Swan wrong? He says no, because a lockdown could have curtailed things faster. “It grumbled on for about six or seven weeks. Would we have just gotten rid of it [and] shortened the whole process? We’ll never know the answer to it.”

This year, Swan has been highly critical of the government’s slow vaccine rollout and reliance on the AstraZeneca vaccine. As the evidence became clearer, he says the ABC agonised over how to report the issue, asking: are we making this worse or not? “People just want to hear the facts,” he says.

Dr Norman Swan’s was an active and early critic of AstraZeneca. Credit:ABC

Swan’s warnings turned out to be prescient. The clotting issue was eventually recognised by authorities who changed the recommended vaccine for under-50s to Pfizer out of an abundance of caution.

“The Commonwealth was clearly running away from a situation where this problem was real and it wasn’t going to go away,” Swan says. “When I delved into it and actually looked at the pathology and realised it was a low platelet count, which hadn’t been reported very much, I thought ‘shit … this is not normal clotting’. Vaccines have been taken off the market for less.”

Swan was also on the government’s case about why it was not contracting with Moderna, the US-based manufacturer of a highly effective mRNA vaccine similar to Pfizer. Less than two weeks ago, Hunt announced the government had done exactly that, buying 25 million doses.

While his advice was ultimately heeded, the relative peace Swan and the government reached last year was blown out of the water.

“I hear they’re really annoyed with my coverage of the vaccine,” Swan says. “I suspect they get pissed off with me from time to time and I certainly hear that second hand.”

In a speech to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons on May 13, former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth named Swan as a critic of the government’s communication on COVID-19. Later in the speech, Coatsworth lambasted “activist” doctors whom he accused of misrepresenting data from AstraZeneca’s trials. He stresses he was not referring to Swan in this group, and says Swan plays an important role in getting information to the community.

“We need people who are external to government who are able to translate a health message clearly,” says Coatsworth. “The qualification needs to be: if there’s criticism made of policy, who’s making it? Is it Dr Swan making it based on Dr Swan’s research? Is it based on a view expressed to him by another expert? In which case, who is it? And has he provided a balanced view based on what the majority of people in that profession think?”

Coatsworth says Swan’s dire predictions about COVID getting out of control were fair enough. “He wasn’t the only one saying we have to be worried about exponential growth. We bought enough ventilators to sink the Titanic.”

Criticising Swan in public can be hazardous, especially on Twitter, where his fans are liable to seize upon any scepticism as though it were heresy. Just as trolls badger Swan, his followers sometimes viciously target his detractors. It is not unlike the abuse posted by hardcore supporters of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews under the hashtag #IStandWithDan in response to perceived victimisation by the media.

Tegan Taylor and Dr Norman Swan’s Coronacast podcast still averages 2.6 million downloads a month.Credit:ABC

Hunt declined to comment for this story, as did Murphy, Paul Kelly and the federal health department, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard, Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley, NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant and several medical experts.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose has described Swan as a “treasure”, a sentiment senior ABC sources say is thoroughly heartfelt. At a high level, Swan is considered a great asset for the public broadcaster. “He’s our Fauci,” says one such source, referring to the chief medical adviser to the US President.

Within the ABC there are also different schools of thought about Swan; those who revere him and those who express some scepticism of his professed ambivalence toward fame. [A recent interview with The Australian in which he said he missed his anonymity set a few eyes rolling.]

One or two experts have been mildly critical. Peter Collignon, a professor of infectious diseases at the ANU and member of the Infection Control Expert Group advising the country’s chief health officers, referenced Swan’s pronouncements about Sydney’s Avalon outbreak in an opinion piece in January, observing that “many prominent individuals made dire predictions about what might happen in Australia [and] most of these have been wrong”. But Collignon said he wasn’t familiar enough with Swan’s work to comment further for this story.

Malcolm Sim, an emeritus professor of occupational and environmental health at Monash University who sits with Collignon on the ICEG, worked with Swan in the 2000s when they investigated a breast cancer cluster at the ABC’s studios in Toowong, Brisbane.

“He stirred the pot a bit, which is what you’d expect from someone in the media; to be a little bit ahead of the game,” Sim says. “He did it in a way that wasn’t antagonistic [but] trying to be helpful and usually evidence-based.

“He has been able to distil complex information into a readily communicable form that most people out there in the community would be able to understand. I think that’s a real strength.”

Immunologist Peter Doherty, the Nobel laureate and former Australian of the Year, says Swan is highly valuable whether or not he might sometimes get it wrong.

“My bottom line with Norman is we’re much better with him than without him. He’s a positive and a lot of people follow him. Some people disagree with him, but that’s life,” says Doherty.

“He is trying to communicate a whole story. He has been trying to make a synthesis for a broader audience. From what I’ve seen what he’s saying is fine. I might find myself disagreeing with him but I might be wrong. We’ve all been on a learning curve and Norman’s no different.”

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