Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) hospital “separation” (being discharged from hospital) data shows how annual separations coded as “acute myocarditis” remained relatively stable throughout the 2010–2020 period before rising sharply in the COVID-19 “vaccine” era:

This break from the prior baseline is not subtle; it represents a structural change in the pattern of hospital-diagnosed myocarditis rather than routine year-to-year fluctuation.

The increase is also not evenly distributed across the population.

The acute myocarditis surge disproportionately affects young men

The substantial increase in acute myocarditis is driven predominantly by males aged 15–34, with the most pronounced rises in the 15–19 and 30-34 cohorts.

This demographic concentration is notable because it aligns closely with the established risk profile for myocarditis observed in post-marketing surveillance of mRNA COVID-19 “vaccines”.

While alignment does not, on its own, establish causation, it substantially narrows the field of plausible explanations and strengthens the case that the observed increase is not random.

The acute myocarditis was not “mild” or “transient”

The AIHW data also make it harder to sustain the familiar reassurance that most myocarditis was simply “mild” or “transient”.

These data represent hospital separations with a principal diagnosis of acute myocarditis; not simply incidental findings.

As such, they reflect clinically significant presentations requiring admission and management.

These acute myocarditis admissions in Australia were associated hospital stays of between 4-6 days on average, and total annual acute myocarditis hospital days has exceeded 2,000 in each year since COVID-19 “vaccination” commenced:

For a condition so often rhetorically downplayed, the hospital burden was anything but trivial.1

It’s not solely acute myocarditis caused by viral infection

The rise in acute myocarditis cannot solely be attributed to recognised viral causes such as COVID-19, influenza or other viral infections.

Although “infective myocarditis” contributed to these increased numbers, a corresponding increase is observed in the numbers of “unspecified” myocarditis (I40.9) in this period:

The infection hypothesis also begins to look less convincing once the age pattern is taken seriously.

Young men were not the principal victims of severe COVID-19 disease in Australia. They were not the cohort filling intensive care units, nor the cohort driving mortality. Yet they are central to the myocarditis surge.

That mismatch matters.

If post-2021 myocarditis were largely a downstream consequence of severe infection, one would expect the clearest signal to sit more heavily among older and more medically vulnerable Australians.

Instead, the signal lands squarely in the very group already known to be at elevated risk of “vaccine”-associated myocarditis: young men.

Why the increase in “unspecified” myocarditis?

The rise in “unspecified” acute myocarditis also warrants scrutiny.

By 2021 and 2022, myocarditis was not some obscure diagnostic curiosity; it had become one of the most publicly discussed serious adverse events of the COVID-19 “vaccination” era, particularly in younger males.

In those circumstances, one might expect clearer attribution and more careful subcategorisation, not a swelling “unspecified” bucket.

At minimum, it suggests a concerning degree of diagnostic uncertainty.

At worst, it raises the possibility that where causation became professionally uncomfortable, specificity gave way to silence, dishonesty and flawed medical ethics.

Conclusion

The data point to a pattern that is no longer reasonably described as incidental.

Australia saw a marked rise in hospital-treated acute myocarditis after 2021, concentrated in younger males and centred in the exact demographic most consistently associated with “vaccine”-related risk.

This is not a broad, population-wide drift that can be waved away as background noise.

Rather, it is a concentrated and demographically coherent signal, and one that should have triggered far more serious public scrutiny than it ever received from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and Australia’s peak medical bodies.

In a decision reminiscent of its hydroxychloroquine restrictions in March 2020, the TGA cited concerns of safety risks and shortages in making this decision. Yet, as our investigation in this article reveals, these concerns about ivermectin’s safety were unfounded and relied on seriously exaggerated threats of shortages.

We therefore conclude that the restriction of ivermectin access had little to do with patient safety or supply integrity. Rather, it functioned as a coercive public-health sanction, explicitly designed to penalise non-compliance and ambitiously drive COVID-19 “vaccination” uptake.

What is “off-label” prescribing?

A critical distinction must be made, one that has consistently been blurred in both the TGA’s reasoning and subsequent media reporting; “off-label” prescribing and “private” prescribing are not synonymous.

“Off-label” refers to how a medicine is used relative to its approved indication; “private” refers to how that medicine is funded. An off-label prescription can still be Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme-subsidised (PBS) if it meets the PBS restriction criteria, while a private prescription, whether on-label or off-label, is never PBS-subsidised.

This distinction matters because the publicly available prescribing data, published by Australia’s PBS, captures dispensing, not clinical intent. A claim of a surge in “off-label” prescribing in 2021 required either a corresponding increase in PBS-subsidised dispensing, or widespread private prescribing at the height of professional intimidation, regulatory threats, and media vilification.

As we reveal in this article, there was no substantial increase in ivermectin prescribing and it was implausible that private prescribing surged in Australia at this time too.

Manufacturing consent

It all started so well for ivermectin.

But by 2021, the story had very much changed.

Before the TGA announced its ban on “off-label” ivermectin prescribing, the legacy media was flooded with slurry-grade propaganda slop, conditioning public acceptance and pre-assembling the soundbites needed to make the decision appear inevitable:

The function of these stories was not to impartially inform the public, but to manufacture consent on behalf of the TGA, even if these stories contained obvious disinformation. For example, that a man was hospitalised following an ivermectin overdose.

It simply didn’t occur.

Bizarrely, The Guardian article headline (below) claimed it occurred, even though in the second paragraph of the article we learned that it was not an ivermectin overdose at all:

Yet, the fake claim about the overdose was circulated in many other stories as though it was factual.

It was included in The Conversation article, authored by three academics from the University of Sydney:

Despite their credentials and pharmacy expertise, the authors astoundingly confessed to having little knowledge of what the “controversial drug” did to humans:

Yet, as these experts must surely have known, ivermectin has been used in humans for decades, with billions of doses administered worldwide, particularly through mass drug administration programmes for onchocerciasis (river blindness) and strongyloidiasis (threadworm). Its pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, metabolism, dosing ranges, contraindications, and adverse-event profile are all understood in humans.1 The medicine has an extensive regulatory history, including Nobel-Prize-recognised impact, and is listed on the WHO Essential Medicines List.

The article portrayed ivermectin as an obscure or experimental drug, seriously undermining the scientific credibility of the authors and their claims about this “controversial drug”.

It was a hit job by the legacy media on ivermectin which was completed in a matter of roughly ten days.

The TGA decision

With the pre-programming complete, the TGA convened an emergency meeting of the Advisory Committee on Medicines (ACMS) to provide advice about what to do with ivermectin.

The ACMS advice to the TGA, later released under FOI, revealed the Committee’s concerns about risk-taking behaviour of “unvaccinated” ivermectin-users who might have believed themselves to be protected from the disease and therefore, would have decided not to get “vaccinated” as part of the national “vaccination” program, or sought appropriate medical care if they developed symptoms of COVID-19, therefore creating an infection risk in the community.

The ACMS also noted the spread of misinformation regarding the appropriate, safe and “well-tolerated” dosages of ivermectin and the risks, including death, this created for “unvaccinated” ivermectin-users.

A related concern was how increased “off-label” prescribing could create medicine shortages, particularly for vulnerable communities like Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who were more prone to diseases for which ivermectin was indicated.

Despite providing no evidentiary support beyond its assertions of public health risks from the “unvaccinated” bingeing on horse-paste in toxic dosages, wandering the streets infecting all and sundry, the ACMS advice was accepted by the TGA and the restrictions were imposed.

The public health risks

The public health risks posed by ivermectin were based on several fanciful assumptions:

1. People who sought and used ivermectin for prophylaxis or treatment of COVID-19 disease would consider getting “vaccinated” if ivermectin availability was restricted;

2. “Unvaccinated” ivermectin-users were a greater infection risk to the community than the COVID-19 “vaccinated” because they would think they were protected from COVID-19 and would not engage in protective health measures;

3. “Unvaccinated” ivermectin-users would not seek “appropriate medical care” if they developed symptoms of COVID-19; and,

4. Dangerous misinformation was exposing potential ivermectin-users to risks, including death from a medicine that could cause serious illness and death.

Let’s address these one-by-one.

First, the types of people resilient enough to have resisted mandates, relentless legacy media propaganda, societal pressure, and enduring lockdowns to be “vaccinated”, it can be said with near certainty, were not your prime candidates for “vaccination” with any COVID-19 “vaccine” whether or not ivermectin was or was not available. The idea that these individuals would run down to their local pharmacy to roll up their sleeves if ivermectin was restricted was plainly stupid.

Second, as was known even at the time in September 2021, “vaccination” did not prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, so those “vaccinated” with COVID-19 “vaccines” were an even greater infection risk to the community as the “vaccinated” were proportionally a much larger cohort at the time. These matters aside, most of the country was still living under oppressive lockdown regimes where movement was highly restricted. The idea that “unvaccinated” ivermectin-users could and would threaten the “vaccinated” failed to take into account these enduring lockdowns and it also rehashed the absurd fallacy of “my ‘vaccine’ won’t work if you’re not ‘vaccinated’ too”.

Third, it was a mere assertion that ivermectin users would avoid seeking medical care if they developed COVID-19 symptoms. Yet, on balance, if this assertion were true, could you blame them? Pause to reflect on what constituted “appropriate medical care” in 2021 for the treatment of COVID-19. Wait at home until you’re sufficiently sick and gasping for breath, then come to hospital to be intubated and denied antibiotics to suffer bacterial pneumonia? No thanks. Consider also, how these protocols differed according to your “vaccination” status. The National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce protocols at the time — and long afterwards too — prioritised remdesivir (“run death is near”) only for “unvaccinated” COVID-19 patients to prevent hospitalisation based on the flimsy likelihood (one clinical trial only) that it “probably” reduced the incidence of hospitalisation in patients if it was started within seven days of symptom onset.2 If “unvaccinated” ivermectin-using individuals avoided health establishments in 2021, it was a well-informed choice at a time where the nature of care provided exclusively to them was punitive and potentially lethal.

Fourth, since the pandemic commenced, Australia’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN) has recorded only one adverse event report involving death from ivermectin as a suspected medicine (sadly, in a case report involving a cocktail of other suspected medicines including fentanyl). As one the World Health Organisation’s essential medicines, the safety profile of ivermectin has already been well-established. Had the TGA actually been concerned with the proper dosing of ivermectin, then restricting general practitioners from prescribing the essential medicine would have only increased the potential for individuals to have mistakenly consumed improper, potentially toxic doses of ivermectin. That is, if the TGA claim about misinformation and dosages is to believed without evidence; which it should not be.

For the above reasons, we doubt the restrictions on ivermectin had anything to do with public health risks, leaving only the possibility that it was about shortages.

Shortages

Prior to its decision, the TGA had reportedly observed significant increase in the volume of supply of ivermectin, which allegedly amounted to “3-4-fold increased dispensing of ivermectin prescriptions in recent months”:

However, the claim was never substantiated and we cannot independently verify the TGA’s claims until the TGA chooses to disclose its source data and/or unredact “Table 1” as shown above.

If the 2021 surge in ivermectin use had genuinely occurred through “off-label” prescribing, it should have appeared in PBS dispensing data, but there was only subtle month-to-month changes in ivermectin prescribing at all in the months prior to the decision:

The claim of “300-400% increase” in prescribing was evidently false and there clearly was not a “sustained increase over the last 24 months” to September 2021, as claimed. This implies that the surge never existed, or that the TGA is asking us to believe in a mass of covert private prescribing which would not be recorded in the PBS data.

Another strong reason for doubting the TGA’s intervention was driven by its fear of ivermectin shortages is that Australia was reportedly flush with imported ivermectin at the time. Information released under FOI by the TGA show how personal imports of ivermectin in the period from July-October 2021 had significantly increased:

If individuals could obtain ivermectin freely and easily locally from general practitioners, then personal imports would have been costly and redundant. Surges in imports of ivermectin indicate that ivermectin was plausibly very hard to come by. Most doctors were “vaccine”-pushers and most doctors still are. Therefore, the TGA’s claim about surges in “off-label” prescribing — which it presumably conflated with “private prescribing” — is implausible.

In sum, the TGA’s claim that it was concerned with potential shortages for ivermectin is contradicted by its own evidence that Australia was awash with imported and locally sourced ivermectin at the time.

Economics 101

The concerns about medicine shortages also seriously miss the point.

Simple economics dictates that a shortage of a product sends a market signal to producers to increase the supply of the product. In the short-term, such a shortage can even raise prices until supply is increased and prices return to their normal equilibrium level.

It is unclear how or why the TGA considered that a shortage of a low-cost, generic medicine that could be manufactured at scale could not have been overcome.

Though one shortage for ivermectin occurred on 2 August 2021, driven by “unexpected consumer demand”, it was resolved a mere 18 days later on 20 August 2021.

Clearing the market of excess demand in this way (i.e. alleviating the shortage) had nothing to do with swift regulatory action, it simply represented the regular functioning of the market economy.

In proof of this proposition, to date, no further shortage of ivermectin has been recorded.3

And this is despite Australia’s burgeoning appetite for ivermectin.

Australians want ivermectin

It was not until June 2023 that the ban on “off-label” prescribing was lifted by the TGA, as it was satisfied that the public health risks of COVID-19 had been mitigated by “vaccination” (piggybacking once again on natural immunity) and the encouraging supply data of ivermectin.4

As it turned out, it was essential that the supply data was encouraging, because Australians really want ivermectin.

Lots of in fact.

The trend in prescribing in this period is quite remarkable:

(The above graph is interactive. If you are reading this article in your email, click to open the graph in its own window to enable interactivity.)

It should be noted that these data reveal actual dispensing (including repeats) of ivermectin, not solely the issue of prescriptions, and so, the graph shows the number of actual medicines obtained by individuals and used (or perhaps stockpiled in anticipation of our promised next pandemic).

What could explain the soaring increase in ivermectin prescribing?

You could ask Google that question…

But, we’re probably past the point of trusting Big Tech now aren’t we?

So, we put forward two possibilities that could explain the ivermectin prescribing trend shown.

Either:

1. Australia has been experiencing a silent, multi-year epidemic of scabies, threadworm and river blindness that has left no trace anywhere else in the health system.

Or:

2. Doctors have increasingly been issuing PBS-subsidised prescriptions for ivermectin for “off-label” purposes.

We think it might be the latter.

The remarkable story is not even fully captured in the above graph.

To create the graph we bundled both PBS codes for ivermectin together to show “Total Ivermectin Prescriptions” in the period. But ivermectin issued under PBS code 2688Y provides double the ivermectin (8 tablets) compared with PBS code 8359Y (4 tablets) and it is the double dosage that is responsible for the absolute majority of prescribing increase:

Australia is truly now awash with ivermectin to a level not seen before in its prescribing history.

Conclusion

We have demonstrated that the TGA’s intervention on 10 September 2021, was not based on concerns of safety and shortages from substantial increases in “off-label” prescribing.

The data show substantial increases in prescribing did not occur, certainly not to the 300-400% level claimed by the TGA.

Remarkably, the near-1000% increase in prescribing of ivermectin today has prompted neither the same concerns or intervention from the TGA, nor caused any shortages of the medicine.

We have shown how substantial increases in personal imports of ivermectin were indicators that ivermectin was difficult to obtain domestically, discrediting the suggestion that there could have been substantially increased private prescribing of ivermectin at the time.

Whatever the cause, the data for ivermectin prescribing to June 2025 shows a seismic shift in the thinking by health professionals which, hypothetically, could be for the treatment of COVID-19 but perhaps something else, such as its potential anti-cancer properties.

The post-2023 surge in PBS-dispensed ivermectin strongly suggests that “off-label” use, now freed from regulatory sanction, is occurring within the PBS framework, not outside it.

The change is not only an increased demand for ivermectin, but also in doctors’ willingness to prescribe it openly, and that is a welcome shift from the dogmatic thinking around COVID-19 “vaccines” and ivermectin that must be occurring in many more health professionals today.

So great was UZM’s objection to “vaccination” that it required sedation with Diazepam for it to be completed.

So, why did the Tribunal authorise the restraint, sedation and compulsory “vaccination” of UZM?

The facts of the case

UZM was a 39-year-old man who lived in a group home with two others in Sydney’s inner west.

The Tribunal member wrote, rather ambiguously, in her findings that UZM was:

“. . . reported to have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.”1 [emphasis added]

UZM was also afraid of needles.

So afraid, in fact, that there had been four unsuccessful attempts to COVID-19 “vaccinate” him by a senior manager (“YBE”) at UZM’s disability service provider.

UZM had clearly objected; a fact even acknowledged in the Tribunal member’s findings.

“Mr. Z”, UZM’s legal Guardian (and father), however, had “consented” for his son to be COVID-19 “vaccinated”, but these attempts, as outlined, were unsuccessful, prompting YBE to apply to NCAT to have the State “consent” for the “vaccination” of UZM.

What issues did the Tribunal have to consider?

The starting point was how to disregard UZM’s clear objection to being “vaccinated”.

UZM’s objections mattered, because under The Guardianship Act 1987 (NSW) (The Act), a person’s refusal must be taken seriously unless strict conditions are met for treating it as ineffective. The Act expressly recognises and protects the objection of a person, even if that person lacks the capacity to consent.

Under The Act, an objection can only be “disregarded” if the “patient” has little or no understanding of the proposed medical treatment and if any distress the treatment causes would be short-lived and reasonably manageable and both limbs must have been met for UZM’s objection to have been lawfully disregarded.2

In UZM’s case, although he was alleged to have had little or no understanding of the proposed treatment, the proposed treatment had clearly caused him significant distress on four separate occasions and UZM’s objection was, therefore, recognised by the Tribunal:

“[A]fter four previous attempts at vaccination, the Tribunal was not satisfied that [UZM’s] distress is likely to be reasonably tolerable and transitory.”3

UZM’s objection, therefore, was not disregarded by the Tribunal.

Yet, in a striking departure from the logic of its own findings, the Tribunal member still “consented” for a full course of “vaccination” to ensure UZM was not deprived of necessary medical treatment because he lacked the capacity to consent.

To carry out the “vaccination” an Emla patch was used to desensitise UZM’s skin, a butterfly cannula was inserted into UZM’s arm to intravenously sedate him with Diazepam, and he was injected with a COVID-19 “vaccine”.

It was not stated, but it is presumed that this procedure would have been performed twice so that UZM would have received his “full course of vaccination with the Pfizer or AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine”.4

In sum, the compulsory “vaccination” of UZM consisted of six total intrusions into his bodily integrity.

What issues did the Tribunal fail to properly consider?

In such a brief exposition, the Tribunal member failed to properly consider several significant factors in her findings.

First, the Tribunal member did not classify the proposed medical treatment as “major” or “minor”. In failing to do so, the Tribunal member never entered the correct legal pathway, leaving every subsequent step based on an unstated assumption rather than the process the Act requires.

Under The Guardianship Regulation 2016 (NSW), the proposed “vaccination” of UZM was clearly a “major medical treatment”, because it was:

(b) . . . treatment that involves the administration of a drug of addiction,

(c) . . . treatment that involves the administration of a general anaesthetic or other sedation, but not treatment involving:
(i) sedation used to facilitate the management of fractured or dislocated limbs, or
(ii) sedation used to facilitate the insertion of an endoscope into a patient’s body for diagnostic purposes unless the endoscope is inserted through a breach or incision in the skin or a mucous membrane [emphases added]

and;

(f) . . . treatment that involves a substantial risk to the patient (that is, a risk that amounts to more than a mere possibility) of . . .

(ix) a high level of pain or stress5 [emphases added]

In contrast, a “minor” medical treatment is defined in The Act as:

[T]reatment that is not special treatment, major treatment or treatment in the course of a clinical trial.6 [emphasis added]

On these grounds, it should have been obvious that the proposed treatment — COVID-19 “vaccination” via chemical restraint — constituted “major medical treatment”:

• To “vaccinate” UZM, a drug of addiction (Diazepam) had to be administered;

• Sedation was required to “vaccinate” UZM and it was not for the management of a fractured/dislocated limb, nor for diagnostic purposes;

• Attempts at “vaccinating” UZM had also caused him a high level of pain and stress; and,

• COVID-19 “vaccination” was, at the time, part of the “the world’s largest clinical trial”, and therefore, UZM’s “vaccination” was not “minor treatment” because it was “treatment in the course of the clinical trial”.

The Tribunal member recited the rules for classifying treatment in her reasons, but when it came to the findings she never actually made the classification that the proposed treatment was “major” or “minor”. Instead, she simply proceeded as if it were minor, because that is the only way the objection test could have even been considered.

The Tribunal member never expressly analysed whether the sedation, repeated failed attempts, the need for a cannula, and the level of distress placed the procedure into the “high level of pain or stress” category that defines major treatment.

The second important consideration overlooked by the Tribunal member was that UZM was not as afraid of needles as he was made out to be.

Although UZM reportedly had a fear of needles, he had received his influenza vaccination from his general practitioner.7

It is likely that UZM consented to this procedure because there was no suggestion that he objected.

He didn’t have to be sedated.

No reports of distress or pain.

It worked on the first occasion.

No repeated attempts.

No application to the Tribunal for “consent”.

One reason cited by the Tribunal member for the successful influenza vaccination was that it was completed at the familiar surroundings of his general practitioner’s practice and, by contrast, COVID-19 “‘[v]accination’ sites were unfamiliar to [UZM] and there was insufficient time to desensitise UZM to attend those new surroundings.”8

What was the rush?

Nothing in the findings explains why there was any urgency or why “insufficient time” was available to desensitise UZM to new “vaccination” sites. At the time, mostly all general practitioners would have, in due course, been licensed to administer COVID-19 “vaccines” (repeatedly) and finding a site would have been possible.

That phrase in the findings suggesting some urgency was required was given without context; without evidence; and without any explanation of why time could not be taken; or why desensitisation was not possible; or why the process needed to occur immediately.

So, on the evidence before the Tribunal, UZM’s fear of needles could have been managed without intrusions into his bodily integrity involving chemical restraint.

The Tribunal member simply reduced UZM’s refusal of COVID-19 “vaccination” to a fear of needles, which does not sit comfortably with the evidence that UZM had received his influenza needles previously.

We do not know how the Tribunal member reconciled the idea that a person who managed one vaccination in a familiar context was incapable of expressing a genuine objection to another.

Imagine, perhaps, that UZM was capable of understanding what the influenza vaccination entailed and, for this treatment, he provided valid consent. Similarly, imagine that UZM could have been capable of understanding the proposed COVID-19 “vaccination” and he validly objected.

By the logic of the findings, consent was only respected as valid and informed when UZM accepted a medical treatment. When UZM objected to a different medical treatment, it was disregarded because he could not consent. UZM was, by this reasoning, so haplessly handicapped that he could not and did not understand the life-saving nature of COVID-19 “vaccination”.

UZM’s objection was reduced by the Tribunal member to an infantile “fear of needles”. Even if we accept that UZM was simply afraid of needles (not of COVID-19 “vaccination), his refusal could not be separated from the way this treatment would have to be performed. He objected while fully conscious, and the only way the procedure could succeed was by sedating him to the point where he could no longer resist or express that objection.

Although UZM had no expressive speech, he was clearly able to consent and object to medical treatment, as the evidence clearly demonstrated.

If the law allowed sedation to vitiate a person’s refusal, any objection could be swept aside simply by rendering the objector unconscious.

Conclusion

The findings were strikingly brief, consisting of only 26 paragraphs, most of which comprised the restatement of facts of the case or recitations of the relevant legislation.

For such a serious intrusion on UZM’s bodily integrity, involving chemical restraints, and to have this process completed twice, the Tribunal member provided woefully insufficient reasoning and analysis justifying the decision, which raises serious questions about the legality of the forced “vaccination” of a person — not “patient” — against his wishes and his repeated objections.

In the end, “consent” was given by everyone but the person whose body was being acted upon.

The final barrier to his refusal was removed not by law, but by sedation.

Reading this decision now, one cannot help but shudder.

In 2021, in a matter involving sedation, restraint and repeated failed attempts, no expert evidence was called.

The necessity of the treatment was simply assumed.

Throughout the reasons, UZM is referred to as a “patient”, placed within a medical paradigm in which his rights as a human being disappeared and decisions were made for him as though his own will were incidental.

We have no recourse. As non-parties, we cannot appeal on UZM’s behalf.

No one knows who he is and nothing can be undone.

The most that can be done is to keep his story on the record.

Cases like this do not vanish when ignored, and they will not be the last of their kind.

Thanks for reading.

The case exposed an inherent contradiction in the relevant legislation.

Consent is personal.

Yet, the legal system must fabricate a substitute version of it when it cannot be given.

Therefore, the “Application for Consent to Medical Treatment” was made by TKQ’s treating psychiatrist, “WBL” and the State “consented” on behalf of TKQ to be “vaccinated” with three Pfizer shots.

The case against the “vaccine”

At the hearing, TKQ’s mother “DZQ” (TKQ’s legal Guardian) and sister (TKQ’s alternative Guardian) gave evidence explaining their objections to the “vaccine”, which, in light of the evidence, were entirely well-founded and reasonably precautionary1:

• Not enough was known about the “vaccine” and this carried an unacceptable risk;

• Many people they knew had experienced adverse reactions from COVID-19 “vaccination”;

• TKQ took powerful medication (Clozapine) which the “vaccine” may not interact well with;

• TKQ had a history of kidney cancer and the “vaccine” may cause this to recur;

• TKQ was immunocompromised;

• The “vaccine” clearly didn’t prevent infection and “vaccinated” people were having to get booster shots;

• There was a family history of an adverse reaction to an influenza “vaccine”; and most relevantly,

• WBL was not properly qualified to recommend vaccination as he was a psychiatrist.

The case for the “vaccine”

The case for the “vaccination” consisted largely of 2021-era tropes delivered by WBL that failed to venture beyond the “safe and effective” mantra:

• TKQ was vulnerable to adverse consequences of a COVID infection due to his mental illness, as well as heavy levels of smoking;

• TKQ would be protected from serious illness and death from the “vaccination”, even if it would not prevent infection;

• The risk from the “vaccine” was simply and only “transient flu like syndrome”; and,

• There was only an “association” between “vaccination” and myocarditis, but it was an “extremely small risk”.

In opining about the risks and benefits of COVID-19 “vaccination” and infection with SARS-CoV-2, WBL ventured well beyond his qualification, and so, he sought the opinion of two infectious disease specialists in support of his application.

The expert evidence

The expert evidence was provided by two infectious disease specialists (“Prof. T” and “Dr. R”).

At the hearing, Dr. R was queried about TKQ’s “suitability” for the “vaccine” given his history with schizophrenia, Clozapine treatment and renal malignancy.

The best case Dr. R could come up with was:

“these are not contradindications to TKQ receiving a COVID-19 vaccine”.2

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Recalling how medical contraindications to COVID-19 “vaccination” were restricted to so few conditions that not even an adverse event from a previous COVID-19 “vaccine” was a condition which permitted an exemption.

It is little wonder, therefore, that Dr. R could come up with nothing more than “these are not contraindications” in a waste of his presumed “expert” time and knowledge on the matter.

A primary school-aged child with basic literacy and comprehension skills could have read a TGA fact sheet about medical contraindications for COVID-19 “vaccination” and contributed as much “expert” knowledge to the case.

Dr. R could not, it is presumed, speak to the necessity of “vaccinating” TKQ, or it surely would have been included in his evidence and the published findings.

Prof. T.’s endorsement was equally lukewarm:

“[T]he risk of serious adverse events relating to Pfizer are difficult to fully establish (ie. the risk of myocarditis) due to the rates approaching background prevalence levels”3

Another ringing endorsement.

The “risk of serious adverse events . . . are difficult to fully establish” was a soft way of saying “yeah, it’s there and we know about it . . . but I don’t want to [or should not] speculate because I could lose my job.”.

Recalling how doctors were threatened with being suspended or deregistered by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency following their maligned “position statement” in 2021.

Is it any wonder that so few would have come before NCAT willing to present a heteredox view demonstrating, at the very least, uncertainty?

Prof. T also ignored the concept of additional risk from COVID-19 “vaccines”. The negative effectiveness of the COVID-19 “vaccines”, now shown in many published studies, reveals the further risks TKQ faced with “vaccination”.

By taking three “vaccines”, TKQ had an increased chance of becoming infected with COVID-19 compared with remaining “unvaccinated”.

In that scenario, TKQ was exposed to the “vaccine”-related risk immediately and then still faced the background infection-related risk in the normal course of life, leaving him, on that metric alone, in a worse position than if he had not been “vaccinated”.

In summary, there was no ringing endorsement COVID-19 “vaccine” from either of the experts cited in the findings.

Discussion

The widely-reported “pivotal”, Phase III, randomised, double-blind controlled clinical trial reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on 10 December 2020, excluded people like TKQ: immunocompromised and clinically “unhealthy” (smoking and schizophrenia):

So, even in 2020, it was known that the “vaccine” had not been tested on individuals comparable to TKQ.

It follows that any evidence at the hearing suggesting the “vaccine” was safe for TKQ reflected a serious misunderstanding of the trial data and the limits of the evidence relied upon by those presented as “experts”.

Furthermore, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, a causal association between Clozapine and myocarditis had been established:

It has been estimated that as many as 8% of Clozapine patients in Australia develop myocarditis, though it is more common when commencing treatment. Although TKQ was not commencing Clozapine treatment, this risk of Clozapine-induced myocarditis should have been acknowledged and mentioned by WBL in his evidence to the Tribunal and its omission was, at the very least, careless in the extreme.

The Tribunal member would have surely been swayed by a complete account of the risks of Clozapine coupled with COVID-19 “vaccination”.

Following the conclusion of the case, the risk of Clozapine-induced myocarditis was sufficiently cocerning to prompt NSW Health to issue a “Guideline” called “Monitoring Clozapine-induced Myocarditis”, which explained the clear risks we have elaborated in this article:

As an aside, we infer that this Guideline was likely prompted by “other” unnamed and unacknowledged causes of myocarditis that for some reason may have remained elevated at the time of publication of this Guideline (17 October 2022).

Care to guess what it could have been?

NSW Health were probably loving it that another cause for myocarditis was found.

Nothing to do with another medical intervention.

Funny, isn’t it, how quickly adverse events from a particular medicine can be addressed, even when there is simply the association with the therapeutic.

Such simpler times.

Conclusion

To any casual observer, this should have been an open-and-shut case.

The State affirmed legal guardian — the mother to her child — had decided what was best for her ward/charge — her son.

Her family had all agreed with the decision to decline the proposed treatment, as was their legal right and obligation.

The fact that the Tribunal gave any consideration or weight to WBL’s evidence is deeply concerning. Although the Tribunal member noted deficiencies in the legal or medical arguments put forward by TKQ’s family (mother, sister and brothers), WBL was largely given a free-pass with very little interrogation of his ambit claims about COVID-19 risks and “vaccine” benefits (let alone necessity).

On the evidence presented in her findings, the Tribunal member’s decision was swayed by the “expert” evidence resulting in her granting of “consent” for the “vaccination” of TKQ.

Had WBL provided a complete account of the risks and benefits of what he was qualified (we hope?) to speak about — Clozapine — “consent” may never have been granted.

In her findings, the Tribunal member could have written the following explaining why the State should not have “consented” to the “vaccination” of TKQ:

“Medical procedures are rarely risk free, and decisions about medical treatment inevitably involve balancing the risk of the treatment, the risk of not having the treatment, and the benefit of having the treatment. For example, a low risk procedure which provides significant benefit and alleviates a risk of deteriorating health would usually be a situation where the balance is in favour of the procedure going ahead. Alternatively, a high risk procedure, which provides questionable benefit, addressing a condition which causes little impairment, is likely to be a situation where the balance is in favour of not proceeding with the treatment.”4 [emphasis added]

This was precisely what she wrote explaining her decision to “consent” for TKQ to be “vaccinated”.

Her reasoning was sound; she just inverted the conclusion.

Even if the Tribunal member disagreed with the evidence that COVID-19 “vaccination” was a high risk procedure, it was established at the time of the case that it provided questionable benefit(s).

It was known that the “vaccine” did not prevent infection and, likely worse, made you more susceptible to infection (and the possibility of the clinical progression of COVID-19 illness).

Even if the Tribunal member agreed that COVID-19 was a real threat to TKQ, she ignored the extensive evidence of “vaccine” failure that emerged in 2021 which forced those pushing a “safe and effective” narrative to pivot to “it was only ever meant to protect against serious illness and death”: a complete lie which Arkmedic has recently exposed.

As we and many other writers have investigated, the claims about reductions in serious illness and death could have only been made with extraordinarily malevolent data trickery, rendering these assertions also completely meaningless.

Finally, COVID-19 was indeed a disease that caused “little impairment” in the majority. Even with grossly exaggerated counts of “COVID-19 deaths”, the case-fatality rate showed COVID-19 was non-lethal for the absolute majority.

On the evidence at NCAT, however, it seemed that the Tribunal member was unable to disentangle her assumptions about COVID-19’s risks from the benefits of the “vaccine”. If she believed the evidence put to her that COVID-19 was a risk for the majority, then she had already decided that it did not cause “little impairment” and, therefore, justified her decision to “consent” for the “vaccination” of TKQ.

It is a pity that her findings were based, in part at least, on cartoonish talking points about COVID-19 from a psychiatrist masquerading as an “expert” on vaccines and epidemiology who was either unable (or unwilling) to provide information that was crucially relevant to the case from his own field of presumed expertise.

Final thoughts

If the State must intervene to “consent” on behalf of a person that cannot, then there must be extraordinary grounds for doing so and, on the facts presented in the case, the threshold was not even close to being met.

And therein lies the real problem.

A man who could not “consent” to a necessary medical treatment was literally mandated to be “vaccinated” against the wishes of his mother, sister and brothers.

He could not consent.

He did not consent.

Children, too, cannot meaningfully “consent” to “vaccination” in the way described in the case of TKQ, it could be argued.

Is it too far-fetched to think, that at some point in the future, the State argues that your decision to choose not to “vaccinate” your child was tantamount to “neglect” or “abuse” and that the risks of a certain pathogen (real or imagined) outweighed your rights to make informed health choices for your own child?

What could be scraped from your metadata to discredit you in any relevant way to show you were a consumer or purveyor of “misinformation” or “disinformation” to really make the case that the State should decide what is right for your child?

What is right for you?

What is right for us?

The case of TKQ should be illustrative as to what the future holds and the necessity of being prepared against the threat of government overreach into the lives of our most precious loved ones.

The internal correspondence, recently obtained by an applicant under GIPA (GIPA-24-2249-LD, dated 20 February 2025), was provided to this Substack and sheds new light on how an apparent consensus on returning students to face-to-face learning in August 2021 was swiftly abandoned.

An email on 3 August 2021 from Paul Wood (Executive Director of the NSW Department of Education’s COVID-19 Taskforce) reveals that the then Secretary of the Department (Georgina Harrisson) had been consulting with the Secretary of NSW Health (Elizabeth Koff) and Dr. Kerry Chant (Chief Health Officer of NSW) planning for the return to school for HSC (Higher School Certificate) students:

The “comprehensive COVID Safe Plan” which could have “flexibly [been] applied based on . . . local circumstances”, planned for the return of students from 16 August 2021:

Importantly, there was no mention of mandatory staff COVID-19 “vaccination” and schools were even encouraged to prioritise the return to school for staff and Year 12 students to facilitate student wellbeing, completion of exams and access to support that could not be provided remotely.

Less than one hour later, following receipt of Wood’s email, Caroline Sharpe, Senior Medical Advisor from NSW Health, replied and added comments to this plan originally devised by Harrisson, Koff and Chant. In these comments, Sharpe reminded Wood that she would “need to speak with Kerry [Chant] regarding Health’s position” on issues like mandatory testing for students.

But, no mention was made of mandatory vaccination for staff, even in the section called “COVID Vaccinations and testing”:

The original plan’s emphasis was on physical distancing, reduced mingling, and supporting wellbeing through flexible timetables.

As shown, staff were simply reminded to “get a COVID-19 test”, and even then, only under very specific circumstances (if staff had symptoms or they were instructed to do so by public health).

By the 12 August, these plans were still in place with an updated “HSC Advice for All School Sectors”, which again reiterated “COVID-Safe” precautions:

As part of the plan, staff could even remove their masks to sing to others (albeit at the naturally occurring SARS CoV-2 elimination zone of five metres):

But again, no mention of mandatory staff vaccination.

Importantly, in the above document dated 12 August 2021, the HSC examinations were planned to proceed from 19 October 2021:

Yet, an undated document in the released records shows how these plans changed, recommending the HSC examinations to start 9 November 2021. We can infer, therefore, that this document must have been authored some time after the 12 August 2021 given this new recommendation.

In this undated document, staff were only “recommended to be fully vaccinated” — not compelled — and only those staff in the “areas of concern” would be required to provide evidence of their “full vaccination status” to supervise HSC examinations and for face-to-face learning:

As shown (top-right) in the above document, these guidelines were “approved by NSW Health”. This document must have been authored some time in the period between 12 and 26 August 2021 because just over two weeks later, on 27 August, the Department announced that all school and preschool staff would be required to be double vaccinated by 8 November:

“Vaccinations are a critical element of our plan — alongside mask wearing, reduced mingling between cohorts, and staggered start and finish times. . . . Mandatory double doses of vaccinations will be required for all public school and preschool staff from 8 November.”1

This was a mere 24 days that separated a planned return-to-school framework and one of the most consequential workforce directives in NSW Education history.

Nothing in the released documents shows what shifted the thinking.

The tranche of documents released contains no such evidence, no updated advice from Chant, and no transmission modelling that justified ditching the plan she had helped create.

This raises a serious question:

If the health advice changed, it must be shown and should have been released to the applicant.

If it didn’t, the mandate was made without justification.

The documents released as part of the GIPA request do not explain what caused the withdrawal of support for the original plan by Chant, followed by the Department issuing the mandate.

The applicant who supplied the released records to this Substack has shared the “valid application” made to the NSW Department of Education as part of this GIPA request:

Our analysis of the documents shows there are very few documents which were:

• Authored by NSW Health;

• Relate to the 27 August 2021 announcement by Secretary Harrisson; and/or,

• Relate to the role of COVID-19 vaccination in reducing transmission of the SARS CoV-2 virus.

The lack of relevant records is extremely important.

Given that the initial plan was for the return of Year 12 students on 16 August 2021, some health advice must have caused the abrupt shift in policy to a vaccination mandate such a short time later.

But, in the released records, nothing explains what caused this shift in policy.

Who changed this draft that planned for the return to face-to-face teaching with only the recommendation for testing and vaccination and why was it changed?

Despite being one of the most far-reaching employment directives in the Department’s history, the released documents suggest it was an improvised response once Dr. Chant (and perhaps others not identified in this release of documents) rescinded support for the detailed reopening strategy for schools.

Now, the standard explanation is predictable: “COVID worsened during that time.”

Perhaps.

But worsening case numbers alone do not constitute health advice.

If worsening case numbers prompted new health advice, then where was this health advice in the released records?

Where was the information showing that the vaccines substantially reduced transmission which would have prompted the mandate?

The Public Health Order which was signed only one month later following the 27 August 2021 mandate announcement, ambitiously claimed would the “vaccines” could reduce transmission:

And we all know how that turned out.

That such a consequential policy was decided in private, without scientific justification, raises serious questions about how this decision was made.

For all the public messaging about “following the health advice”, the documents now show that the advice itself shifted so abruptly that what emerges is a picture of concentrated decision-making involving so few individuals.

There was no health advice in the released records explaining the mandate.

We should all be concerned about how these opaque decisions were made during the pandemic.

If health advice justified this mandate, where is it?

If it didn’t exist, who made this decision and why?

This mandate upended thousands of careers, livelihoods and families and, as our investigation reveals, it was announced without evidence, explanation, or accountability.

The official record shows no modelling, no advice, no consultation. It was just a backroom reversal rubber-stamped by a handful of names.

Share this article and demand answers from your MP.

Make your own GIPA request.

Raise this in your workplace.

Don’t let this disappear down the memory hole.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we never would have critically reflected on the importance of routine childhood vaccinations and the importance of staying “up-to-date” with safe, effective and necessary vaccinations.

After all, you didn’t want to be an “anti-vaxxer”. Those people were outcasts.

Could you really question the most important breakthrough in modern medical history? The one solely responsible for the remarkable advances in life expectancy and living standards?

In the pre-COVID era, you didn’t have to think about these things.

Vaccines didn’t cause autism.

Propaganda made it easy not to think about these things too deeply:

After all, didn’t you know…

Yes.

They sure do.

Just in the same way that…

In the post-COVID era, however, with our eyes well and truly now opened, it has become apparent that propaganda, disinformation and censorship were not just methods deployed by the State and its legacy media about COVID “vaccines”; rather, this had been ongoing for years with Australia’s National Immunisation Program (NIP) and we just weren’t aware.

Propaganda about the benefits of vaccines.

Censorship of the harms of vaccines.

Disinformation with the two put together.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with Australia’s School Vaccination Program. The Program’s propaganda fails to provide the parents of school-aged children — let alone the children themselves — with sufficient, accurate and comprehensible information to provide valid, informed consent to receive the vaccines on offer.

Informed consent requires a clear understanding of both the potential risks and benefits of a given vaccine, as well as the relative risk posed by the disease it is designed to protect against or prevent.

As our investigation will show, this standard is not being met in NSW Health’s School Vaccination Program.

Remarkably, the Parent Information Sheet distributed to parents as part of the Program fails even to mention the specific vaccine used.

The omission of this key detail raises serious questions about the legality of the consent obtained by NSW Health as part of the process.

What is informed consent?

The Nuremberg Code was a set of ethical research principles established in 1947 after the Nuremberg Trials, specifically the Doctors’ Trial, to prevent the recurrence of inhumane medical experiments like those conducted by Nazi doctors during World War II.

Though it didn’t create the notion of “informed consent”, it was the first major international document to formalise and mandate it as an absolute ethical requirement in human experimentation:

“The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.”1 [emphases added]

The COVID-19 “vaccine” experiment — the world’s largest clinical trial — was an unmistakable breach of this principle; particularly once coercive “vaccine” mandates were imposed.

Yet, what about routine, no longer “experimental” or approved childhood vaccines?

So-called “routine” childhood vaccinations are somewhat different from the COVID-19 “vaccines” as they are licensed and “fully approved” by our courageous regulator (who approves a mere 90% of their sponsors’ applications for new medicines; receiving a paltry 96% of their budget from sponsors’ fees) and are, therefore, classified as standard medical care: not experimentation.

Despite their differences to the COVID-19 experimental “vaccines”, however, these routine childhood vaccines of course also require valid, informed consent before they can be administered.

Informed consent and routine childhood vaccination

The legal foundation for informed consent in Australia is grounded in common law, compelling a medical practitioner to disclose all material risks, those a reasonable person in the patient’s position would consider significant, alongside the nature, purpose, and alternatives to the proposed treatment.2

Consent must also be voluntary and based on an adequate understanding of these risks and benefits. While written consent is recommended for invasive procedures, vaccination typically involves verbal or implied consent, provided it meets the “informed” standard as described in the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency’s “Good Medical Practice: A Code of Conduct for Doctors in Australia”:

Similarly, the Australian Medical Association also reinforces that informed consent must be freely given, specific, and based on sufficient information for all medical care, including vaccination, adopting guidelines recommended by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care:

Even in an alleged “emergency”, in New South Wales for example, informed consent could only be overridden in very limited circumstances under the Public Health Act 2010 (NSW). Section 118 permits the Chief Health Officer to issue a public health order requiring a person to undergo medical examination, treatment, test or isolation if they are suspected of having a serious infectious disease classified as a Category 4 or 5 condition — which could have hypothetically included COVID-19:3

There are, therefore, very limited conditions under which “informed consent” can be overridden, even during public health emergencies.

Informed consent in the School Vaccination Program

We now illustrate the typical process-flow for providing consent for your child to be vaccinated in NSW Health’s School Vaccination Program.

You can follow this process too by going to Service NSW School Vaccination Program and logging in with your Service NSW credentials.

Step # 1 - Click the above link and login to your Service NSW account and click either of these buttons to take you to the consent page

Step # 2 - If you’re not comfortable providing consent, you can click the “Parent Information Sheet” link to hopefully learn more about these vaccines on offer:

Which opens up to this document showing a group of elated unvaccinated students (inferred from their ability to raise what must be unjabbed arms):

Year 7 Parent Information Sheet

Step # 3 - Review the Parent Information Sheet:

The first page reminds us that Experts have recommended the vaccines (two are given to Year 7 students in NSW as part of the School Vaccination Program):

The second page is a list of very basic questions about vaccines in general, or the simple process to providing consent to have your child receive them:

“How do vaccines work?…

How safe are vaccines?…

What are the side effects of vaccination?…

What is anaphylaxis?…

What if my child has asthma and takes cortisone or prednisone by a “puffer”?

• The vaccines can be safely administered to someone who has asthma regardless of which medications they are taking.

Should the vaccine be given to a female student who is or thinks she may be pregnant?

• No. Any female student who is, or thinks she may be, pregnant should not be vaccinated. On the day of the clinic the vaccination nurse will ask female students if they are or could be pregnant. If a student answers yes to this question, she will not be vaccinated. The student will be urged to immediately discuss the issue with her parent/ guardian and to seek medical help. She will also be provided with contact details for a health referral service that will provide advice, support and guidance.

Can I withdraw consent?…

What if I prefer to wait until my child is older?…

What if my child missed out on the vaccine at school?…

Can students with physical and/or intellectual disabilities be vaccinated at school?…

How can I access a record of the vaccinations?…

Where can I find more information about school vaccination?…” [emphases added]

Notice how few of these have anything to do with the specific vaccines (“Gardasil 9” or “Boostrix”) offered?

Only two of the questions pertain to the vaccines offered to Year 7 students as part of the program, and only one contraindication is noted — pregnancy.

The following pages — “information about each of the vaccines” — details the risks of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) and its role in causing approximately 5% of all cancers worldwide (we will address the vaccine for Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis in a separate article):

Yet the information sheet fails to clearly explain the difference between these long-term cancer risks in adults and the much lower short-term risk to 12–13 year olds of these cancers. It also does not mention how rare these cancers are in young people or that 90% of HPV infections clear on their own. Overall, it gives the impression that serious illness is an immediate risk to children which warrants — it is assumed — vaccination protection from infections caused by HPV.

But it is important to note that Gardasil 9 does not even cover all HPV types. There are over 200 types of HPV and 14 of those are considered “high-risk” because they are oncogenic. Nine types of HPV are targeted by Gardasil 9 (hence the name), but only seven targeted by the vaccine are considered “high-risk” (the other two are “low-risk”, targeting genital warts). Seven of these other “high-risk” types, though less-common, are not targeted by the Gardasil 9 vaccine. This is acknowledged in the section “Who should be vaccinated?”, but the brochure exaggerates both the risks of HPV and the benefits of the Gardasil 9 vaccine, therefore not providing appropriate information for parents and children to make an informed choice.

The information sheet also lacks any citations or references, making it hard for parents to verify the information — particularly when alarming claims of 100% protection are made:

Perhaps the most egregious error is that the name of the vaccine is not given anywhere in the Parent Information Sheet.

It is simply referred to as “[a]n HPV vaccine…”:

The vaccine in question is, of course, “Gardasil 9”.

Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil 9, has an alarming track-record when it comes to meeting its legal obligations regarding the safety of its products, which also extends to Gardasil 9.

As reported by investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, Merck misled the participants in one of the clinical trials for Gardasil 9, compromising the rights of those in the placebo group to informed consent by injecting them with an active and non-safety tested adjuvant to make placebo outcomes appear worse than in the vaccinated group.

Merck is also the same company which distorted its clinical trial data for Gardasil 9 so thoroughly that the results were rendered scientifically meaningless, concealing an adverse event rate of 3.3% of its 14,000 participants in one clinical trial; in a follow-up window that was limited to only 14 days.

Gardasil 9 has also been found to contain residual DNA fragments which could cause cancer and has ingredients that can act as transfection agents which Merck was aware of and lobbied regulators to help them bypass testing requirements.

The omission of the vaccine name “Gardasil 9” from the Parent Information Sheet, is therefore, an omission which seriously calls into question whether “informed consent” could have possibly been obtained for the administration of the Gardasil 9 vaccine in the School Vaccination Program.

Step # 4 - Try and find some more information

If unsatisfied with the information, you can visit the NSW Health page by clicking the link shown:

Which takes you to this page where you can click on the tab “For parents and carers”

Which takes you to a page providing more information about the expected reactions and risks following vaccination with Gardasil 9.

Finally, this is the first instance where the actual names of the vaccine(s) is (are) provided:

Clicking the “Gardasil 9” link takes you to its Product and Consumer Medicine Information License where more information about the actual vaccine is provided, however, it is limited to barely more than five pages of information in a brochure-styled presentation:

And once again, no citations are provided to support the claims made in this brochure, in what is essentially a condensed version of the TGA’s Australian Public Assessment Report for Gardasil 9, which does not address the serious risks of Gardasil 9, including death.

Step # 5 - Provide consent?

At this point, you are directed to declare you have availed yourself of the information in the Parent Information Sheet to the extent required to “understand the benefits and risks of vaccination” — generally it would seem — and to confirm that you consent to the vaccine(s) offered:

Once these boxes are ticked and the online form is submitted, then “informed consent” is considered to have been obtained.

Discussion

The opaque process of NSW Health’s School Vaccination Program challenges whether valid and informed consent could have possibly been obtained for these medical procedures.

The School Vaccination Program’s website obscures critical details, requiring navigation through multiple pages to simply even identify the vaccine(s) in question. The website information provides only vague assurances about safety and benefits without age-specific risk data for 12–13-year-olds.

Given cervical cancer’s low mortality rate (approximately 250 deaths annually in Australia) and effective screening, the necessity of vaccinating pre-adolescents against HPV is questionable, particularly in light of concerns about residual DNA plasmids and Merck’s clinical trial practices, which used non-saline controls to make exaggerated claims about safety, efficacy and risk.

The necessity of the vaccine and its role in reduced cervical cancer incidence is also subject to debate. It is suggested that the National Cervical Screening Program is responsible for the reduction in cervical cancer incidence than the Gardasil quadrivalent and Gardasil 9 vaccines:

As these cancers would take decades to develop in older cohorts, it remains to be seen if these rates of cervical cancer (among others) will reduce even further in the coming decades.

It is, however, important to remind our readers that Gardasil 9 neither protects against all HPV-induced cancers, nor is HPV the only cause for these cancers. As the above chart reveals, the National Cervical Screening Program is the most likely cause of the reduction in the most commonly associated HPV infection-induced cancer: cervical cancer.4

So why do we vaccinate at schools?

The School Vaccination Program ensures that vaccines like Gardasil 9 are efficiently delivered, obtaining high coverage across the 12-13 year old population, reducing the administrative burden that it would place on general practitioners (GP) to do so for these tens of thousands of students and their parents.

But it also is a deliberate ploy to normalise the process, making it seem like an administrative process akin to handing in a permission slip; thereby dulling the sense of medical risk that each vaccination entails.

When everyone is doing it, resistance feels abnormal. Students don't want to be the odd one out, and parents are less likely to refuse if they believe refusal is rare.

GPs are trained to obtain informed consent, answer questions, and assess patient suitability. Bypassing them reduces the chance of hesitancy being triggered by actual dialogue about risks and benefits.

Despite sliding rates of vaccination coinciding with the pandemic (approximately 83% to 70% from 2019-2023 in NSW):

tens of thousands of mostly Year 7 students in NSW alone have been vaccinated each year with Gardasil 9 each year in this period. The parents of these “vaccinees” would have undergone the same consent process outlined in this article.

Based on what we have shown, how many of the parents providing consent could we estimate were properly informed of the risks of HPV infection, the rates of cancers resulting from HPV infection, survival rates of cancers caused by HPV infection, the benefits of Gardasil 9, the risks of Gardasil 9 and the necessity of Gardasil 9 for their child?

How much more likely would it be that the majority of these parents simply checked the boxes to provide consent as directed?

We must remember that all medicines produce effects.

The ones we aim for are called benefits and the ones we don’t want are called side effects.

But they are all part of the same trade-off and Gardasil 9 is no different.

Remember when five girls fainted after being immunised at school (when the original Gardasil was first rolled out)?

It was just a coincidence of course:

“But authorities said their reactions were likely to be related to having an injection, not the vaccine itself. . . . Sacred Heart Girls' College headmaster Christopher Dalton said hospital staff told teachers at the school at the time that the girls' reactions were not related to the vaccination itself.”5 [emphasis added]

The vaccine was safe and effective:

“Mr Abbott agreed, saying manufacturer CSL had tested the vaccine batch in question and found it ‘perfectly fit and proper’ . . . Mr Abbott said Gardasil was vigorously evaluated before being registered for use in Australia and it had passed with flying colours.”6

Millions of doses had been given and Experts would have noticed something because they’d have done something about it if there was a risk, because they were the Experts:

“No other Australian adverse reaction cases had been brought to his attention.

In the United States, where the vaccine had undergone a similarly rigorous evaluation and been in use longer, two million people had been vaccinated and only 500 reactions reported, he said.”7

Do you remember when three women developed pancreatitis after being injected with the original Gardasil?

It was probably just another coincidence too.

In fairness, with so many doses of Gardasil and Gardasil 9 given, we should expect elevated rates of adverse events, but how just how many?

What’s the risk profile we accept for incomplete protection against an infection which only may cause cancer, for which even if it does occur, the survival rates are very positive?

Gardasil and now Gardasil 9 have been associated with 3 deaths and over 4,400 reports of harm in 12-17 year olds in Australia as reported in the TGA’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN):

Clearly, this vaccine is not completely safe.

The signal in the data shown above is even more relevant because 12-17 year olds tend to be in the prime of their lives health-wise and would not otherwise expect to be reporting ill-health unless it was for the vaccine they had received.

In sum, it is highly likely that these adverse event reports to DAEN were likely more than mere coincidences associated with vaccination.

Sadly, the three reported deaths associated with Gardasil 9 (following its rollout in 2018) all occurred in children only 12 years old.

Two of these deaths include “Boostrix” in the “Medicines reported as being taken” report, suggesting that these children would have received their vaccines as part of the School Vaccination Program:

How sad if these three children died because their parents provided “consent” through a tick-box portal without being fully informed of the risks of this vaccine.

Though the number of adverse events and deaths might appear relatively small considering the number of doses given, due to the under-reporting ratio, these numbers could possibly be 99% higher than recorded in DAEN.

Conclusion

Informed consent requires a clear understanding of both the potential risks and benefits of a given vaccine, as well as the relative risk posed by the disease it is designed to protect against or prevent.

Australia’s School Vaccination Program has failed parents and children by providing them with insufficient information about the risks of HPV, the benefits of vaccination with Gardasil 9 and the risks of vaccination with Gardasil 9.

The consent obtained by Australia’s health authorities may, therefore, be considered unlawful and it could amount to assault, battery, or negligence.

If you are the parent of a child due for vaccination with Gardasil 9, then pause and withhold consent until adequate, relevant and comprehensible information is provided.

Request full disclosure, including the name of the product, known risks, alternatives and expected benefits of Gardasil 9 from your GP or school vaccinator.

Ask critical questions such as “what are the short-term and long-term effects of Gardasil 9 and is this vaccine necessary for my child?”

Keep written records of what information was provided, what was asked, and what was withheld.

If key information is missing, then submit formal complaints to educational authorities, health departments and the Ombudsman.

Thank you for reading.

Background:
Steel helmets were distributed widely to Allied forces during World War II with the intention of reducing battlefield mortality. While early field reports supported their protective role against shrapnel and falling debris, the effect of helmet use on all-cause mortality remains unclear. This study investigates the association between helmet use and mortality across multiple theatres of war, accounting for timing, fitting, and individual compliance.

Methods:
A retrospective cohort study was conducted on 1.2 million military personnel deployed between 1939 and 1945. Helmet status (helmeted vs non-helmeted) was recorded at baseline. “Fully helmeted” status was assigned to personnel 21 days after initial issue, allowing time for cranial adaptation and habitual strap usage. Soldiers receiving secondary fittings at 6–8 week intervals were included in subgroup analysis. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. Cox proportional hazards models were applied, adjusting for proximity to enemy fire, role classification, helmet fit, refitting frequency, and artillery saturation.

Results:
Among 112,398 recorded deaths, 94.7% occurred in individuals documented as helmeted. After adjusting for latency, refitting, and exposure confounders, helmet use was associated with a 33% relative reduction in mortality (HR 0.67; 95% CI, 0.63–0.71). Kaplan–Meier survival curves demonstrated modest divergence after the 12-week mark, with enhanced survival in individuals compliant with refitting schedules. Subgroup analysis showed elevated risk within 100 metres of enemy lines (HR 1.15), but this association attenuated following adjustment for shell trajectory and trench depth. Notably, personnel in support roles exhibited stronger helmet-associated survival patterns.

Conclusions:
Despite the majority of deaths occurring among helmeted personnel, adjusted analysis reveals a protective association. Mortality clustering in the early post-issuance period suggests underestimation of helmet efficacy due to delayed protective onset. Findings support the continued issuance of helmets and warrant further investigation into fitting adherence, compliance patterns, and the operational impact of cranial protective equipment.

Introduction

The steel helmet has been a mainstay of combat equipment since the early 20th century. Designed primarily to reduce cranial trauma from shrapnel and environmental hazards, its role in reducing overall battlefield mortality has been accepted but rarely quantified. During World War II, helmet distribution reached unprecedented scale, with millions of units issued across theatres. Yet, concerns emerged over rising mortality despite near-universal helmet uptake, leading some to question their effectiveness.

To date, most evidence supporting helmet use has relied on observational data and theoretical modelling. Little attention has been given to factors such as adaptation time post-issue, fit deterioration, or strap tension non-compliance. This study applies modern survival analysis to a historical dataset to assess the true impact of helmet use on soldier mortality.

Methods

Study Population:
Personnel records for 1.2 million Australian and Allied servicemen were reviewed. Helmet status was recorded at point of issue. “Fully helmeted” status was defined as occurring 21 days post-fitting, based on biomechanical adaptation studies of uniform gear adherence. Soldiers not meeting this threshold or lacking documentation of proper strap usage were coded as “partially helmeted”.

Outcome and Variables:
The primary outcome was all-cause mortality during active service. Variables included:

• Helmet status (fully, partially, or non-helmeted)

• Proximity to active combat zones

• Role classification (combat, support, logistics, clerical)

• Helmet refitting frequency

• Exposure duration

• Artillery saturation (defined via battalion munitions index)

Missing data were addressed through multiple imputation using trench depth, unit-level compliance, and documented supply irregularities.

Statistical Analysis:
Cox proportional hazards regression was used to estimate hazard ratios for mortality by helmet status. Kaplan–Meier survival functions were plotted over a 6-year follow-up period. Subgroup analyses explored effect modification by role, exposure, and helmet fit history.

Results

Mortality Overview:

• Total deaths recorded: 112,398

• Deaths among helmeted: 106,478 (94.7%)

• Deaths among non-helmeted or partial-compliance individuals: 5,920

• Overall helmet uptake: ~98.6%

Adjusted Outcomes:
After excluding early deaths (within 21 days of helmet issue) and adjusting for confounders:

• Mortality rate in fully helmeted group: 0.92 per 100

• Mortality rate in non-helmeted group: 1.37 per 100

• Hazard Ratio: 0.67 (95% CI 0.63–0.71; p < 0.001)

Refitting at recommended intervals was associated with improved survival (HR 0.59; 95% CI 0.54–0.64). Personnel receiving a third refit showed the highest survival probabilities, though selection effects may contribute.

Kaplan–Meier Curves:
Survival curves between helmeted and non-helmeted groups remained close in the early months but diverged modestly after week 12, consistent with projected protection timelines. No abrupt threshold effect was observed.

Subgroup Analysis:

• Combat within 100m of enemy lines: HR 1.15 unadjusted; reduced to 1.04 after adjusting for trench depth and shell fragmentation index.

• Support personnel: HR 0.49 (95% CI 0.41–0.57), consistent with lower exposure and high helmet compliance.

Discussion

While it may appear counterintuitive that most battlefield deaths occurred in helmeted personnel, this is consistent with helmet saturation and the presence of unmeasured early-phase vulnerabilities. The concept of a “helmet latency period” is supported by the temporal distribution of deaths, which cluster disproportionately in the first three weeks post-issuance. These findings suggest that early deaths in helmeted individuals may underestimate long-term protective benefit.

This study also highlights the potential value of refitting protocols, often overlooked in previous analyses. Secondary fittings accounted for adjustment of strap integrity, forehead alignment, and peripheral vision comfort—all variables believed to contribute to long-term survival. Data limitations precluded evaluation of helmet colour, denting patterns, or morale effects, though these warrant future investigation.

Excess Mortality Considerations

A marked increase in all-cause mortality was observed across multiple regions during the study period. While temporally correlated with widespread helmet distribution, this association should not be interpreted causally. Numerous co-factors—including disruption to routine medical services, delays in non-combat healthcare, and operational strain on burial registration—may have contributed to excess death counts.

In many cases, deaths were recorded with incomplete documentation, particularly where personnel were listed as “missing” or “presumed dead”. These deaths, though temporally aligned with combat operations, should not be assumed to result directly from warfare. Background mortality, pre-existing conditions, or environmental exposures (e.g. cold, mud, or trench-related moisture) may offer alternative explanations.

Limitations

This was a retrospective analysis reliant on historical documentation. Confounding due to unrecorded variables (e.g. helmet removal during sleep, battlefield looting, extreme humidity affecting leather fittings) may bias results. Additionally, mortality data does not capture non-fatal cranial injury, which may represent an unmeasured benefit of helmet use.

Conclusions

After multivariate adjustment, helmet use was associated with improved survival across multiple roles and theatres of war. Although most fatalities occurred in helmeted personnel, this is best understood as an artefact of helmet uptake and early vulnerability windows. We recommend further exploration of helmet adherence strategies and periodic refitting to maximise protective benefit.

Policy Implications

The results reinforce the importance of continued helmet usage in all operational environments. Observed mortality among helmeted individuals should not undermine confidence in cranial protection. Deaths occurring during the early adaptation period, or among improperly refitted personnel, are to be expected and should not be interpreted as failure of the intervention.

Recommendations include:

• Routine helmet refitting at 6–8 week intervals to optimise strap tension and alignment.

• Monitoring helmet fit compliance in forward units, with targeted education in high-risk battalions.

• Countering helmet misinformation, including unsubstantiated claims that helmets are ineffective or harmful, especially among support personnel and younger recruits.

• Future investment in next-generation helmets, potentially incorporating morale-enhancing liners or biometric adjustment.

Funding

This study was supported by the Imperial Directorate for Protective Equipment and Compliance (IDPEC), with supplemental logistical funding from the Allied War Office Bureau for Cranial Safety (AWOBCS). Additional modelling resources were provided by the Combat Outcomes and Biostatistics Unit (COBU) under the Department for Strategic Morale Management. Refitting protocol trials were co-funded by SteelCorp Industries, primary supplier of Mk II helmets to Commonwealth forces.

The funding bodies had no role in the collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data, but were consulted during helmet efficacy modelling and public communication strategy development.

The link to the UNSW page describes the role for the Research Officer:

“The Research Officer will play a key role in the multidisciplinary infectious disease research team supporting the development of a new AI tool for sentiment analysis and disinformation tracking. They will work with a team of epidemiologists and software engineers and with a larger team in the EPIWATCH® system, an AI open-source epidemic intelligence (OSINT) observatory.

The Research Officer will be responsible for collecting, monitoring, analyzing [sic] and reporting on social media data related to vaccines, masks and medicine whilst collaborating with AI engineers on a grant funded project. They will assist in developing large language models to track community sentiment and disinformation around infectious diseases.

They will work closely with the Professor to manage and prioritize [sic] workflows, ensuring that deadlines and grant deliverables are met.

The position is within the Biosecurity Program and has no direct reports.”1

Ah yes, this sounds like fun!

Finally, someone from an academic establishment is going to be “analyzing” [sic] and “prioritizing” [sic] tracking disinformation in the health/epidemic space relating to “vaccines”, masks and medicine.

For too long, we have been told how the “vaccines” are safe and effective, and their benefits outweigh their very small or transient risks; that mask-wearing actually prevents COVID-19 transmission; or that ivermectin was dangerous horse-paste; or that hydroxychloroquine could kill you.

But we know, sadly, that these true examples of disinformation will not be the task of the Research Officer whose work will likely more closely resemble Winston’s at the Ministry of Truth.

The Biosecurity Program

A quick read of the “Biosecurity Program” reveals the real focus areas:

“The Biosecurity Program is focused on detection, prevention, mitigation and response to emerging infectious diseases, pandemics and bioterrorism. We conduct research on emerging infectious diseases, rapid epidemic surveillance, field response, epidemics, pandemics, bioterrorism, bio-intelligence, and health security in a changing biotechnology landscape. Areas of focus include influenza, COVID-19, pneumococcal disease, herpes zoster, Ebola, MERS CoV, smallpox and measles.”2 [emphases added]

Surely the odds are shortening that the next “I Support the Current Thing” public health emergency will be one of those bolded in the above list (herpes is likely just too on-the-nose to be a taker).

The Biosecurity Program will work with very important stakeholders too:

“We research the rapid detection and prevention of these threats through our AI-driven observatory EPIWATCH. Our research includes prevention by both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical means such as personal protective equipment (masks and N95s) and vaccines. The program engages widely with stakeholders from all disciplines involved in large scale epidemic response, such as health, field epidemiology, pharmaceutical industry, emergency management, defence, law enforcement and other first responders.”3 [emphasis added]

It’s all sounding strangely familiar isn’t it?

The militarisation of the pandemic response (which has been covered extensively by friends of this Substack and ) now with the addition of AI to surveil, nudge, obfuscate and manipulate organic community sentiment, coinciding with “wide engagement” from Big Pharma.

Disinformation in the health/epidemic domain: facemasks

MacIntyre has a deep affection for masking.

Just to hammer home their importance, she often appears in her publicity shots wearing one (or at least with the mask in view so you know she will be putting it straight back on!).

Here’s her profile shot at UNSW’s Biosecurity Program (put that mask back on Raina! Don’t you know COVID-19 spreads through droplets??!!):

Team shot (just look at those non-believers! Get me some sanitiser and a booster pronto!):

Here at the Australian Institute of International Affairs delivering a lecture on the lessons Australia and the international community need to learn about global health and biotechnology from the COVID-19 pandemic (clearly there’s still plenty of learning to be had — where’s your mask Renuga Inpakumar??????)

Presumably, in the next pandemic, spreading information that masks do not work would be “disinformation”.

Importantly, it would be disinformation if you knew this information was false but spread it anyway.

Why would this be disinformation?

Well, Raina has told us that masks work.

Many, many times before actually.

• “Face Mask Use and Control of Respiratory Virus Transmission in Households”

  • This 2006–07 Sydney-based cluster Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) tested whether surgical or P2 (N95-equivalent) masks worn by adults could reduce respiratory infections after exposure to a sick child. It found no difference in infection rates across groups, mainly due to poor adherence (<50% wore masks consistently).

    • So, despite low adherence rendering masking ineffective, the authors propose that in a “severe pandemic”, people would magically comply, and masks might then reduce transmission. It’s a counterfactual hypothesis not tested in the study, but presented as a plausible takeaway — essentially: “If only people wore them properly, it would’ve worked.”

• “A Cluster Randomised Trial of Cloth Masks Compared with Medical Masks in Healthcare Workers”

  • This large 2015 cluster-randomised trial in Vietnam compared cloth masks, medical masks, and standard practice among 1,607 healthcare workers. Cloth mask wearers had significantly higher rates of influenza-like illness and lab-confirmed respiratory virus infections than those wearing medical masks — or even controls. Filtration testing showed cloth masks blocked only 3% of particles, compared to 56% for medical masks.

    • This study quietly torpedoed the idea that any mask is better than none. Cloth masks weren’t just ineffective — they correlated with higher infection rates than standard practice. In trying to offer a protective barrier, they may have ended up offering a damp, reusable petri dish instead. The study was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant with 3M as the partner on the grant (yes, that same one):

The above study was published before the COVID-19 pandemic. Its takedown of cloth masks prompted the authors to issue a statement in late March 2020 advising it would still be better to wear a cloth mask than no mask at all. 

Oops!

By July 2020, with cloth masks back in vogue, MacIntyre and colleagues even published an article in the journal Thorax, republished here, suggesting a good 12 LAYER CLOTH FACE MASK should do the job!

• “Masks and Respirators for Prevention of Respiratory Infections: A State of the Science Review”

  • This 2024 state-of-the-science review surveyed existing evidence for masks, suggesting many studies have limitations and often underestimate real-world effectiveness. They argued that a broader evidentiary framework, including observational studies and “mechanistic data”, shows masks work (especially respirators) in reducing respiratory virus transmission when worn properly and consistently.

    • The problem with relying on mechanistic evidence is that it describes how masks should work in theory, not how they actually perform in real life. Lab conditions don’t reflect how people wear masks in the real world: loosely fitted, reused, or worn under the nose. If proper use is rare, then the protective effect is too. To claim that masks “work” in a practical, population-wide sense ignores the reality of human behaviour. For masks to consistently block viral transmission, they’d need to be worn correctly, continuously, and universally—with no breaks for eating, drinking, sleeping, or speaking face-to-face. Pure fantasy.

As we have shown, the science is far from settled in the facemask domain; even if “The Science” presents that it is.

Disinformation in the health/epidemic domain: “vaccines”

MacIntyre also has a deep affection for vaccines.

She also has a new book for sale.

You can pre-order it by scanning the QR code on the image below.

In writing this book, MacIntyre will have surely drawn on her experience working with the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on COVID-19 Vaccine Composition since November 2021:

Shortly before joining the WHO Advisory Group, MacIntyre claimed that COVID-19 would never be endemic because it would spread rapidly in the “unvaccinated” or “under-vaccinated” (this post didn’t really age too well — in her defence, Omicron was still two weeks away from laying waste to Australia’s “fully vaccinated” population):

The evidence suggests that MacIntyre was also a believer in the “vaccine” solution to the pandemic even as early as December 2020, before the data from the “pivotal” Phase 3 Clinical Trials for the “vaccines” had even been published:

So, vaccines work, ok??!!

The COVID-19 “vaccines” in particular, work.

They work so well in fact, that when they don’t work, it’s because you haven’t had enough of them.

Questions around their safety or effectiveness, will therefore be branded as misinformation.

If you knowingly spread this misinformation, it will be disinformation.

Looking to the future

The $499,932 of taxpayer funds awarded to MacIntyre and her team will be used to create AI that can identify public health disinformation and its effect on communities.

“Disinformation, or ‘fake news’, is a significant challenge in today’s public health field, and unfortunately is a consequence of living in a highly connected world,” says Professor MacIntyre. “It affects community sentiment, which in turn can affect vaccination rates and uptake of other health interventions. AI-driven solutions will help detect and combat disinformation as more threats emerge, and will provide early warnings of negative community sentiment, which can inform health promotion and public health messaging to communities.”4 [emphasis added]

As though the pandemic’s negative community sentiment was irrational and fuelled by disinformation rather than being the rational response to being locked down, mandated, threatened, marginalised, silenced: now ignored.

Consider how AI is being used today:

And pause to reflect on how “disinformation in the health/epidemic domain” might be managed in Australia in the coming years.

Are they making the beds in the quarantine camps yet?

Given the widespread failures, neglect, and systemic issues exposed during the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, it was expected the severe mismanagement and understaffing would cause devastating COVID-19 outbreaks in residential aged-care facilities (RACFs) in 2020.

To some extent, these fears materialised but not to the level predicted by many. Though Australia’s “COVID-19 deaths” mostly occurred in RACFs in 2020, as we demonstrated in Parts 1 and 2 of this series of articles, these “COVID-19 deaths” were likely the result of prematurely prescribing and administering sedatives which hastened residents’ deaths “from COVID-19” among other leading causes such as dementia.

In 2021, however, the story quite unexpectedly changed.

While the rest of the nation (primarily in NSW and Victoria) dealt with an explosion in “COVID-19 cases” with the Delta wave, somehow Australia’s RACFs managed to not only restrict “COVID-19 deaths” but “COVID-19 cases” too.

In 2021, there were just 282 “COVID-19 deaths” and 1,737 “COVID-19 cases” in Australia’s RACFs from approximately 242,000 individuals living in permanent RACFs in Australia.1

Why did the older and more comorbid aged-care residents have better COVID-19 infection and mortality outcomes than the rest of the Australian population in 2021?

• Was it natural immunity from prior infections?

• Did the RACFs get their act together and learn how to respond to and manage COVID-19 in 2021?

• Was it the “vaccines”?

In this article, we interrogate the reasons for these unexpected outcomes in Australia’s RACFs and show how the low number of “COVID-19 deaths” in 2021 was a calm before the storm of the Omicron wave.

We will show how soaring rates of prescribing for sedatives and opioids on the PBS’s (Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) Palliative Care Schedule, which paled in comparison to our analysis of 2020’s data, caused record excess deaths in Australia’s RACFs from late 2021 onwards.

Why were residents in aged-care facilities better off in 2021?

Was it natural immunity?

With a relatively low number of “COVID-19 cases” in RACFs 2020-21, natural immunity would not have been sufficiently widespread to explain the reduction in “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19 deaths” in 2021.

In non-outbreak scenarios in 2020, COVID-19 testing was reduced, raising the possibility that non-severe “COVID-19 cases” were missed, leading to underestimations of the true number of “COVID-19 cases” and therefore, the extent of natural immunity in the RACF population. Conversely, hyper-sensitive PCR-testing methods could have caught more “COVID-19 cases” than had meaningfully existed possibly leading to overestimates of natural immunity as well.

In 2021, however, it is likely that more “COVID-19 cases” were captured through a massive expansion in testing in RACFs. By 10 August 2021, 475,170 COVID-19 tests had been completed at 2,544 unique residential aged care facilities RACFs nationally.2

Yet, as protective as natural immunity could have been, it could have only minimally accounted for these improved infection and mortality outcomes, as case numbers were so low in 2020 and 2021.

The comparably worse outcomes for RACF staff from 2020 to 2021 (addressed in the next section) further disproves the natural immunity explanation for lower “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs in 2021.

Did Australia’s RACFs get their act together?

In 2021, RACF resident “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19 deaths” sharply declined. There were 14% fewer resident “COVID-19 cases” and 68% fewer resident “COVID-19 deaths” compared with 2020.3 Similarly, there were 58% fewer RACF staff “COVID-19 cases” than in 2020, yet unexpectedly, 13 staff succumbed to “COVID-19 deaths” (up from zero) in 2020.4

The striking reductions for COVID-19 infections and mortality in RACFs bucked the trends for the wider Australian population, where both “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19 deaths” started to significantly trend upwards from June 2021 onwards.

There is evidence, therefore, that Australia’s RACFs learned from the mistakes of 2020, and applied stricter and more consistent infection control measures to explain lower “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19” deaths in 2021. These RACF protocols included restricting visitor access, mandatory testing for staff, better infection control monitoring and reporting, and more timely information sharing with health authorities.5

Yet, the extent to which these measures were responsible for better COVID-19 outcomes in 2021 must have been limited considering how these same processes failed from 2022 onwards, when both “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19 deaths” once again soared in Australian RACFs, resulting in more than 3,200 “COVID-19 deaths”.6

Was it the “vaccines”?

The extent to which it was “vaccination” that explained, or at least partly explained the unexpected reduction in the number of aged-care “COVID-19 cases” and “COVID-19 deaths” depends on vaccine coverage and timing of the receipt of “vaccines”, and the prevalence of COVID-19 in Australia at the time.

“Vaccination” coverage and timing in RACFs

Although aged-care residents were eligible to be “vaccinated” much earlier than the rest of the Australian population, the data show that “vaccination” coverage was lower in the RACF cohorts compared with the Australian population overall. By the end of 2021, only 87.2% of residents in aged-care facilities had been “double vaccinated” compared with 90.2% of the Australian population aged 12 and over;7 a modest increase from the 85.3% reported to have been “double vaccinated” by early July 2021.8

There was also limited “vaccination” coverage for RACF staff, even until after the “vaccine” mandate took effect on 17 September 2021 for all RACF staff. In June 2021, it was reported that only 16.3% of RACF staff were “fully vaccinated”, with only 30% having received one dose. By 16 September 2021, vaccination rollout data revealed that only 78.1% were “fully vaccinated” and a month later this had risen to 91.8%.9 In sum, COVID-19 “vaccination” coverage was not sufficiently widespread and was also slow to achieve for RACF staff.

With so many unwashed, “unvaccinated” RACF staff potentially superspreading COVID-19, the “vaccination” coverage was insufficient and could not explain the improved infection and mortality outcomes in Australia’s RACFs in 2021.

Three fanciful assumptions of the idea that “vaccines” could have played any role in the reduced infection and mortality in RACFs in 2021 are:

1. The “vaccines” could prevent infection;

2. The “vaccines” reduced your risk of repeated COVID-19 infections; and,

3. The “vaccines” were safe and did not cause elevated mortality from other (non-COVID-19) causes.

All of these assumptions are false.

Timing of “vaccination”

As shown in the previous section, residents in aged-care facilities reached a high-level of “vaccination” coverage (85.3%) earlier in 2021 than the rest of the Australian population and, therefore, the presumed protective effects of the “vaccine” could not explain the improved infection or mortality outcomes in Australia’s RACFs in 2021.

The study “Effectiveness of mRNA Vaccines and Waning of Protection Against Sars-CoV-2 Infection and Severe COVID-19 During Predominant Circulation of the Delta Variant in Italy: Retrospective Cohort Study” showed “vaccine”-effectiveness waned substantially to the point where six months after “vaccination” high-risk (aged over 60 years) were no better off than the “unvaccinated”:

“At 27-30 weeks after the second dose, vaccine effectiveness was estimated to be similar to no protection in high risk people.”10

Negative vaccine effectiveness has been demonstrated in multiple other studies, most notably in this Australian study which we wrote about in 2023, showing how some cohorts were more likely to die “from COVID-19” or from other leading causes than the “unvaccinated”.

Therefore, any presumed benefits from “vaccination” would have waned considerably if the primary course was completed at the time of the rollout in February 2021.

“Vaccination” does not, therefore, explain the improved COVID-19 infection and mortality outcomes in RACFs in 2021.

The prevalence of COVID-19 in Australia in 2021

In the first half of 2021, Australia experienced very low numbers of “COVID-19 cases”, with most infections linked to international arrivals in hotel quarantine. Community transmission was rare and typically contained. It wasn’t until mid-June 2021 that the Delta variant triggered a major outbreak, beginning in Sydney and marking the start of prolonged lockdowns and a significant national case surge (see below: note the graph uses a logarithmic scale to show “new ‘COVID-19 cases’” as they were barely visible on a linear scale prior to August 2021):

The story was very similar in RACFs. The first “COVID-19 Outbreaks in Australian Residential Aged Care Facilities” report for 2021 showed that a cumulative total of only 2,027 “COVID-19 cases” (all from 2020) had been recorded in RACFs increasing to just 2,032 on 26 June 2021; still with zero “COVID-19 deaths” by this time. By 30 July 2021, cases had increased to 2,060; still with zero deaths. It was not until the report from 13 August 2021, that the first “COVID-19 deaths” were reported and the number of “COVID-19 cases” escalated to 2,113, (86 added in 2021 to the 2,027 from 2020).

The lack of “COVID-19 deaths” or “COVID-19 cases” when there was no community transmission disproves the claim that “vaccines” caused this outcome. It simply shows there was no exposure to COVID-19 in RACFs in the first half of 2021, with “healthy vaccinee bias” leading to the misconception that it was the protective benefits of “vaccination” which was responsible.

Whilst “COVID-19 deaths” might have been low during this period, it would be wrong to assume that all “vaccine” recipients were healthy in this period (January to 13 August 2021; when the first “COVID-19 deaths” were recorded). The staggering numbers of adverse events reported in the TGA’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications — underreported by as much as 99% — shows the true impacts of the “vaccines” for the aged 65+ cohort:

In sum, “vaccination” did not cause the relatively positive COVID-19 infection and mortality outcomes in RACFs in 2021. “Vaccine” coverage was relatively limited for residents, slow to achieve for RACF staff and any presumed “vaccine” effectiveness would have waned considerably by the time of the Delta wave for RACF residents. With low COVID-19 prevalence in the community, any positive outcomes were the result of the “healthy vaccinee bias” which glosses over the serious reported harms, including deaths from all COVID-19 “vaccines” in the period from January to 13 August 2021; when the first “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs for 2021 were reported.

Soaring palliative care prescribing in June 2021 onwards

Here the story turns.

Starting in June 2021, there was a sharp increase in the prescribing of sedatives and opioids on the PBS’s Palliative Care Schedule. These substantial increases resulted from a Department of Health review in February 2020, which brought about changes to the PBS Palliative Care Schedule, expanding access to medicines used in palliative and “end-of-life” care which were formerly restricted to cancer patients only.

Aside from expanding access to these medicines, other restrictions were also eased following the review. Special authority requirements were simplified and the number of repeats, quantities and dosages were also increased for these medicines.11 The increased volumes of medicine dispensed, due to larger quantities and repeats per prescription, meant that the explosion in the number of sedatives and opioids was a much larger increase, by medicine volume or quantity, in comparison with the pre-June 2021 prescribing data.

The graphs below show alarming increases in sedative and opioid use, which, given the data is publicly viewable on the PBS Date of Supply data, must have occurred in outpatient or RACFs (not in hospitals):12

Expanded and simplified access to palliative or “end-of-life” care sedatives and opioids can explain how prescribing could have occurred, but does not address why it should have.

The perfect storm

With expanded access to sedatives and opioids as part of palliative care and “end-of-life” prescribing, coupled with an explosion in “COVID-19 cases” in the Omicron wave, RACFs experienced soaring excess mortality.

Not all of these excess deaths were “from COVID-19”, but a large proportion were.

As we demonstrated in Parts 1 and 2 of this series of articles, palliative and “end-of-life” medicine prescribing spiked in the period immediately preceding or matching rises in “COVID-19 deaths”.

Below we present similar data for 2020-23, showing increased prescribing together with “COVID-19 deaths”, which is particularly evident during the peak of the Omicron wave. The red shaded area highlights the spike in prescribing in December 2021 followed by the rise in “COVID-19 deaths” in January 2022 (this will not be visible in your email, please click the graph to open it in a new window):

The sharp increase in prescriptions in December 2021 does not reflect stockpiling behaviour because it continued the upward trend that began in June 2021, maintaining consistency with the heightened demand already evident in months prior, rather than showing a sudden, isolated spike typical of stockpiling.

Note the corresponding drop in palliative care prescribing which occurs in January 2022, suggesting that the approximate 380 “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs in January 2022 significantly curbed the demand for “end-of-life” care medicines because these residents had succumbed to sedation, or “COVID-19 deaths”.

Though “COVID-19 cases” in RACFs were relatively low in 2021, they were mostly recorded later in the year. Approximately 1,340 were reported in the period between 24 September to 24 December 2021 and this influx of “COVID-19 cases” in RACFs — just as it did in 2020 — was likely to have led to many being placed on the “end-of-life” protocol involving these sedatives and opioids.13

There are other evident spikes in prescribing either preceding or matching spikes in “COVID-19 deaths” after December 2021-January 2022; however, with only monthly data available for prescribing it is not presently possible to calculate by how much, if at all, these prescribing spikes preceded the “COVID-19 deaths”.

Record excess mortality in residential aged-care facilities

There is more to our analysis than elevated “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs.

A 2023 study which compared mortality rates in RACFs across a number of years, found that there were 4,896 excess deaths in the period July 2021-June 2022 which accounted to 21% of the national excess deaths, even though those in RACFs represented less than 1% of the Australian population.14

The study used publicly available data from financial years, tracking the number of permanent residents and “exits” (deaths) in RACFs, and so its study period included both the peaks of the Delta and Omicron COVID-19 waves, somewhat complicating our calendar year analysis so far.

Though our analysis here focuses on data from calendar years, we were able to piece together data from the Department of Health “COVID-19 Outbreaks in Residential Aged-Care Facilities” reports. We know that the majority of these “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs did not occur in the Delta wave having established the very low numbers of “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs in 2021 (282 or approximately 22% of the national “COVID-19 deaths” for that year).

As addressed previously, the first “COVID-19 deaths” occurring in RACFs were the three reported in the 13 August 2021 report, meaning all 282 “COVID-19 deaths” in 2021 must have occurred in the period from August-December 2021 — within the study period (July 2021-June 2022). The report from 1 July 2022 shows 2,881 “total COVID-19 deaths” had occurred “since the beginning of the pandemic”, meaning that 1,921 “COVID-19 deaths” must have occurred in the period from January to July 2022 in Australia’s RACFs.15

In sum, from July 2021 to June 2022, there were 2,203 (1,921 + 282) “COVID-19 deaths” and 2,693 non-COVID-19 excess deaths in RACFs.

Interpreting residential aged-care excess mortality

Excess dementia mortality is the likely reason for the elevated non-COVID-19 excess deaths in the study period. Compared to the 2015-19 average, there were 2,294 excess dementia deaths in 2021 and 3,468 excess dementia deaths in 2022.16 Though this is a crude estimate not accounting for changes in the age-structure of the population in that time, these are strikingly large excesses which would only minimally be reduced by any changes in demographics in this short period of time. These are likely even underestimates because the mortality displacement caused by elevated deaths in 2021 should have reduced the deaths in 2022, but the reverse was observed.

As Australia’s population ages, dementia has become an increasingly common comorbidity in Australia’s RACFs. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) shows that in the study period (July 2021 to June 2022), there were approximately 131,000 people living with dementia (54% of all residents) in RACFs. In an outbreak scenario, with so many suffering with the disease in RACFs, those residents at an advanced stage of the disease could have been prescribed and administered these palliative and “end-of-life” care medicines as infection control measures, possibly causing these excess dementia deaths. While the approach would have reduced “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs, these same sedatives and opioids, at the individual level, could have deepened confusion, slowed breathing and raised fall risks, accelerating decline in people with dementia and leading to elevated “dementia deaths”.

In a likely genuine coincidence, another AIHW report calculated that approximately 4,800 residents in RACFs (roughly 2% of all residents) were appraised as needing palliative care in this same study period (July 2021 to June 2022); a remarkably close alignment with the reported 4,896 excess deaths.17 Though, in reality, the numbers accessing palliative and “end-of-life” care would be much larger as virtually all residents close to death would access these medicines at some point before their eventual deaths.

Conclusions

In 2021, there was an expansion in access to palliative and “end-of-life” care medicines — sedatives and opioids — which coincided with record excess deaths in Australia’s RACFs.

The evidence presented in this article shows a continued need for these medicines that outlasted COVID-19 waves.

As we wrote earlier in the article, this is not simply about expanded and simplified access to these medicines, it is about why they should have been needed.

Something has made Australians sicker and it has not only persisted, but worsened since 2021, requiring more and more sedatives and opioids.

What could have caused the significant jump in the numbers of people requiring access to palliative care and “end-of-life” care medicines in 2021?

Was it simply a coincidence that the Department of Health commissioned a review in February 2020, just as the pandemic kicked-off, seeking ways to get more sedatives and opioids into Australians?

Was it yet another coincidence that Australia’s excess mortality crisis commenced at just the same time that these sedatives and opioids became available to many more Australians?

Had our pain-relief needs really been unmet for so long until these important changes?

Or did these changes reflect something more sinister?

Was it just another coincidence — or perhaps strategic convenience — that palliative and “end-of-life” medicines became more readily available, in greater quantities and with weaker oversight, precisely as the Delta wave began?

Was this Australia’s quiet purge of high-cost, low-survival residents under the veneer of “care”; a convenient solution to the “problem” of an ageing population?

So many questions.

We will keep asking.

Thank you for reading.

We showed how a mere positive COVID-19 test (a significantly flawed test) was all that was required for an aged-care resident to be placed on this “end-of-life” care protocol, and how “informed consent” could even be obtained after the medical intervention.

Now, the evidence from the recently concluded inquest into the deaths at one of these RACFs — Newmarch House in western Sydney, NSW — confirms the widespread use of sedatives in this particular RACF and horrifyingly, that all residents who died at this facility during this COVID-19 outbreak were prescribed Midazolam and Morphine prior to their “COVID-19 deaths”.

Despite the known risks and harms with these sedatives, particularly for those with respiratory illness or dementia, seventeen of the nineteen residents died because of their COVID-19 infection and the Coroner found that “nothing could be done”, or “no other steps could have been taken” to have materially altered the eventual outcome for these residents.

The inherent assumptions of the Coroner’s findings were that COVID-19 was fatal for all the residents; that COVID-19 was untreatable; and that chemical restraints did not cause the deaths.

There is strong evidence to refute all of these assumptions, and it was not considered at the inquest.

The inquest also revealed how one COVID-19-negative resident, Barry Jehan, was unlawfully prohibited from leaving Newmarch House to be with his family because the risk he could pose, if he might have had the virus, to his family. Barry would later contract COVID-19 at the facility, be prescribed Midazolam and Morphine, and would succumb to a death “from COVID-19” five days after his COVID-19 diagnosis.

As we speculated in Part 1, although COVID-19 might have been a contributing factor in these residents’ “COVID-19 deaths”, it was the use of chemical restraints — namely Midazolam and Morphine — which hastened their deaths. It was also the denial of other potentially life-saving treatments or care that might have averted the allegedly fatal progression of these residents’ COVID-19 disease.

We now have several reasons confirming our hypothesis:

• The sudden onset of the COVID-19 outbreak at Newmarch;

• The curious appearance of Midazolam and Morphine at Newmarch House; and,

• The rapid “time-to-death” for many residents following their COVID-19 diagnosis (and placement on the “end-of-life” treatment protocol).

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 outbreak at Newmarch

The COVID-19 outbreak at Newmarch House was the result of indiscriminate PCR testing of residents commencing on 14 April 2020.

The catalyst for the whole-of-facility testing was a positive test result for a Newmarch staff member, first reported on 11 April 2020 following a PCR test from 10 April 2020. At the same time, a resident at Newmarch (referred to as “CA” in the Coroner’s findings) undertook a PCR test because they were experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, including breathing difficulties.

“CA” was the only Newmarch resident to have demonstrated COVID-19-associated symptoms prior to the outbreak and discovery of these “COVID-19 cases”.

These other “COVID-19 cases” were not discovered because the residents were displaying symptoms that prompted testing. There are, therefore, several possible interpretations of this outbreak at Newmarch commencing on 14 April 2020:

1. These “COVID-19 cases” were false-positives resulting from the use of a flawed diagnostic tool for the detection of COVID-19;

2. These “COVID-19 cases” resulted from “aggressive swabbing” as described at the inquest by Dr. James Branley, the lead clinician managing the outbreak at Newmarch, which might have collected more cellular debris from dead (non infectious) SARS-CoV-2 cells:

   “So my recollection is there was very much a debate at that stage, you just sit tight and you wait till people get symptomatic, and you swab them if they're symptomatic. Now that wasn't the approach that I took, I took the approach to systematically go in and swab aggressively.”1 [emphasis added]

3. These 15 newly discovered “COVID-19 cases” had contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus days or weeks previously and were clearing the virus without it causing COVID-19 disease; and,

4. Some or many of these new “COVID-19 cases” were incubating the SARS-CoV-2 virus, whilst the infection was still in its early stages and progressing to a more advanced stage of COVID-19 disease.

The discovery of 15 additional “COVID-19 cases” could have resulted from a combination any or all of the above.

With the exception of “CA”, the residents had not demonstrated any of the laundry-list of COVID-19-associated symptoms to have warranted testing, and therefore, it is as though the 15 new cases were almost discovered accidentally in symptom-free residents who might have been unaffected by COVID-19 disease. Though Newmarch House was in lockdown from 23 March 2020, it was not placed into “full lockdown” (isolating residents in their rooms) until 12 April 2020 and so, it was not as though any COVID-19-associated symptoms could have easily been missed or ignored by the nursing staff or doctors at Newmarch House once the residents were isolated and neglected in their rooms.

If these new “COVID-19 cases” were at the earliest stage of infection, then the rapid disease-progression raises serious questions about the true causes of the “COVID-19 deaths” at Newmarch House, and the likely causative role played by sedation.

Sadly, it was the detection of these “COVID-19 cases” that initiated the prescribing of “anticipatory” or “crisis” medication to “manage” the outbreak.

The curious appearance of Midazolam and Morphine at Newmarch House

On 18 April 2020, Midazolam and Morphine “just all arrived” at Newmarch House, with registered nurse Christine Giles expressing uncertainty about who had placed the order in her evidence given at the inquest:

“I was told that they'd been ordered by the VACS (Virtual Aged-Care Service) team. They weren’t that they were ordered by the VACS team. They just all arrived, because I haven’t really, I didn’t really get told that they were all arriving. They arrived at 8 o’clock or something that night 9 o’clock that night, and then I had to try and block them all up. . . I guess we don’t normally order crisis medication or that medication until we've got somebody who’s dying. So, the fact that I had all of this medication arrived, I thought at the time I thought I thought oh my god, there’s an expectation that every one of these residents is going to need this medication, and . . . that hit me for a sixer, to be honest, at the time. I yeah. But I'd also heard it on the media about people dying left, right, and centre overseas. So, I guess it just hit me hard at that time.”2

In fact, so much of these restricted, “Schedule 8” drugs were sent to Newmarch House, as described in Nurse Giles’s evidence above, it “creat[ed] an acute problem of finding adequate locked storage space in which to store them.”3

VACS nurse practitioner Hailey Carpen, in her evidence at the inquest, suggested the prescribing of “anticipatory” or “crisis” medications — chemical restraints — for these residents was only as a “just-in-case” measure:

“So, anticipatory medications have been used by registered nurses for a long time, where they use their assessment skills to determine if a resident needs a particular medication, and so it would have been no different in this case. With COVID, the use of anticipatory medications in these patients would be just as clinically indicated as other patients who didn't have COVID who were possibly at, you know, approaching end of life or in distress. . . I think mostly they were prescribed because of the uncertainty of the way each patient, or each person would react to becoming COVID positive, and so if they needed the medications, they were there.”4 [emphases added]

Carpen’s evidence is confusing. She stated that chemical restraints were prescribed because of the uncertainty of the way each patient would react. But, prescriptions would typically only be issued for a medical need, not as a precaution for uncertainty.

If these medications were pre-prescribed for all COVID-positive residents, that suggests they were being set up for “end-of-life” use regardless of symptoms.

The nurses and doctors working with VACS made every attempt to deflect from the inappropriateness of these chemical restraints. Doctor Mohammed Kakkat, the senior hospitalist in geriatric medicine for VACS, in his evidence before the inquest, described a situation where a number of residents were “declining rapidly” yet individual assessments of each patient were made:

“Remember, all the patients need to, need to assess individually, not a blanket thing, right. And if the patient had so many co morbidities [sic] and COVID came in between, so there is more chance to get it worse, right. . . We need to assess the patient, and as I told you before, we need to assess the patient, and prescription is individually based, not a blanket based. It is individually. If indicated, we have to prescribe.”5

When asked why the medication was prescribed in anticipation of symptoms being present, as opposed to being responsive to present symptoms, Dr. Kakkat explained:

“If the symptoms occur, that is the PRN [pro re nata or “as needed”], right. Now, we know that these symptoms can occur in this patient, right, so the trajectory is going like that so if these symptoms occur we don't need to run around that time, so we have a plan. That is the plan. This is a plan. This is not a must you must give the anticipatory medicines or crisis medication; this is a plan so if this happens, do this.”6

Yet the Coroner found Dr. Kakkat’s evidence particularly untrustworthy, concluding:

In sum, Midazolam and Morphine suddenly “arrived” at Newmarch House; was ordered in bulk; the medicines were used in a blanket fashion “shortly after a resident tested positive for COVID-19 . . . absent any symptoms”; and neither family members nor palliative care specialists were consulted or notified about the treatment.

Does it not all sound very suspicious?

Who gave the order to send the Midazolam and Morphine to Newmarch House?

Why did the VACS team rush to prescribe and administer these sedatives prematurely?

Incredibly, despite this alarming evidence, the Coroner would conclude that these resident deaths were all “COVID-19 deaths” — the eventual outcome which could not have been averted — only delayed.

The Coroner and the “experts” at the inquest should have more deeply interrogated the manner of death of those residents, particularly those who succumbed to a “COVID-19 death” so soon after their initial COVID-19 diagnosis.

The rapid “COVID-19 deaths” of many Newmarch House residents

The rapid escalation of disease-progression in a number of “COVID-19 cases” leading to their “COVID-19 death” — only days later in some cases — raises serious questions about the true cause of these “COVID-19 deaths” and the standard of care provided for COVID-19 positive residents.

In 2020, “COVID-19 deaths” in Australia (the majority of which were in RACFs) had a mean time between diagnosis and death of 18.1 days which showed no evidence of varying by age.7 Yet, at Newmarch House in 2020, there were six resident “COVID-19 deaths” where the time from diagnosis to death occurred within a week or less:

Ann Fahey

Ann Fahey was the last of the group of residents to test positive to COVID-19, who died only three days after her COVID-19 diagnosis.

Her Advanced Care Plan (ACP) clearly stated that she wanted to be transferred from Newmarch House to hospital, if medically indicated (importantly, one of the indications for her to be transferred to hospital was for a fall) and wanted CPR and to be kept alive by being fed artificially. In sum, Mrs. Fahey did not have a “do not resuscitate” plan in place at any point.

On several separate occasions, Mrs. Fahey’s family were asked to confirm, however, if the “do not resuscitate” plans were still in place for Mrs. Fahey, first by Dr. Kakkat of the VACS team, and again when she was finally admitted to Nepean Hospital before her death.8

Mrs. Fahey’s family had wanted her to be transferred to hospital, but Dr. Kakkat, among others, wanted her to remain at Newmarch, in breach of her ACP. Mrs. Fahey had suffered a “minor fall” on 30 April 2020 which she described to her son as “losing her balance”, and no injury or pain was reported by her treating nurses. As per her ACP, however, a fall should have resulted in her transfer to the hospital, but it did not occur.

By 1:30am on 2 May 2020, Mrs. Fahey was evidently recovering well from her newly diagnosed bout of COVID-19, her attending nurse reported that she had “nil cough, respiratory distress pain or discomfort”.9

Yet, on 6:30am the same day, Mrs. Fahey was transferred to Nepean Hospital where, on admission, her condition had allegedly suddenly deteriorated to the point where the medical specialist noted:

“Impression: respiratory distress due to covid [sic]”.10

Which signed Mrs. Fahey’s death warrant.

By 10:36am on 2 May 2020, she was administered ketamine and fentanyl and was intubated.

She was extubated at 4:00pm on 3 May 2020 and died at 4:06pm.

In the five hours between 1:30am and 6:30am on 2 May 2020, Ann Fahey had progressed from “nil cough, respiratory distress pain or discomfort” to the near total opposite — “respiratory distress due to COVID-19” requiring intubation — then “COVID-19 death”.

She was the only resident at Newmarch House to have died “from COVID-19” not to have been prescribed Midazolam and Morphine, which the Coroner found was an oversight rather than a deliberate decision.

Mrs. Fahey’s transfer to Nepean Hospital was likely the result of her son Mark appearing in a Channel 7 evening news segment on 1 May 2020, criticising the standard of care at Newmarch House.

Had Mrs. Fahey not been transferred to Nepean Hospital, the evidence suggests that she most likely would have been prescribed Midazolam and Morphine and the eventual outcome would have been a “COVID-19 death” at Newmarch House instead.

Raymond Jennings

Raymond Jennings was first diagnosed with COVID-19 after the commencement of the whole-of-facility testing on 14 April 2020.

On 15 April 2020, Mr. Jennings did not complain of any pain and he sounded well, despite lower oxygen saturation and a slightly elevated temperature. These symptoms continued to 16 April 2020, where he was reported as “awake, alert and coughing, but not in pain or distress”.11

At this point the VACS team and Dr. Kakkat became involved, as the Coroner wrote:

“At 4.05pm, Mr Jennings was reviewed by the VACS team, including Dr Kakkat. The note was limited to a record that Mr Jennings was ‘93 yrs old male 125 not for transfer with hospital with COVID +ve’, a list of his comorbidities, and observations identical to those recorded at midday by a care worker. Anticipatory medications were charted by Dr Kakkat, including morphine, but there is no record that these were clinically indicated, discussed with family, or in fact administered.”12 [emphasis added]

The Counsel Assisting submitted that Dr. Kakkat likely copied the notes from an earlier observation, without even conducting a face-to-face assessment of Mr. Jennings; or perhaps not at all.13

By 17 April 2020, Mr. Jennings’s lower oxygen saturation and fever persisted, but he was not experiencing any breathing difficulties. Yet, Dr. Branley opined “he did not think [Jennings] would recover” in a phone-call with Jennings’s daughter that same day.14

By 18 April 2020, Mr. Jennings’s oxygen saturation and fever had improved, his blood pressure and respiratory rate were all within the normal range. He was communicative and denied pain. By 9:56am he was assisted with breakfast and had his usual medications.15

At approximately 10:30am, half-an-hour later, he was found not breathing, with no vitals, no pulse, cold skin and his face turned blue and he was confirmed deceased.

The Coroner found that Raymond Jennings died “from COVID-19” and his death was quite sudden and no other outcome was likely in the circumstances.16

Though the Coroner found no evidence that Midazolam and Morphine were administered, the detailed evidence presented in the Coroner’s findings from the observations of Mr. Jennings suggest that he was, in fact, sedated:

• In severe hypoxia (oxygen saturation rates below 85%), the body usually compensates by breathing faster, yet Mr. Jennings’s respiratory rate dropped to 14 breaths per minute in his final hours instead of increasing;17

• Despite persistently low oxygen saturation, there were no reports of gasping, struggling, or visible distress, suggesting a blunted physiological response, likely from sedation;

• Earlier, on 17 April, his body showed signs of compensation with high blood pressure, an elevated heart rate, and fever. However, by 18 April, instead of worsening, his blood pressure stabilised, his heart rate slowed, and he remained communicative until shortly before he was found unresponsive, suggestive of sedation;18 and,

• In acute respiratory distress, patients typically struggle for breath before collapse, yet Mr. Jennings did not show this pattern. Instead, his body stopped compensating, suggesting that his respiratory drive had been suppressed, likely because of sedation.

Raymond Jennings had a “do not resuscitate” plan in place.

His was Newmarch House’s first “COVID-19 death”.

Ronald Farrell

Ronald Farrell had a case of “COVID-19” that was reported by the staff at Newmarch to be “mild” as late as 18 April 2020 — just days before his “COVID-19 death”.

Despite vitals within the “normal” range, albeit with oxygen support, Dr. Kakkat prescribed Midazolam and Morphine for Mr. Farrell on 17 April 2020 with the Coroner taking a very dim view of the decision:

“Dr Kakkat was questioned in relation to his clinical thinking for prescribing anticipatory medications for Ronald Farrell in circumstances where the Nepean clinical record entry records no vital signs. He gave evidence that if he wrote anticipatory medication there would be a [clinical] ‘indication’ and that “it is not a blanket thing.” Dr Kakkat was unable to give any clinical justification for prescribing anticipatory medications. He said that the medications were prescribed as anticipatory of any symptoms, namely pain, shortness of breath, agitation, irritability, for vomiting, for nausea, and ‘these types of symptoms.’ Of note is that Ronald Farrell had none of these symptoms at the time of the prescribing of the anticipatory medication.”19 [emphasis added]

Morphine was commenced for Mr. Farrell only an hour before he died “from COVID-19” at 6:00am on 19 April 2020, as recorded in the findings.20

But, as was the case with Raymond Jennings, strong evidence suggests that the prescribing and administration of “anticipatory medication(s)” occurred as early as 17 April 2020 — coinciding with Dr. Kakkat’s prescribing. These reasons include:

• On 17 April, when Mr. Farrell’s oxygen saturation dropped to 84% (severe hypoxia) without supplemental oxygen, his respiratory rate was only 22 breaths per minute, which is mildly elevated but not extreme. Normally, with severe hypoxia, a much higher rate would be expected as the body struggles for oxygen;

• On 18 April, when Mr. Farrell’s oxygen dropped to 84% (severe hypoxia) again, his respiratory rate remained at 22 breaths per minute, showing no significant increase despite worsening oxygen levels;

• Overnight on 19 April, despite continued severe hypoxia and a raised respiratory rate, by 4:15am that same day, Mr. Farrell was observed “sleeping comfortably”.21 If Mr. Farrell was in severe respiratory distress, it would be highly unusual for him to be sleeping peacefully, suggesting he was sedated.

Though the experts at the inquest agreed that escalating care could have been provided to Mr. Farrell, perhaps with antibiotics or better oxygen administration and management, there was a consensus among them that nothing could have been done that would have materially altered the eventual outcome for Mr. Farrell.

Despite the assurances from the Newmarch House staff that his case was only “mild” when diagnosed on 14 April 2020, his death only five days later, became Newmarch House’s second “COVID-19 death”.

Barry Jehan

Barry Jehan was another “sudden death” at Newmarch House “from COVID-19”.

Twice, Mr. Jehan had tested negative to COVID-19, yet, he was still prohibited from leaving the facility by Newmarch House for the risk he could pose to his family if a mysterious infection had not been detected by the PCR tests at Newmarch.

Progress notes, taken just ten minutes after Mr. Jehan died (at approximately 3:10am) stated:

“Mr Jehan has died just now. I last saw him at 2.40am and he was quite comfortable then, I had prayed with him at around 2.30am and deterioration noted in respiratory effort but he was quite comfortable.”22

The suddenness of the “COVID-19 death” is peculiar as well for the evidence at the inquest about Mr. Jehan’s apparent recovery by the evening before he died:

“At 9.00pm [on 27 April 2020], a RN [registered nurse] spoke to Ms Van Put, and told her than Mr Jehan was comfortable and well looked after. Mr Jehan was noted to be asleep, but rosary attended to with classical music playing. Ms Van Put gave evidence that a nurse called Ursula told her that her father was eating three meals a day, that he was chatting on about being a signalman and his classical music and that she had “good feelings” about him (alluding to his recovery).”23

Mr. Jehan was comfortable and well-looked after and there was a sense of his impending recovery, yet, he was dead six hours later “from COVID-19”.

There is, once again, strong evidence suggesting that he was prescribed and administered Midazolam and Morphine, causing his “COVID-19 death”:

• Dr. Kakkat prescribed both medicines well-before any escalation of Mr. Jehan’s COVID-19 symptoms on 25 April 2020 — in keeping with Dr. Kakkat’s improper “just-in-case” approach of prescribing “end-of-life” medicines without the clinical indication to do so (as noted by the Coroner in his conclusions24);

• Though the Coroner found that the “medication charts [did] not disclose any administration of either Morphine or Midazolam”25, the consistent and serious problems with Newmarch House’s management and processes reveal that the lack of disclosures of the use of these sedatives might not mean they were not being used; rather, that they were not being documented:

  “Mr Jehan was noted to be very breathless, and an RN phoned a doctor for a telephone order of oral Morphine which was noted to be ‘effective’ although there is no record of morphine being administered.”26

  Were staff simply too busy to maintain these essential patient records, or did someone deliberately try to conceal the use of these medicines by not keeping complete patient records?

Edith Brownlee

Edith Brownlee tested positive to COVID-19 on 14 April 2020, when the whole-of-facility testing was commenced.

Just three days after her COVID-19 diagnosis, on 17 April 2020, VACS nurse Hailey Carpen prescribed Midazolam and Morphine.

The Coroner’s findings did not address whether these sedatives were administered, however, it is clear that Mrs. Brownlee’s case of COVID-19 was mild and the medicines were inappropriate, and, as with the other cases discussed so far, not clinically indicated for Mrs. Brownlee.

Even more concerningly, the sedatives were ordered despite no observations having been recorded:

“At 5.26pm RN Carpen from VACS recorded that observations were not recorded and yet “anticipatory end of life medications ordered today.” Whether there was a remote review of the notes, or an inperson review, is unclear. RN Carpen also completed the medication chart.”27 [emphasis added]

Mrs. Brownlee had a “do not resuscitate” plan in place and as the Coroner described, she was essentially left alone to die at Newmarch House:

“There is no record to indicate that Edith Brownlee was seen by any Hospital in the Home (HITH) or VACS team member (medical or nursing) between 17 April 2020, and the time of her death on 21 April 2020. The only entries between those dates involved a remote review of the Newmarch House progress notes. There is likewise no evidence in the Newmarch House clinical records that Mrs Brownlee was seen by a GP after 8 April 2020.”28

The evidence presented at the inquest showed that Mrs. Brownlee’s vitals all remained within the regular range, she was “alert and interactive”, and less than 12 hours before she died “from COVID-19”, she was described by one nurse to be:

“[D]oing really good and her oxygen and mood was good”.29

The Coroner did not address whether the Midazolam or Morphine was actually administered to Mrs. Brownlee, but again, the detailed observational evidence from the nursing staff at Newmarch suggest that she was sedated:

• Mrs. Brownlee’s vital signs were not as extreme as the other cases, but the drop in her oxygen saturation and lack of distress suggest the effects of sedation. Her respiratory rate spiked at 9:34pm on 20 April 2020, which indicated her body initially attempted to compensate for something, but it then returned to normal by 10:00pm despite her oxygen saturation decreasing, suggesting her respiratory drive was subdued, likely from sedation; and,

• On 21 April 2020, registered nurse Tegan Dean noted:

  “[A]febrile [observations] stable asymptomatic meds given as ordered”.30 [emphasis added]

  Recalling that “crisis medications” — Midazolam and Morphine — were ordered on 17 April 2020 for Mrs. Brownlee by Nurse Carpen, it is plausible that the “meds given as ordered” were these sedatives which hastened Mrs. Brownlee’s death “from COVID-19”.

Summary

The Coroner’s findings in the “Inquest into the Deaths at Newmarch House” reveal a horrifying picture of what constituted residential “aged-care” in 2020.

It is deeply troubling to reflect on the COVID-19 panic which paralysed our public health response. Residents at Newmarch House were essentially detained and their loved ones believed the propaganda of an ambitious program named “Hospital in the Home” (HITH) and what it could offer.

But, HITH was never capable of delivering its two central aims — to improve a patient’s experience during episodes of acute illness and reduce disruption to family life — when faced with the myriad challenges tossed-up by the ever-changing public health landscape.

Under this model, residents did not receive daily care and clinical review until 28 April 2020, by which time 12 residents had already died “from COVID-19”.31 The “aged-care” offered under this model was characterised by isolation and neglect.

The VACS model was revealed to be equally horrific. The Coroner highlighted that geriatric medical assessments should be conducted face-to-face, rather than via telehealth or screens, making the VACS model particularly inappropriate for RACF settings. On the limited occasions where the VACS team attended Newmarch, such as in the first two weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak at Newmarch, the VACS team “did not always see patients” and on the limited occasions where face-to-face consultations occurred, there was no follow-up after the initial consultation and the progress notes were not always recorded in relation to these consultations.32

The seemingly “hands-off” and “screens-on” approach of the VACS team was described by Nurse Carpen in her evidence at the inquest:

“So, the VACS team was sitting at the hospital in front of a computer. The team in the nursing home would take a device into a resident. We would talk to the resident Dr Sharma would talk to the resident and find out about their symptoms, obtain the observations from the nursing staff at the time, and come up with a plan.”33

The Coroner was critical in his summary of the approach and usefulness of the VACS standard of “care”:

“The telehealth reviews were largely focused on discussions around not transferring patients to hospital. Other than recording the prescription of anticipatory medications, the available records do not indicate that any thorough medical assessment was performed, or any treatment or management plan formulated. For example, the available records do not indicate that any comprehensive geriatric assessment was conducted for any resident.”34 [emphasis added]

Evidently, the VACS team were more preoccupied with keeping the residents at Newmarch House rather than transferring them to hospital where they could have a higher quality of care and treatment.

The VACS team were equally preoccupied with prescribing sedatives for COVID-19 positive residents, ordering them in bulk in anticipation of illness, despite having no clinical indication for doing so.

Rather than simply providing palliative comfort or allowing a natural end, the protocol appears to have hastened death in a manner some might characterise as “active involuntary euthanasia”; when a medical intervention takes place, not at the patient’s request, in order to end the patient’s life. As the expert evidence at the inquest established, the premature prescribing of “end-of-life” medicines was “inconsistent with supportive care of patients”.35

If it wasn’t supportive care, and if the intent to hasten death existed, some legal interpretations could consider it euthanasia. Alternatively, if sedatives were administered in a reckless or negligent manner, there could be grounds for a claim of unlawful practice.

​In April 2023, a class action was initiated against Anglicare Sydney and the Nepean Blue Mountains Local Health District concerning the outbreak at Newmarch House, testing these very claims. The lawsuit, led by Shine Lawyers on behalf of 18 affected family members, alleged negligence in managing the outbreak and resident care.

The allegations in The Statement of Claim lay bare the appalling standard of care at Newmarch, including the prescribing and administration of Midazolam and Morphine, the isolation and neglect of the residents, and the abject failures of Newmarch House’s management of its COVID-19 outbreak commencing in April 2020 (see below):

In November 2024, a confidential settlement was reached and is now pending court approval, to be decided on 2 May 2025.

Despite the wishes of the families of the Newmarch House residents, would anyone have been better off in hospital in 2020?

Sadly, probably not.

We have every reason to believe that a similar “end-of-life” protocol would have been applied to COVID-19 positive residents had they been transferred from Newmarch House.

Remember, the only box we had to tick to place one on an “end-of-life” protocol was the “recovery is not expected” box before recommended sedatives could lawfully be used in the treatment of a COVID-19 positive patient.

Ann Fahey’s sad story is a stark reminder of how quickly an aged, comorbid, COVID-19 positive resident could deteriorate and die a “COVID-19 death” once admitted to hospital in 2020.

The assumptions made by the Coroner in his findings — COVID-19 was fatal for all the residents; that COVID-19 was untreatable; and that chemical restraints did not cause the deaths — were all influenced by the medical professional “experts” in their evidence at the inquest.

And although the coronial inquest took many years to conclude (meaning the “expert” evidence was given years ago), it would be uncontroversial to assume that these assumptions about COVID-19 would persist for many “experts” today too.

Though the legacy media covered the findings of this inquest, most of the commentary predictably focused on simple variations of the same theme:

“We didn’t get them to hospital quickly enough”.

“It was the lack of leadership with poor communication”.

“We didn’t test hard enough, we could have caught more cases earlier!”

As though the crisis at Newmarch House could have been solved by finding more “COVID-19 cases”.

The crisis at Newmarch House was the subject of several separate reviews, and just like the legacy media reports, all of them decided to focus on every issue aside from those which were most important.

Nothing about chemical restraints.

Nothing about how all the residents who died in the outbreak at Newmarch House were prescribed Midazolam and Morphine in advance of their illness.

Nothing about how Midazolam and Morphine were ordered in bulk and sort of “just all arrived” at Newmarch House after the outbreak in a bulk quantity so large it created an acute problem of where to store the medicines.

It was preferable to pretend it was chaotic and directionless at Newmarch House rather than to interrogate why “end-of-life” protocols were adopted for COVID-19 positive residents, or the ways that Midazolam and Morphine caused the “COVID-19 deaths”.

These predictable omissions and diversions are a sad indictment on the integrity of those responsible for inquiring into the “COVID-19 deaths” at Newmarch House in 2020.

The dangers of these sedatives were well-known before the pandemic, even when administered to relatively healthy people:

“Midazolam, a short-acting drug also used to combat seizures, has well-known side effects including the slowing – or even stopping – of breath . . . . Dr Minh Le Cong of the Royal Flying Doctors Service, said in his experience administering Midazolam to patients would often be either “ineffective, or too effective. You’d either just keep giving more and more doses, or then when it did work it would work too well in that the person would be in a medically induced coma” he said. . . . Dr David Taylor, who has studied the use of Midazolam in Victorian emergency departments, said hospitals have strict procedures and guidelines in place. “It’s always mandated that you have someone giving the drugs to sedate the patient, and another person who is there observing the patient” said Taylor. “Managing the risks of Midazolam outside the controlled environment of the emergency room is more difficult and if staff don’t have the training and equipment to pick up the side effects or manage them appropriately then it could be a potentially dangerous situation”.36 [emphasis added]

Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught many how to be wilfully ignorant and how to suspend rational inquiry if the slightest chance a “COVID-19 conspiracy” is detected.

It is disheartening, but we are on the right side of history and we must keep challenging the pandemic narrative.

Even if these stories are never explained or acknowledged publicly, and the perpetrators do not face consequences, these truths will be learned by more and more people and that alone is worth every continued effort.

In the next article, as promised, we will reveal our analysis of the prescriptions and medicines shortages data from beyond 2020.

As we wrote in our last article:

“Something made Australia sicker in 2021 and palliative care prescribing soared from mid-2021 onwards.”

Thank you for reading.

During Australia’s two COVID-19 waves in 2020, shortages for sedatives caused by “unexpected consumer demand” occurred. These corresponded with surges in prescribing for sedatives, suggesting a potential link between their expanded use and increases in deaths caused by COVID-19 and dementia.

As we will show, sedation at the time was both permitted and recommended by treatment protocols for COVID-19 patients and those unable to follow COVID-19 infection mitigation controls in RACFs.

The evidence we present in this article, suggests that these recommendations were followed.

In other words, two shots to slow the spread: Midazolam and Morphine.

“COVID-19 Deaths” in 2020

By the end of 2020, prior to the commencement of the world’s largest ever clinical trial, Australia had recorded only 909 “COVID-19 deaths”, 678 of which were in RACFs.

These deaths were not, however, shared equally between the RACFs across Australia. Department of Health statistics reveal that there were only four States (Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania) which had COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020 (defined as having two or more COVID-19 “cases”) and among these four States, Victoria experienced 123 of the 129 listed in the Department of Health’s “COVID-19 Outbreaks in Australian Residential Aged-Care Facilities” final report for 2020.2

These 678 “COVID-19 deaths” in RACFs occurred from a mere 2,027 RACF resident “COVID-19 cases”, revealing a case-fatality rate (CFR) of 33.45%.

In contrast, among 2,238 RACF staff COVID-19 cases, only one death was recorded, resulting in a CFR of just 0.04%.3

The age and general health of RACF staff likely explain these differences, but the statistic remains striking; highlighting COVID-19’s limited lethality in 2020, except among older, comorbid, or chemically restrained individuals.

Yet, the reasons for the significant disparities in COVID-19 management outcomes among Victorian RACFs remain unclear.

One possible explanation for these variable resident COVID-19 outcomes could be the different “treatment” provided to residents of certain RACFs and not others. Sedatives, or “chemical restraints”, were recommended for some residents who tested positive to COVID-19. If their COVID-19 disease was critical, then doing so would could have hastened their deaths “from COVID-19”.

A second possibility is that residents already in an advanced stage of illness, who tested positive for COVID-19, were placed on an “end-of-life” care plan involving chemical restraints, potentially hastening their deaths “from COVID-19”.

The third possible explanation for these variable COVID-19 outcomes for RACFs in 2020 is that sedatives were used for “wanderers”; primarily dementia patients unable to adhere to infection mitigation strategies in RACFs. If sedatives were used as infection control measures in RACFs, it could explain why some had far superior COVID-19 outcomes than others. The counterpoint here is that if sedation was used for these types of patients, then sedation could have harmed their respiratory function, potentially hastening their deaths from causes like dementia.

In the end, 2020 was still a low “COVID-19 deaths” year for Australia. With the exception of the shockingly poor performance of these few RACFs, primarily in Victoria, Australia sailed through the pandemic without “vaccination”, or restricted access to vital early treatments like hydroxychloroquine.

In this article, therefore, we investigate how and why only a select few RACFs might have failed so poorly with its COVID-19 management resulting in these elevated “COVID-19 deaths” and we draw attention to how deaths from other causes might have also been elevated in these RACFs because of these policies promoting isolation and chemical restraint.

As the evidence in this article will show, the chemical restraint of patients in RACFs was allowed and even recommended.

Sedation was allowed

Despite restrictions on the use of sedatives, or chemical restraint for residents in aged-care facilities, they were still widely used and actually permitted under Australian law. In 2021, Australia’s “Aged Care Quality and Safety” Royal Commission reported how chemical restraint was an overused practice in RACFs, even before the pandemic. Following the Royal Commission, the regulatory requirements for RACFs in their use of chemical restraints were strengthened, however, chemical restraint continued to be used in RACFs.

A Human Rights Watch review of non-compliance reports for aged-care facilities across Australia from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021 found use of chemical restraints in more than 150 aged care facilities, despite recommendations to minimise their use.4

Similarly, in an explosive report in The Australian from August 2020, it was revealed that hospitals were refusing to admit seriously ill COVID-19 residents and sending them back to RACFs, where they were sedated:

“Another facility – the Glenlyn Aged Care in Glenroy – told the families of residents that Royal Melbourne Hospital ‘would not be accepting (residents) and they were to remain at the facility and be placed on end of life care and/or be sedated if they were wandering’.”5

As shocking as these reports were, they were all probably lawful applications of chemical restraint if certain loose conditions were met. The first condition was if “informed consent” was obtained by the medical or nurse practitioner (given by the resident or their representative). The second condition was if chemical restraint was used only as a “last resort”.

Incredibly, under these strengthened restrictions, informed consent could even be obtained after the chemical restraint was applied:

“Under the Principles, the aged care provider must inform the consumer or their representative about the use of the chemical restraint. The aged care service must provide this information before commencing the chemical restraint if it is practicable to do so, or immediately after.”6 [emphasis added]

Consider the absurdity of obtaining “consent” after the event. Consent, by definition, must precede the intervention, otherwise, it is simply a retrospective notification of actions already taken.

It is even more ludicrous to pretend that a patient considered for chemical restraint as a “last resort” could meaningfully give informed consent, because by reaching that “last resort” threshold, they would likely be beyond a state of clear decision-making.

Unsurprisingly, we found that these new restrictions were not always followed. A July 2021 report revealed that 90% of residents in one NSW RACF had been given psychotropic medication without evidence of informed consent:

“The report showed that 35 of the 39 residents were being given psychotropic medication . . . there was no written consent from family for the residents to take the medication.”7

The notion of the “last resort” was also a vague idea ripe for exploitation. It could conceivably have been interpreted as meaning it was imperative to protect the health of the community at the expense of the individual: at all costs. By this thinking, it would be permissible to sedate a resident in an aged-care facility if that would prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the RACF, even if that sedation had the effect of hastening that resident’s death. The problem is that once the use of chemical restraint is framed in utilitarian terms, like maximising overall safety “for the greater good”, then the threshold for what qualifies as a “last resort” becomes dangerously flexible.

Yet, this was how sedation was allowed under Australian law, and was also likely exploited in RACFs.

Those at risk of harming themselves or others, could lawfully be chemically restrained and, not only was it lawful, it was recommended.

Sedation was recommended

In April 2020, the Australian New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine (ANZSPM) published one of the first palliative care guidance documents in the pandemic. Its “Essential Palliative and End-of-Life Care in the COVID-19 Pandemic” publication recommended medicines such as Midazolam, Morphine, Metoclopramide, Hydromorphone, Clonazepam and Glycopyrrolate for patients receiving palliative and “end-of-life” care:

It is important to note, that ANZSPM guidance did not distinguish “palliative” from “end-of-life” care. This is important because the former is directed toward improving the quality of life for those suffering from “life-limiting illnesses”, whereas the latter is about providing care to those in the final stages of their life.

Was COVID-19 considered a “life-limiting illness” or something that placed an aged-care resident in their “final stages of life”, particularly if that resident was aged 85+ and had other comorbidities?

In the end, it didn’t matter.

The treatment plan was the same.

If you were an aged-care resident suffering from dsypnoea, or pain, or cough, you could get your Morphine, or the super-charged “Hydromorphone”.

A bit of agitation?

Let’s throw in some Midazolam.

Did you have to be on an “end-of-life” plan to get these wonder-drugs?

No, because the ANZSPM guidance was for palliative care and “end-of-life” care.

We have good reasons to believe that this ANZSPM protocol became the default national protocol for COVID-19 palliative care in Australia too. In September 2020, Australia’s peak COVID-19 expert group, citing evidence from the ANZSPM expanded on ANZSPM’s recommendations with its guidance document “Management of People with COVID-19 Who Are Receiving Palliative Care”. The advice in this document was for:

“[P]eople with COVID-19 whose prognosis due to co-existing advanced progressive disease is limited or uncertain, or people with critical COVID-19 illness where recovery is not expected.”8 [emphasis added]

Once more, these vague directives could be open to interpretation and, perhaps in this earlier stage of the pandemic, our understanding (and the refusal of many to try to better understand) how to treat COVID-19 might have led to COVID-19 patients being prematurely placed on an “end-of-life” treatment plan which hastened their deaths. All that was required was the “uncertainty” of a patient’s prognosis to have them placed on a palliative or “end-of-life” care plan.

The National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce’s (NCCET) guidance is a harrowing reminder of how residents would have been treated in RACFs in 2020.9 Their guidance includes recommendation such as:

• How to provide palliative care using baby monitors, or via video tablets from outside the patient’s room “with masks down”; acknowledging (and denying at the same time) the importance of face-to-face communication in palliative care10;

• Ways to minimise staff interaction with residents to “support infection control” by dosing residents up with “immediate release medications” to knock them out, or with slow release medications to minimise the need for medical or nurse practitioners to repeatedly risk visiting their rooms:

  • “In patients with COVID-19, every interaction (such as providing medication) has an important opportunity cost for nursing staff, and many medications can be omitted, stopped or converted to a once daily formulation (for some drugs given more than once a day) during COVID-19 illness”11;

• Sedating COVID-19 patients as a “last resort” with the lowest possible dose, for the shortest possible duration; all of which, could be open to wildly variable interpretations:

  • “In people with COVID-19, delirium can increase risk to other patients and staff as it may impact on the person’s capacity to understand and follow infection control measures and maintain isolation. . . For pharmacological prevention and management of delirium and agitation, follow guidance as per usual care”.12

• Managing breathlessness and cough with sedatives:

  • “For management of the symptoms of breathlessness or cough, use opioids as per usual care. Consider the addition of a benzodiazepine (for example Midazolam) if breathlessness persists.”13

Aside from the horrors of using chemical restraint of COVID-19 infected patients as an infection control measure or, as some earlier legacy media reports stated, to manage understaffing at RACFs, doing so could have made their COVID-19 condition far worse. The use of opioids or benzodiazepines can cause harm due to their potential to suppress respiration, depressing the central nervous system and exacerbating respiratory issues caused by COVID-19. These concerns set aside the significant problems associated with opioid use in “opioid naive” populations.14

In sum, we know that not only was chemical restraint in RACFs lawful, but that it was also recommended.

We also know that sedatives were used.

Shortages and prescriptions data shows sedatives were used

Aside from the few media reports alleging the use of chemical restraint in RACFs, we also have very good data suggesting that these protocols were applied in RACFs and sedative use surged in 2020.

First, data from the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s (TGA) “Medicines Shortage Reports Database” reveals that three of these six recommended palliative care medicines were all affected by shortages in 2020, many of which were driven by “unexpected increase[s] in consumer demand”.

As shown above, both the timing and duration of these shortages neatly correlate with the two COVID-19 waves in 2020 and were driven by “unexpected consumer demand”.15

We propose that the surge in demand for these sedatives was likely the result of increased palliative and “end-of-life” prescribing combined with their increased use as chemical restraints for infection control, as discussed in the previous section of this article.

These shortages are highly unlikely to have been driven by “unexpected consumer demand” in the nation’s hospitals either. On 24 March 2020, Australia’s Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) announced a temporary suspension of all elective surgeries and this ban was slowly lifted with a phased resumption of surgeries a month later in late April 2020. These measures reduced elective surgeries in public hospitals by 8.3% and 5.2% in private hospitals in the period comparing 2018-19 to 2019-20.16 Fewer surgeries would have caused a reduction in sedative use, and so, it could only be assumed that the “unexpected consumer demand” would have had other, non-hospital causes.

Second, data from Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) also shows that the number of prescriptions for these same palliative and “end-of-life” care medicines surged during these waves of “COVID-19 deaths” in 2020. It is important to note that these data do not include medicines administered to “inpatients” in private or public hospitals, and therefore, the increased usage observed is not affected by “COVID-19 hospitalisations” which were relatively small in 2020 anyhow. For the same reasons, the increased sedative use is also not explained by increased use of mechanical ventilation in hospitals for major surgeries or as part of “COVID-19 ICU admission” (though they could impact the TGA Shortages Database data).

As a “COVID-19 death” did not provide time for a planned and sustained nature of treatment, doctors would have likely prescribed these palliative and “end-of-life care” medicines when visiting these RACFs under these emergency scenarios. In doing so, they would have been likely to have prescribed them under the “Prescriber Bag Schedule”, which offers free medicines for emergency or initial treatment.17

Our analysis, therefore, focused on changes in the total number of prescriptions for these recommended palliative and “end-of-life” care medicines for COVID-19 patients, prescribed under the “Prescriber Bag Schedule” (click the image below to open the graph in a new window):

As the evidence shows, there are clearly visible spikes for all of these palliative and “end-of-life” care medicines, especially the quite significant spikes for Midazolam, Morphine and Metoclopramide, corresponding with, if not slightly preceding the the first wave of “COVID-19 deaths” of approximately March to May in Australia.

The use of these sedatives preceding the “COVID-19 deaths” is expected because it could have set aged-care residents on a pathway that caused their health to deteriorate, where to a point almost 2-3 weeks later (on average) they succumbed to a “COVID-19 death” or death from other leading causes such as dementia. This reflects a potential “pull-forward effect”, where increased sedation hastened mortality among vulnerable individuals who might have otherwise survived longer.

In the second wave, occurring from July to October, there are surges in prescriptions for Midazolam and Morphine which, though evident, are not as pronounced as all the surges for these and other palliative care prescriptions in the first COVID-19 wave (with the exception of the surge in Chlorpromazine prescriptions in the second wave).

The observed drop in Morphine prescriptions in the data is explained by prescribing restrictions which were imposed by the TGA in June 2020. It is estimated that restrictions which reduced pack-sizes, altered indications for opioid use and modified authority requirements resulted in many more private prescriptions being issued as sales data for these opioids showed little change throughout this period.18 Therefore, we have reason to believe that the the Morphine prescriptions data might be a significant underestimate and the elevated prescribing for Morphine likely continued in the second COVID-19 wave too.

Deaths by other causes

Deaths by causes (not “COVID-19 deaths”) also reveal the likely harmful effects of the increased use of chemical restraints in RACFs in 2020. Though often regarded as Australia’s “low mortality year” owing to the coincidental disappearance of influenza, there were elevated deaths by leading causes such as dementia in the months corresponding with the COVID-19 waves in 2020 (click the image to open the graph in a new window):

As the data shows, compared against the 2015-19 baseline average, dementia deaths in the first COVID-19 wave were even beyond those of the “worst flu season on record” in 2019. It is anticipated that there is usually an uptick of dementia deaths during bad influenza seasons and this is observed with the surge in these deaths in 2019 (the blue line) in the winter months. The trajectory is similar across all of the mortality lines showing a noticeable rise in the winter months, but two important distinctions with the 2020 line are noted:

1. No evident mortality displacement from this “worst flu season on record” from 2019 to 2020; and,

2. Despite the near total absence of influenza in Australia at the time, dementia deaths in 2020 exceeded those in 2019 between January-April and November-December.

It is plausible that the excess prescribing and shortages discussed earlier in this article for palliative and “end-of-life” care medicines might have also hastened deaths by dementia which could explain the elevated mortality observed during these months in 2020.

Conclusion

Chemical restraint was a practice widely used in RACFs before the pandemic and one which continued in 2020.

The law allowed it as a “last resort” but the evidence shows that residents in aged-care facilities could be placed on palliative or “end-of-life” care if their COVID-19 outcome was simply “uncertain”.

In the national plan, there was no distinction between a palliative and “end-of-life” treatment and it is highly likely that many of Australia’s “COVID-19 deaths” and dementia deaths in RACFs in 2020 were hastened by the application of these protocols and the use of chemical restraints.

As alarming as these revelations might be, the surge in the use of sedatives pales in comparison to the prescribing of these same sedatives in June 2021 onwards.

Something made Australia sicker in 2021 and palliative care prescribing soared from mid-2021 onwards.

We will explore this in our next article.

Thank you for reading.

The article was written to help non-thinkers who might feel overwhelmed or fearful from the spread of dangerous COVID-19 misinformation:

“It’s not a new thing for people to try to mislead you when it comes to science. But in the age of COVID-19 — when we’re being bombarded with even more information than usual, when there’s increased uncertainty, and when we may be feeling overwhelmed and fearful — we’re perhaps even more susceptible to being deceived. . . People who are trying either to make you believe something that isn’t true, or to doubt something that is true, use a variety of strategies that can manipulate you very effectively.”1

The five malevolent ways we could be deceived were:

1. The ‘us versus them’ narrative

2. ‘I’m not a scientist, but…’

3. Reference to ‘the science not being settled’

4. Overly simplistic explanations

5. Cherry-picking

Whilst not an exhaustive list, these were highlighted as the main approaches, which, if we could recognise them, might prompt us to seek out more reliable sources of information.

Most recently, this same author published another opinion piece in The Conversation about Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s confirmation as the Secretary of the US Health and Human Services Department (HHS).

And he doesn’t appear too happy about it.

Commencing with an ad hominem attack in the title, it is clear that Vally is none-to-keen on Kennedy. The article portrays Kennedy as a science-denying, unqualified crackpot who has fallen into the most important public health role, arguably in the world.

The choice of headline image, however, is more problematic.

In our opinion, it is plainly gutter journalism.

The image paints Kennedy in a similar light to the article’s theme, evoking feelings of doubt, mistrust and ridicule. Mocking Kennedy’s neurological condition, spasmodic dysphonia, which affects his speech and facial expressions, is utterly disappointing and a departure from The Conversation’s stated editorial policies to be professional and ethical:

“We will not belittle or humiliate and will be ethical and professional across our entire publication.”2

As poor as this opening was, it was not this which piqued our interest.

Rather, it was our recall of the March 2021 article and how we could detect and avoid being misled when it comes to “Science”.

We make no assertions that the Vally had any intention to mislead or deceive in his RFK Jr. article, but when the same person who warned us about these traps ends up setting them, it raises an obvious question: did Vally fail to recognise his own blind spots, or, did he assume no one would notice?

In this article we analyse Vally’s takedown of Kennedy through the lens of his March 2021 article to determine the ways that we too, could be misled by the mischaracterisation of Kennedy and his views.

1. The “us versus them” narrative

Vally’s piece casts Kennedy as a dangerous outsider attacking the noble institutions of science. Instead of engaging with Kennedy’s arguments and evidence, it presents a good versus evil story where Kennedy is a “conspiracy theorist” opposing “real scientists.”

By suggesting Kennedy lacks the scientific credentials, he implies that only scientists can meaningfully engage with science. The appeal to authority is illogical and it also denies the many examples of scientific breakthroughs made by “outsiders” in history.

These matters aside, Vally probably should have also looked at the long list of former HHS Secretaries. Very few have had any medical or scientific credentials, and many, like Kennedy have been lawyers, whilst many others were economists, politicians, or healthcare administrators.

2. ‘I’m not a scientist, but…’

Vally proposes that “alarm bells should ring loudly” if someone wants to keep an “open mind” on matters of science and evidence. What is demanded is blind obedience to the status quo which prompts the question, if “The Science” was so settled, then what is the harm in questioning it or having an open mind, as Kennedy surely does about vaccine safety, drinking water fluoridation or infectious disease research?

The other troublesome aspect of Vally’s warning is how we respond to observational evidence and anecdotal evidence, particularly with respect to COVID-19 “vaccine” safety. Would a potentially “vaccine”-injured person read Vally’s article and be expected to not keep an open mind about even the mere possibility that the “vaccine” could have caused their injury if they were not a scientist?

Of course not.

3. Reference to ‘the science not being settled’

A core tactic of misinformation, according to Vally, is “overstating uncertainty”. But in his attack on Kennedy, he commits the opposite sin: acting as though no uncertainty exists at all.

The fluoride-IQ debate? Dismissed.

Vaccine safety concerns? Treated as disinformation, despite documented examples of regulatory failure.

Science is never settled, but Vally wants readers to believe it is, whenever it suits his argument. Vally even goes as far as to point out how the tobacco industry designed the playbook for this misinformation approach; to raise doubt, create confusion and undermine the science. He seems completely unaware, or unwilling to admit, that these exact same strategies have been used by the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, the State and the legacy media to either censor or marginalise anything contrary to orthodoxy.

The evolution of Vally’s ideas throughout the pandemic provides further evidence still that of course “The Science” is never settled. For example, in March 2020, Vally said we could reduce our risk by “regularly cleaning and disinfecting surfaces that are touched a lot”. But, by February 2021, he wrote the article “Catching COVID from surfaces is very unlikely. So perhaps we can ease up on the disinfecting”.

“The Science” changed and so too did Vally’s ideas.

Imagine thinking that the COVID-19 “vaccines” would end the pandemic back in 2021.

Well, as it turns out, yes, Vally believed this was the case. Not only was the virus circulating because we weren’t “vaccinated” sufficiently, but our only option was to “eliminate” the virus and “wait for the effect of vaccines to kick in”.

This was August 2021!

“The number of fully vaccinated people isn’t even close to the levels required to attenuate transmission. . . . Right now, we still have a very infectious virus circulating in a mostly non-immune population. . . . The only option is to respond aggressively and eliminate the virus in order to enjoy some freedoms while we wait for the effect of vaccines to kick in. . . . Getting vaccines into people is the priority and the faster we do this, the faster we move to the final phase of the pandemic in this country. The pandemic has been a marathon, and we have collectively hit the wall. But if we push through and get vaccination coverage up past 70%, the end is in sight.”3 [emphasis added]

Once again, of course science is never settled and suggesting so is an overly simplistic explanation.

More on that next.

4. Overly simplistic explanations

Kennedy’s positions are woefully mischaracterised. His concerns about vaccine safety are flattened into outright “anti-vaccine” sentiment. His focus on chronic disease research is framed as a reckless abandonment of infectious disease science. The result? A cartoon villain, rather than an honest assessment of what his leadership might actually mean for public health.

Incredibly, Vally’s slanderous piece published yesterday is guilty of the exact thing which he warned against in his March 2021 article. In this article, he acknowledged:

“Science is often messy, complex and full of nuance.”4

On the one hand Vally suggested those who stated they were keeping an open mind about “The Science” were being deceptive. On the other hand, science was “messy, complex and full of nuance”. Both positions are obviously incompatible with one another. The only way to believe both was to employ doublethink.

Overly simplistic explanations and generalisations, Vally told us, were where conspiracy theories were born.

Yes, we agree.

“We’re naturally drawn to simple explanations. And if they tap into our fears and exploit our cognitive biases — systematic errors we make when we interpret information — they can be extremely seductive.”5

Like that one about how the “vaccines” have saved millions of lives through the pandemic and it would have been far worse without them.

5. Cherrypicking

Vally accuses Kennedy of crafting narratives by picking and choosing any study that fits his worldview. Yet his own article does exactly that by selecting only the most extreme or controversial Kennedy quotes while ignoring his actual positions, such as his repeated statements in favour of vaccine safety (not against vaccines themselves).

Conclusion

The confirmation of RFK Junior represents a seismic shift in public health policy that will send ripples to Australia.

It will prickle the sensitivities of the establishment who have dominated COVID-19 discourse ; censoring and marginalising alternative viewpoints since the first questions were raised about pandemic policy.

If Kennedy is successful with his transformation of American public health through improved nutrition, proper vaccine safety regulation, and the removal of toxic elements from its food and water supply, then shrieks like those from Vally will pale into the blogosphere where they belong.

If Kennedy succeeds, then what “public health” embodies will change for the better and we can go on with ignoring these mouthpieces and their familiar rants.

The challenges that await Kennedy are an angry and frustrated establishment desperate to undermine and discredit him.

An establishment that has been particularly skilful at predicting things.

Could this include the deployment of another pandemic?

The noted vaccine-pest, Peter Hotez, described many of these infectious diseases “coming down the pike” for the new administration in a strange rant in December 2024:

Which resembled the “surprise outbreak” predicted by the little man way back in 2017:

Has anyone checked in on Monkeypox recently?

How’s Bird Flu tracking these days?

Is anyone scheduling Event 202 in the coming months?

Perhaps the severe flu season California is grappling with will morph into something new and deadly?

Very little will shock and surprise us these days, but thankfully, at least we are aware of five ways that science could be used to mislead us.

Authored by its national science reporter, Liam Mannix, it tells the story of an “audacious strategy” to bring drugs to market, upending the normal development pathway.

You see, there is only a market for “public health” for Big Pharma if people are able and willing to pay:

And there is simply no market for the sick, dying plebs in the developing world.

The drug in question?

It treats river blindness.

It treats scabies.

Did you guess it?

It’s not Ivermectin.

No, it’s “Moxidectin”.

It’s not yet available on Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, but it will be handed out to “hundreds of thousands of patients” in Ghana this week after an “independent team” of Australian scientists won a rare approval for the drug from the FDA (not yet from Australia’s TGA - the research is still ongoing in this space).

“Medicines Development for Global Health” (MDGH), the team behind the efforts to get Moxidectin approved, proudly boasts its independence on its webpage:

Just how independent of “major philanthropic funders”?

Scroll just a bit further on the page to the “Support Received So Far” section of the same page:

Hmmmm……

The details of the relationship with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are not explored in detail. Suffice to say the details of the “case study for changing the supply paradigm for global health medicines” beyond the aspirational jargon are…murky.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are, after all, known for their rather sizeable philanthropic and pharmaceutical entanglements along with their fixation on “vaccinating” the universe.

Anyhow, back to the story at hand.

Dewormers are again all the rage.

Though Moxidectin was approved by the FDA in June 2018 and its clinical trial results were published in The Lancet in October 2018, it was news in Australia just the other day because only last week the 250,000 doses were handed out by the Ghana Health Service.

You see, drug development really does take time:

Jokes aside, the meddling of large philanthropic interests resulting in the sponsorship of medicines that yield little-to-no-profit for Big Pharma should be applauded.

This has long been a problem for Big Pharma, as acknowledged by one former executive, when discussing the low-price-low-profit medicines space:

“Big pharma” (lower case in the article for reasons unknown) doesn’t care about people or “public health”; it cares about profits and selling “medicines” to sick and rich people.

On reflection, we wonder what it took for the author of this article to endorse a new medicine, or at the very least to simply report on it?

Imagine having adopted the same curiosity about all pharmaceutical interventions during the pandemic for the treatment of COVID-19. Although Moxidectin could be more effective than Ivermectin in treating river blindness and scabies, very limited scientific evidence published so far is offered to support its promise. There are also concerns about Moxidectin’s safety which was considerably worse with mild-to-moderate adverse events when compared with Ivermectin.

I suppose we’ll see how that plays out once it’s rolled out to a lower-middle income population in a playbook that’s all-too-familiar from such noted philanthropic organisations.

So, here we have an example of the honesty we sorely missed from the legacy media during the pandemic in reporting this story.

Is it now becoming safe in the legacy media to again report on the promise of low-cost medicines with even just the mere potential to improve health outcomes enough to endorse them?

Even animal dewormers?

Even using the words “Big Pharma” and its prejudice against poor people (even if “Big Pharma” is written in the less-impactful lower case).

How far the legacy media has come in just a few short years of this supposed pandemic.

Both measures restricted individual freedoms, often enforced through police patrols, fines, and penalties for non-compliance. The NSW Police Commissioner at the time even suggested treating the virus like a criminal to reduce community transmission:

Restrictions were justified on the basis of public safety, with governments arguing that restricting movement - whether for entire days (lockdowns) or during specific hours (curfews) - was necessary to prevent outbreaks. Both measures were frequently extended beyond their initial timeframes, often without clear evidence of effectiveness, leading to growing public resistance and legal challenges.

Yet, on reflection, lockdown was by far the worst of the two restrictive measures. Lockdowns confined people to their homes for months, eliminating public life during all hours, leading to economic devastation, mental health crises, and social isolation. Essential activities such as work, schooling, and even outdoor exercise were heavily restricted or banned altogether in some cases. The prolonged nature of lockdowns caused widespread financial hardship, while curfews, though restrictive, still allowed some level of daytime normality.

More importantly, whilst most Australians were able to partake in “Freedom Day” in late 2021, lockdowns which extended exclusively for the “unvaccinated” were clearly punitive. Unlike broad lockdowns, which affected everyone, these extended restrictions for the “unvaccinated” functioned as a form of coercion, limiting their ability to work, travel, and engage in public life unless they complied with “vaccination” mandates. The measures were framed as protecting public health, yet they lacked clear scientific justification, particularly once it became evident that “vaccination” did not prevent transmission (not that it was ever even indicated for doing so).

On reflection, as bad as all “public health” interventions were during the pandemic, curfews were preferable to lockdowns because they were less restrictive and did not specifically target or marginalise a cohort of the population like the “unvaccinated”.

But, in a significant decision in late 2024, the High Court of Australia held that even curfews were unconstitutional because they were punitive and that punishing things was the prerogative of the Judiciary; not the Executive. The Court emphasised that restrictions for “non-citizens” of Australia, including adhering to nightly curfews and wearing ankle bracelet monitors, could not be justified as administrative necessities and were, in effect, forms of punishment.

The High Court delivered a majority judgement, with two dissenting opinions; from the Honourable Justices Robert Beech-Jones and Simon Steward. This was the same Beech-Jones who, only a year prior, was appointed to the High Court. The same Beech-Jones who, in 2021, adjudicated in the NSW Supreme Court on a pivotal case challenging the legality of NSW’s “COVID-19 vaccine” mandates. In the mandates case, Beech-Jones ruled the health orders mandating “vaccination” were lawful under the Public Health Act 2010 and did not constitute coercion; rather, just a “movement restriction” that impacted one’s ability to move or work.

Just a mere inconvenience really.

Remember, no one ever forced you to be “vaccinated”.

Background to the High Court decision

On 28 November 2023, the High Court of Australia ruled in NZYQ v Minister for Immigration that the indefinite detention of non-citizens without a real prospect of removal from Australia was unconstitutional. The Court found that such detention served a punitive purpose, which is beyond the Executive’s power and infringed upon the Judiciary's exclusive role in imposing punishment.

Following this unfavourable ruling, the Federal Government introduced emergency measures requiring detainees who might be released to wear ankle bracelets and adhere to mandatory curfews “to keep the community safe” and to “strengthen relevant migration laws”.1

These “emergency measures” were rushed through both Houses of Federal Parliament with the debates and votes being conducted on the same day, with near unanimous support resulting in this Bill becoming legislation the same day.

From experience, we know that the State likes to keep the community safe, whether from respiratory pathogens, misinformation, disinformation, social media or racists, and therefore, on this occasion, the threat to community safety from “non-citizens with a history of serious criminal offending, including but not limited to serious offences committed in Australia” was at least consistent with its perceived mandate to intervene in our daily lives for our “safety”.2

The NZYQ v Minister for Immigration decision resulted in the release of approximately 150 detainees, with the Government warning at the time a “significant number” had been convicted of “serious criminal offences”.3 It was later clarified that approximately half of these detainees had been convicted for serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, violent assault and sexually-based offending, including against children.4 By June 2024, approximately 85 of 160 of the detainees released were required to wear ankle bracelets, 77 of which also had curfews between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am.

Some of those released continued to reoffend. Though many were for the offences of non-compliance with the monitoring restrictions, some were charged for serious crimes such as murder, assault, trespass and for child safety concerns. Yet, for those cases presenting to the courts for the breaches of curfew or reporting obligations, the Judiciary tended to side with the defendants. For example, Abdelmoez Mohamed Elawad, a 45 year-old Sudanese man who had racked up more than 200 criminal charges within a 12-year period in Australia, was bailed in the Supreme Court of Victoria by Justice Michael Croucher for the single charge of not complying with his curfew restrictions:

“Justice Croucher said while it was appropriate for the prosecution to point to his background, “the question is whether he should be released on bail on this charge, this single charge, the circumstances of which are (he’s) found in Footscray beyond his curfew time.”

“Is that it?” the judge asked.5

In a similar case in May 2024, Burundi man Kimbengere Gosoge had six charges laid against him for breaches of curfew and failing to maintain his monitoring device. Despite having been convicted for trespass, possession of amphetamines and stealing since his release from immigration detention only six months prior, he was handed a one-year suspended jail sentence.6

The legal basis for these punitive measures was tenuous and the Judiciary had demonstrated a lack of appetite to sentence offenders who breached these monitoring and movement restrictions.

By August 2024, the “draconian” and “punitive” approach taken by the Federal Government in managing community safety was challenged by one known by the pseudonym “YBFZ” in Australia’s High Court. In the statement of claim, the plaintiff YBFZ argued punitive measures such as wearing ankle bracelets or being subject to curfews could only be imposed by a court following a criminal conviction, not administratively by the government. This, he contended, violated the separation of powers required under Chapter III of the Australian Constitution, which reserves the imposition of punishment to the Judiciary.

In its submissions in defence, the Commonwealth Government suggested that such curfews were not punitive, but were in fact routinely employed in Australia:

“[C]onsiderably more onerous curfews are imposed for purposes that obviously are not punitive. For example, curfews were imposed by public health officials in Victoria and certain regions of New South Wales during the COVID-19 pandemic (and, likewise, in regions of the United States and Canada.”7

The Commonwealth’s argument was striking for what it inadvertently revealed. By citing pandemic lockdowns as “considerably more onerous” measures that were supposedly non-punitive, it acknowledged the reality of the true nature of lockdowns. After all, how was it that the Commonwealth, wielding significant constitutional power over the States and Territories and during a supposed national crisis, allowed such extreme incursions on liberty to be imposed unchecked?

In its judgement, handed down on 6 November 2024, Justices Gageler, Gordon, Gleeson, and Jagot upheld that “nightly curfews and ankle bracelets are forms of punishment which have real impacts on people’s lives and cannot be justified”.

Fundamental protections in law against arbitrary detention and interference with bodily integrity apply equally to all people in Australia, whether they are citizens or not.

Just not during a period of a State-declared “emergency” for Australian citizens it would seem.

We all had equal rights to liberty and bodily integrity, but the rights of criminal non-citizens of Australia were more equal.

Summary of the majority judgement and concurring opinion

The following summary paraphrases and/or quotes the Justice’s majority judgement.

The law of the country gives value to bodily integrity and liberty from “arbitrary” interference.8 Under the common law, every person’s body is “inviolate” and “each person has a unique dignity which the law respects and which it will protect”.9 Both the curfew and monitoring condition infringed on these inalienable rights of the individual.

Furthermore, the language of the Migration Amendment (Bridging Visa Conditions) Act (The Act) that imposed curfews and monitoring conditions was too broad and, therefore, infringed on the exclusively Judicial power of the Commonwealth.10

Curfews

The curfew imposed on the plaintiff was neither trivial nor transient in nature. For nearly one-third of the day, he was confined to his specified place at his notified address. The plaintiff had to be sufficiently organised by 12:00 pm the previous day if he wanted to change his notified address and he was constrained if he wanted to travel further in the community to be able to return to his notified address by the time the curfew commenced each night.11 These conditions were punitive because they amounted to a “deprivation of liberty”which was “relatively long-term”.12

In some respects, the curfew condition should more correctly have been called “home detention” because a curfew only prevents movement after nightfall, whereas the plaintiff could be held at a specific place for a period that could include daytime.13

Contrary to the defendant’s submissions, “other types of curfews (for example, to prevent infectious diseases spreading or to restore public order) do not assist. Curfews may be of many different kinds and for many different purposes and, by reason thereof, will have different constitutional significance.”14

For these reasons, the curfews were considered unconstitutional.

The monitoring condition

The fitting of the ankle bracelet involved what would otherwise be the commission of “trespass to the person (in the forms of assault and battery). The monitoring device then continued to be in contact with the wearer thereafter, as a direct and immediate continuing consequence of what would otherwise be the tort of trespass.”15 It was chunky and not discreet and everyone who saw one wearing it would immediately recognise it and assume the wearer presented some form of risk. Its continued presence on the body could not be described as a slight or modest interference with bodily integrity.16

The ankle bracelet had to be charged twice per day and it took 90 minutes to be fully charged and the plaintiff would face imprisonment if it was not charged or properly cared for and maintained.17 The charging device also had to be charged to ensure that it could charge the ankle bracelet. The practical effect of this restriction was that the plaintiff had to be somewhere near a mains power supply virtually at all times, a further deprivation to his liberty.18

Furthermore, the continuous monitoring of the plaintiff would breach his privacy and would divulge to the complete stranger monitoring his location, the places he visited which might reveal his political, religious, sexual and other personal affiliations.

The endless monitoring created real physical, psychological and emotional burdens for the plaintiff which made them punitive, and therefore, unconstitutional and invalid.

The dissenting opinions

Beech-Jones

Chapter III of the Constitution and NZYQ

Not every form of hardship or detriment imposed by the Executive constitutes punishment. Therefore, the Constitution was not infringed simply because Commonwealth legislation authorised the Executive to interfere with common law rights.19

A relevant test of whether a restriction is punitive is whether it is selectively imposed on an individual or whether it is imposed on a broader section of society. Even if the imposition of house arrest to a particular person was not deemed punitive, it would be far more punitive than a “stay-at-home” order issued to the public during wartime, a civil disturbance or the outbreak of a contagious disease. The measures, after all, were not collective punishment targeted at a particular race or social group.20 Detention should be considered “purely protective” (not punitive) if it was undertaken to prevent them from communicating a contagious disease.21

A law might provide for the detention of persons affected by an infectious and serious disease, but the legislative scheme for that detention might extend the detention well beyond the period during which the individual is infectious. Such detention would be greater than what the reasonable protection of the public requires. In that case, the power of detention could not be seen as necessary to achieve the legitimate and non-punitive purpose of preventing the spread of a deadly disease and, therefore, it may be inferred that the purpose of the detention is punitive. Leaving aside the duration of the detention, the fact that there may be other less draconian means of addressing the spread of such as disease would be relevant to the extent that it enabled us to assess the true intent of the law - be it protective or punitive.22

But, these measures were only ever intended as preventative and regulatory, not punitive. Whilst the threat of punishment existed, that would have been a separate process if or when the law was broken. The Act was “purely protective” because it was designed to make the visa holder comply with these conditions, not to punish them by imposing the conditions.23

The power to impose the monitoring condition

There is no historical or other basis for treating interferences with privacy as punitive and there are numerous examples to the contrary. The mere collection of information about a visa holder’s movements into, out of, or within the country are purely protective. Examples of interference with bodily integrity abound which would not be characterised as punitive; submitting to decontamination or medical testing, the use of force in executing a warrant and making an arrest and the taking of fingerprints, an iris scan or physical measurement, non-consensual body searches at airports. Perhaps these all have a shorter duration, but they are examples of far more intrusive interferences with bodily integrity than this discreet, light and small monitoring device some visa holders had to wear.24

Any stigma that the plaintiff experienced because of wearing the discreet device could be avoided by using a smaller monitoring device like a smart watch, or clothes that would easily cover the device. In any event, the stigma associated with wearing the device was only incidental to the purpose of the device. The purpose of the law matters: it was to monitor compliance; not to shame.25 If, however, “the use of a public symbol to mark out the members of a particular race or members of a social group for disapprobation is a form of stigmatisation [then] that could amount to collective punishment of the kind adverted to earlier which would warrant the characterisation of any law authorising its application as punitive”.26 [emphasis added]

The power to impose the curfew condition

The plaintiff made the inaccurate statement that during the period in which the curfew condition is in effect, the Commonwealth has “total control over his liberty”. Nothing like “total control” existed, particularly in comparison with those of the NZYQ cohort who were in immigration detention. The plaintiff’s statement was inaccurate because the deprivation of his liberty was comparatively low: he could freely choose his place of residence anywhere in Australia; he could change these at short notice, he could supply a number of different addresses and choose to stay at any of them with notice. The Commonwealth did not dictate what occurred at those premises, who could reside or enter them, or did not reserve any power to enter those premises.27

“The restriction on liberty and movement for a third of the day, supported by the threat of criminal prosecution and mandatory imprisonment, is a very significant restraint. The Commonwealth sought to resist this conclusion by pointing to the type of curfews noted above, namely those applicable in times of civil unrest, wartime or during a pandemic. However, those are examples of general curfews. Here, the curfew condition is specifically directed to a particular individual based on an assessment that must include a consideration of the risk they pose and most likely includes a consideration of their past behaviour.”28 [emphasis added]

Here, in the case of our visa holders, “specifically directed” curfews to “particular individual[s]” were based on an assessment of their risk they posed.

In sum, the curfew condition is not as severe as the plaintiff contends, and therefore, is not punitive.

Discussion

The assurance in the majority judgement that the common law treats the human body as “inviolate” and respects liberty and bodily integrity, raises an important question about how these principles were abandoned during the pandemic.

Several unprecedented interventions affecting liberty, bodily integrity, autonomy, and privacy in ways that had not been seen before were imposed:

• Coercion from “vaccination” mandates violating informed consent;

• Lockdowns;

• Mandatory PCR-testing;

• Quarantine;

• Facemasks; and,

• Even having to wear ankle bracelets in COVID-19 quarantine facilities.

To any reasonable mind, the curfew conditions were far less restrictive than lockdowns. On this test alone, if the curfew could be considered a “deprivation of liberty”, by the same reasoning, the lockdowns must have been too.

Similarly, the interferences with bodily integrity (as noted above) were far more invasive and extensive than the ankle monitoring condition imposed on the visa holders. On this test too, if the wearing of the ankle bracelet was an interference with bodily integrity tantamount to assault and battery, then any of the above would exceed this test and must also be considered so too.

But this discussion only compares the broad lockdowns experienced by all during the pandemic.

The lockdown which was extended for the “unvaccinated” - that particular “social group” to which Beech-Jones repeatedly referred in his dissenting opinion - warrants closer analysis.

Another esoteric reading of Beech-Jones’s opinion

Beech-Jones supplied several interesting hypotheticals in his reasoning which suggest that pandemic measures which specifically targeted a “social group” were unconstitutional.

In other words, when a restriction focused on a particular social group, such as the “unvaccinated”, it would be an example of a collective punishment and could be considered punitive rather than protective, therefore, invalidating it.

As the “vaccines” were never indicated for the prevention of infection and the transmission of COVID-19 disease, and the real-world observational evidence proved this to be true, the extended lockdowns for the “unvaccinated” were never “purely protective” because anyone “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated” could still contract and transmit COVID-19. Once again, the continued lockdowns for the “unvaccinated” could not have been “purely protective” for the community and must, therefore, have been punitive.

In the event that we accepted that lockdowns were even valid for the “purely protective” purpose of mitigating the spread of an infectious and serious disease, the extension of detention well-beyond the period in which the individual was infectious would be “greater than what the reasonable protection of the public requires”, meaning the measure would be punitive, and therefore, invalid.

But there is an even more important aspect to Beech-Jones’s hypothetical here.

The extension of lockdowns for the “unvaccinated” had nothing to do with whether or not one was infectious. Extending the deprivation of the liberty of otherwise healthy people, simply for refusing to subject themselves to “vaccination”, was plainly and simply punitive.

On consideration that there were several less draconian methods of addressing the spread of such a disease, the measures taken by the State to extend the restrictions against a particular social group revealed that the true purpose of the law was to authorise “the infliction of punishment” on the “unvaccinated”.

In many examples, the “unvaccinated” were required to wear or display a “public symbol”, like a face mask or “vaccine passport”, once the broad lockdown restrictions had been removed for the “fully vaccinated” cohort of the population.29 By Beech-Jones’s reasoning, this stigmatisation could be regarded as collective punishment of the “unvaccinated”, again, rendering these measures invalid.

Our lasting question with Beech-Jones again is, were these hypotheticals pivotal to his reasoning about the validity of curfews and monitoring conditions for visa holders in Australia?

Could Beech-Jones have, once again, been warning against the “slippery-slope” of measures which target particular social groups?

Conclusion

Incredibly, the majority judgement of the High Court of Australia in YFBZ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs held that even serious offenders who had a violent criminal past, before and after arriving in Australia, had superior rights to yours.

Curfews, which, to any reasonable mind, were far less restrictive than lockdowns for Australian citizens, constituted a “deprivation of liberty” to these non-citizens.

Ankle bracelets, which were characterised as “assault and battery” on these non-citizens interfered with bodily integrity.

But, rest assured, under the common law, every person’s body is “inviolate” and “each person has a unique dignity which the law respects and which it will protect”.

Yet, for a shameful period in our history, these rights to liberty and bodily integrity only extended to those Australian citizens who:

• Willingly enrolled themselves in the world’s largest clinical trial;

• Had bought into the propaganda about prosocial behaviour;

• Were virtue-signalling;

• Had uncritically consumed the propaganda and were fearful for their health and safety; and,

• Regrettably, could not resist the coercion to take the “vaccine” through mandates or otherwise.

If you were not in one of the above categories, then you were likely one of the “unvaccinated” (and presumably still are).

For you, these rights were suspended “for the greater good”.

Because “public health”.

Because “emergency”.

Of course, courts defer to “public health authorities” and “expert consensus” in controversial cases involving health emergencies, particularly when governments declare an “emergency” and invoke “emergency powers”.

But, as the pandemic has taught us, consensus - particularly “expert consensus” - should be interrogated, critiqued and challenged at all occasions - even if the Judiciary lacks the appetite.

A key aspect of Beech-Jones’s judgement in the pivotal “vaccine” mandate challenge was the assumption, widely held at the time, that COVID-19 “vaccines” significantly reduced both infection and transmission. This scientific premise underpinned the justification for mandates, particularly in workplaces and high-risk settings, under the reasoning that the measures served a public health purpose beyond “individual protection” (which we must now necessarily put in scare quotes too).

Had it been established at the time that COVID-19 “vaccines” did not prevent infection or transmission, the legal and evidentiary foundation for the mandates would have been significantly weakened.

Not that we didn’t know at the time.

The evidence was presented in the Kassam & Ors v Hazzard & Anor case, but, Beech-Jones effectively trusted one side’s version of “Science” while treating opposing evidence, no matter how well-founded, as inadmissible, irrelevant, or not as “expert” to the core scientific issues relevant to the case.

Is it any wonder that the State won?

We were presented with an alleged universal and authoritative consensus of belief about an unprecedented deadly disease because of State-directed censorship, clouded by the fog of State-crafted propaganda.

The disease, as it turns out, was less deadly before the global population was “vaccinated”.

How could any of that make sense?

In sum, it does not.

In the slightest of positive news from this experience, we know that the High Court will actively recognise the rights of the individual.

At least in certain, non-controversial or non-emergency circumstances.

Furthermore, we might have been subtly provided with an example of how to challenge any future incursions into our bodily integrity or liberty.

Perhaps the Paradigm has shifted.

His was Australia’s first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) “COVID-19 death” from the cumulative 743 “COVID-19 cases” at the time: a case-fatality rate (CFR) of just 0.13%.

In contrast, Australian1 “COVID-19 deaths” at the time totalled 999, from 51,256 “COVID-19 cases”; a CFR of 1.95% (1348% larger than the ATSI CFR).

These incredible health outcomes with COVID-19 were completely unexpected. The “Gap” in life expectancy between Australian and ATSI peoples, which today is 8.8 years for males and 8.1 years for females (and is even wider in remote and very remote areas), it was anticipated, would be severely worsened by the pandemic. Allegedly, the risk of severe COVID-19 was up to four times that of the wider population, leading some scholars to claim “the oldest continuous culture on the planet [was] at risk”.

Despite the hyperbole, however, these alarmist predictions did not play out at all as expected.

• In the period from 1 January to 24 October 2021, there were 15 ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” from 6,470 “COVID-19 cases”: a CFR of 0.23%.

• In contrast, total Australian “COVID-19 deaths” in this same period were 728, from 130,120 total “COVID-19 cases”; a CFR of 0.56% - more than double the ATSI CFR.

• Much later, by 28 January 2022, after the Omicron variant had arrived on Australia’s shores, carried by “fully vaccinated” travellers and spreading like wildfire through a “fully vaccinated” domestic population, total ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” had only reached 40 from 130,120 “COVID-19 cases”: the CFR had reduced to just 0.03%.

• In contrast, in this same period, there were 3,496 Australian “COVID-19 deaths” from 2,246,513 “COVID-19 cases”; a CFR of 0.16% - more than 5.33 times larger than the ATSI CFR.2

• In the period from the Omicron wave to 10 March 2024, total ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” had reached 451 “COVID-19 deaths” from 438,126 “COVID-19 cases”; a CFR of 0.10%.

• In contrast, in the same period, there were 22,091 “COVID-19 deaths” from 11,148,348 “COVID-19 cases”; a CFR of 0.20% - double the ATSI CFR.3

Due to under-reporting, it is likely that these positive outcomes were potentially even more positive than they appeared:

The under-reporting would mean that even more ATSI “COVID-19 cases” would have occurred relative to “COVID-19 deaths”, further reducing the CFR for ATSI peoples.

In ordinary circumstances, a remarkable outcome such as this should have dominated State press releases and legacy media bandwidth. “Gap Closure” has been pursued since 2008, regrettably with very limited successes; and so, the near total void of the acknowledgement of these positive outcomes with COVID-19 for ATSI peoples is perplexing.

What is also remarkable about these results with COVID-19 has been their persistence. While the Australian population has experienced continued “COVID-19 deaths” from 2020 onwards, with it becoming a leading cause of death in 2022 and 2023, these same outcomes were not evident for the ATSI population despite their lower rates of COVID-19 “vaccination” and assumed risks with severe COVID-19.

But it is also not just “COVID-19 deaths” which demonstrate a significant story about ATSI COVID-19 outcomes. Early in the pandemic (July 2019-June 2021), COVID-19 hospital “separations” (the conclusion of a hospital episode, which could mean a patient was either discharged [including transfers or discharges to other facilities] or died) were approximately the same between the ATSI and Australian populations and amounted to less than 0.1% of all “hospital separations” in this period.4

On reflection, the “curve” was impressively flattened. COVID-19 must have been treated somewhat effectively in the nation’s hospitals in 2020 at least, as “COVID-19 deaths” through this period were low, and those which occurred were predominantly in residential aged-care facilities. From July 2019-June 2021, although “COVID-19 hospitalisation” separations increased for most cohorts (also suggesting more “COVID-19 hospitalisations”), they actually reduced for ATSI peoples from 0.6 to 0.5 per 10,000 of the population.5 As the first ATSI “COVID-19 death” did not occur until August 2021, we know that these were all COVID-19 recoveries: not deaths.

In the next reporting period (July 2021-June 2022), however, coinciding with the Omicron wave, widespread “vaccine” uptake, coercion from mandates and the endorsement and uptake of multiple booster “vaccines”, there was a significant escalation of “COVID-19 hospitalisations” and separations for all cohorts:

Yet, again, ATSI peoples had far more favourable outcomes in this period than the Australian population. ATSI “COVID-19 hospitalisation” separations were 337 per 10,000 of the population, more than 57% better than the outcomes for the Australian population.

We know that ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” remained low throughout this period, whereas for the Australian population they did not, so we can be confident that these ATSI “separations” were not ATSI “COVID-19 deaths”. In contrast, the significantly greater number of “COVID-19 deaths” for the Australian population suggests that their “separations” included a substantial proportion of “COVID-19 deaths” more than recoveries. Therefore, even the “COVID-19 hospitalisation” outcomes were far more favourable for the ATSI population than the Australian population.

So, the lasting question is: did we close the “COVID-19 deaths” gap?

Perhaps, but it was not because of better “pandemic management” or State-led interventions.

As we show in this article these unexpected outcomes were the combined effects of:

1. Different demographics;

2. Lower rates of COVID-19 “vaccination”; and,

3. More accurate collection and reporting of ATSI COVID-19 data.

The conclusion we draw is that these astounding results with COVID-19 for ATSI peoples should prompt critical reflection from our health bureaucrats about our national response to COVID-19, their key health messaging and the harmful futility of the “vaccination” program.

Methodology

In this article we compare COVID-19 outcomes using CFRs rather than death rates because the CFR for each population provides a more accurate measure of how each cohort fared with COVID-19 among those who contracted the virus.

Death rates can misrepresent outcomes by including individuals who never contracted COVID-19, potentially understating the disease’s true impact. By concentrating on deaths relative to cases, the CFR provides a truer indication of each population’s actual COVID-19 outcomes.6

Different demographics

The different age distribution of the ATSI population can partly explain the different COVID-19 CFRs between the two populations.

In 2022, for example, 53% of all Australian “COVID-19 deaths” occurred in those aged over 85; an age significantly beyond the life expectancy for ATSI peoples. Therefore, other leading causes of death affecting cohorts younger than those typically impacted by COVID-19 reduced the possibility of more ATSI “COVID-19 deaths”.

The ATSI population is also much younger. As of 30 June 2021, an estimated 34% of the ATSI population was aged under 15, compared with 17% for the Australian population.7 People aged 65 years and over comprised 5.4% of the ATSI population, compared with 17.2% of the Australian population.8 Therefore, a comparatively greater aged proportion of the Australian population has resulted in more “COVID-19 deaths” in this cohort.

The different age distribution provides a compelling reason for these different COVID-19 outcomes, but one that would be difficult for our health bureaucrats to acknowledge. If age was the sole factor in these different outcomes, then it would provide evidence that COVID-19 was never a risk to younger cohorts; even the younger, supposedly more vulnerable ATSI population. Therefore, it cannot simply be the different age distribution that explains the more favourable ATSI COVID-19 outcomes.

The different socioeconomic position (SEP) of ATSI peoples, provides yet another explanation for these different COVID-19 outcomes. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that of the relatively fewer total “COVID-19 deaths” in the ATSI population, the majority were in those from the lowest SEP:

As shown above, “COVID-19 deaths” among ATSI peoples were strongly associated with socioeconomic disadvantage rather than ethnicity. Beyond the most disadvantaged cohort, the percentage of ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” in each cohort was superior to that of the Australian population, with significantly lower “COVID-19 deaths” as a percentage of all deaths compared with the Australian population in each quintile.

Therefore, different demographics somewhat explain the different COVID-19 outcomes between the ATSI and Australian populations, but, we must also consider another important distinction between the two populations to explain these outcomes.

Lower rates of COVID-19 “vaccination”

ATSI peoples have not always been the most adherent to State messaging, with good reason, whether health messaging or otherwise. Historically, ATSI peoples have had lower rates of childhood vaccination for so-called “vaccine preventable diseases” and ATSI peoples are roughly five times more likely to “discharge [from hospital] against medical advice”.9

ATSI COVID-19 “vaccination” rates are also well below that of the Australian population. By September 2021, for example, ATSI first dose COVID-19 “vaccination rates were about 20% lower than the Australian population.10 By the end of 2021, only 63.5% of the ATSI population aged 12+ was “double vaccinated”.11 As of June 2024, 13% of the ATSI 18+ population were “unvaccinated”, and 26% of the 5+ population were “unvaccinated”.12 These lower rates of “vaccination”, it was anticipated, would lead to “devastating outbreaks . . . not only in remote regions, but in communities closer to towns and cities.”

Yet they did not.

COVID-19 “vaccination” rates continued to lag throughout the pandemic and never reached that of the Australian population. “Vaccination” coverage was even lower between ATSI peoples and the Australian population in remote areas. By September 2021, remote regions in Queensland and Western Australia had significantly lower “vaccination” coverage, with some remote regions with less than 10% “fully vaccinated”.13

Data also shows that ATSI uptake of booster “vaccination” was substantially lower compared with the Australian population. By February 2022, only 48.2% of the eligible ATSI population, compared with 63.4% of the Australian population had received “more than two doses”.14 By February 2023, only 56.6% of the eligible ATSI population had received “three or more doses” in comparison with 72.4% of the eligible Australian population.15

These trends of lower “vaccination” were spread across the nation in 2023. Although the Department of Health and Aged Care’s “COVID-19 Vaccination - Geographic Vaccination Rates - LGA - Indigenous Population” webpage has been scrubbed from the Internet, it is still available on the Internet Archive. The most recently updated data, from 16 March 2023, showed that the ATSI population in each Local Government Area (LGA) had “vaccination” rates well-below that of the Australian population. The further away from urban areas, these rates dropped even further in terms of the number of “vaccines” given too.16

ATSI peoples not only had less “vaccination” coverage, but also longer “time since last ‘vaccination’” across all areas:

Data from November 2023 (shown above) revealed that more than three-quarters of the ATSI population had received their last COVID-19 “vaccination” more than one year prior.

In sum, the data shows how the ATSI population had far lower rates of COVID-19 “vaccination”, including booster “vaccination”. The data also shows that the further away from major cities, “vaccination” coverage dropped further still, with the potential to seriously compound existing health inequalities. Therefore, ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” should have been significantly higher than they were in remote areas because of this added layer of presumed disadvantage.

But they were not.

We contend that the reduced rates of “vaccination”, particularly booster doses, have likely contributed to more favourable ATSI COVID-19 outcomes. There is ample evidence in the literature pointing to negative vaccine effectiveness and documented vaccine harms, not to mention findings that COVID-19 itself was relatively mild in most cases. Therefore, every injection of a COVID-19 “vaccine” added risk to the ATSI population through increased susceptibility to contracting COVID-19 or harm from the “vaccine” itself. By avoiding these risks, it also can explain their favourable COVID-19 outcomes.

If our contention is incorrect, then these unexpected outcomes must be explained by health bureaucrats and academics who insisted that the absence of “vaccines” would result in far worse outcomes for ATSI peoples. The observational data provide strong evidence that lower rates of COVID-19 “vaccination” were unexpectedly protective for ATSI peoples.

More accurate collection and reporting of ATSI COVID-19 data

The third explanation for these favourable ATSI COVID-19 outcomes is that ATSI COVID-19 data was a more accurate reflection of the severity of COVID-19 disease than Australian COVID-19 data. There are several reasons supporting this speculation:

1. “COVID-19 hospitalisations” and “COVID-19 deaths” data for the Australian population were exaggerated through:

   1. Counting all “incidental” hospitalisations “with” COVID-19 as “COVID-19 hospitalisations”;17

   2. Double-counting all “COVID-19 hospitalisations”. For example, an ICU admitted “COVID-19 hospitalisation” was counted as both a “COVID-19 hospitalisation” and a “COVID-19 ICU admission” during the pandemic;18 and,

   3. Misclassification of “COVID-19 deaths” even when COVID-19 was not the cause of death.19

   This methodology would have similarly impacted COVID-19 data for ATSI peoples; however, due to their smaller population size - approximately 3.8% of the Australian population - these numbers were not amplified to the same degree. Consequently, the distortion of data resulting from these practices was more pronounced at the broader Australian population level, making the overall COVID-19 data for the Australian population appear significantly worse in comparison with the ATSI population;

2. Lower rates of “COVID-19 hospitalisations” among ATSI peoples reduced the opportunity for exaggerated data, such as incidental “COVID-19 hospitalisations” or “COVID-19 deaths” being misclassified; and,

3. There was a contrasting political imperative to downplay COVID-19 severity within ATSI populations, as presenting improved health outcomes aligned with the broader “Closing the Gap” agenda. The higher proportion of incidental “COVID-19 deaths” in the ATSI population compared with the Australian population suggests COVID-19 was unexpectedly less lethal for ATSI peoples. Between August 2021 (the first ATSI “COVID-19 death”) and January 2024, approximately 40% more of the “COVID-19 deaths” were recorded as “with” COVID-19, not “from” COVID-19.20 COVID-19 would have been causative for many more ATSI “COVID-19 deaths” if the presumed risks with COVID-19 were greater for ATSI peoples. It is, therefore, plausible that the larger number of deaths “with” COVID-19 for ATSI peoples might be a truer reflection of COVID-19’s actual lethality.

Conclusion

These unexpected and persistently favourable ATSI COVID-19 outcomes demand that we revisit the broader national response to the pandemic and its central assumptions. Demographics played some role, but importantly, so too did lower rates of COVID-19 “vaccination” combined with more accurate data collection and reporting.

It is now incumbent upon those who issued ominous forecasts for ATSI peoples to explain how and why the predicted catastrophe never came to pass. The evidence shows that we have some crucial lessons to learn from what happened with ATSI peoples and COVID-19 which should guide our future pandemic planning.

Postscript

In researching this article, we were surprised to learn that a collection of academics had addressed the dramatic reversal of “The Gap” in a polemic published in The Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.21

The brief article attributed the favourable ATSI COVID-19 outcomes to “outstanding Indigenous leadership” and the application of “world’s best practices” but it failed to detail the specific strategies or actions taken. For instance, it mentioned that Aboriginal health leaders implemented best practices across various locations but did not elaborate on the specifics of what these practices entailed, how they were executed, or why they provided superior outcomes to the Australian population.

While the thought-bubble references the low number of “COVID-19 death” and “COVID-19 hospitalisation” rates among ATSI peoples, it does not address the demographic variables or different rates of “vaccination” which more plausibly explain these outcomes.

More concerningly, the authors make several unsubstantiated and unscientific claims, suggesting that ATSI peoples’ allegedly superior pandemic management provided evidence that a Voice enshrined in the Constitution would work. The article’s tone, language, and selective emphasis on this last theme suggest a primary goal of advancing a political narrative, rather than critically and scientifically unpacking the pandemic’s impact on ATSI populations.

“[O]utstanding Indigenous leadership, governments at all levels listen[ing] to Aboriginal wisdom and that control was handed to those who knew what to do. . . This viewpoint makes the case for a different model to engage and empower First Nations to really close the gap ‐ themselves”. . . I hope non‐Indigenous Australia finally learns is that Indigenous leadership – when left to genuinely flourish without the ever‐present interference and paternalism – is phenomenally powerful, deeply impactful and highly successful, highlighting the ways of knowing, doing and being that exist in Indigenous Australia” [emphasis added]

Had these authors considered the practical implications of what “flourishing” looks like without the “ever-present interference and paternalism”, they may have stumbled on the answer that COVID-19 “vaccination” might have been among the two most important reasons why ATSI peoples’ COVID-19 outcomes had been so favourable.

In this postscript, we critically analyse the claims made in the article, further supporting our main contention in our article that demographics, different rates of COVID-19 “vaccination”, and more accurate COVID-19 data collection and reporting were the reasons for these more favourable outcomes.

“Australian First Nations response to the pandemic: A dramatic reversal of the ‘gap’”: a response

According to the article authors, the roadmap to these ATSI successes were based on four key pillars: the right to self-determination and leading coordination in the COVID-19 response; increasing the supply of housing; Indigenous data sovereignty; and building local capacities for healthcare delivery with ATSI health practitioners.22

Yet, these were largely the same, if not inferior initiatives, in comparison with those imposed on the Australian population, with the exception of the right to self-determination and to lead coordination in the COVID-19 response. Therefore, we challenge the article authors’ conclusions by addressing each of their separate claims below.

1. The right to self-determination and leading coordination in the COVID-19 response:

Referencing the work of others, the article authors describe how these measures included “prohibiting access permits for non-essential travellers and developing key distancing health messages in local languages and Aboriginal community-controlled health services developing local preparedness and response plans”.23 Communities themselves also “imposed restricted travel to and from communities”, implementing “considerable efforts to protect elders, and found solutions to secure isolation and quarantine facilities where housing stock [was] limited”.24

As important as self-determination might be for ATSI people in general, it is highly unlikely this first aspect of the approach could explain the much better COVID-19 health outcomes for ATSI peoples for the following reasons:

First, this aspect sounds very much like an endorsement of lockdowns for the prevention of severe COVID-19 outcomes, with the notable difference that at least this version was driven by communities and not by the State. But everyone in Australia had lockdowns: some more than others and for longer too. So, the argument that this brand of lockdowns were more effective for the ATSI peoples and not others is unconvincing and requires evidentiary support.

Second, more than 86% of the ATSI population live in “non-remote” areas and would have not been in a system with “community-determined lockdowns” as those suggested by the article authors. Therefore, these approaches cannot explain the different CFRs between the two populations.

Third, if self-determination was effective at preventing “COVID-19 deaths”, the article authors do not explain why it was ineffective at preventing “COVID-19 cases”. ATSI “COVID-19 cases” still found their way to ATSI peoples in urban, remote and very remote areas and it did not cause as many deaths in comparison with the Australian population. The severity of each individual “COVID-19 case” was not determined by lockdowns, lockouts, border controls, or other movement restriction policies for the individual who contracted each “case”. Rather, it was determined by the virus itself, access to early treatments and the age and health of the person who contracted the “case”.

Fourth, if ATSI peoples had better outcomes because they were able to create more “localised pandemic responses” developed by their communities, then why was this benefit not observable in the Australian population who, if the argument holds, have this by default as their birth-right?

Finally, it is difficult to assess the extent to which developing key distancing health messaging, or any health messaging for that matter might have been impactful given the lagging “vaccination” rates and adherence to other “health” practices during the pandemic, particularly if they bore any resemblance to this attempt by the (then) Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan to translate his key health messages:

2. An immediate increase in the supply of housing:

The article authors never interrogate reasons why this approach was successful for the ATSI population in comparison with the Australian population, who have access to the supply of housing to have provided adequate quarantine/isolation. It is obvious, from the suggestion that the supply of housing was deficient in ATSI communities at some point during the pandemic to have warranted the recommendation for this intervention to increase its supply. Therefore, rather than providing a sound reason for why the COVID-19 outcomes were better for ATSI peoples, it provides a sound reason for why they should not have been.

3. Indigenous data sovereignty:

“Indigenous data sovereignty” is explained as data collection that is “comprehensive”, “shar[ed] to all parties”, “sensitive to all parties” and in a “timely manner”.25 The article authors suggest “data sovereignty” includes:

“[A] rights-based approach aimed at effective Indigenous data governance to ‘empower our peoples to make the best decisions to support our communities and Indigenous in the ways that meet our development needs and aspirations’.”26

But the recommendation is purely aspirational and does not satisfactorily distinguish the approach taken for the Australian population. There is no evidence supporting the contention that the majority of the ATSI population had the freedom to exercise their “rights-based” approach that was either any different to the Australian population, or to an extent that was influential as far as COVID-19 outcomes were concerned, whether for the remote or “non-remote” ATSI populations.

4. Building local capacities for healthcare delivery with ATSI health practitioners

This presumed fourth pillar suggests that strengthening ATSI health workforces was essential to these favourable COVID-19 outcomes, though the article authors do not address this aspect of the roadmap in any detail whatsoever. In the original study, it was suggested that increasing and retaining ATSI health practitioners, building infectious disease expertise, and developing surge workforce plans would ensure better COVID-19 outcomes; however, this argument relies heavily on a “deficit” model (like pillar # 2), which assumes that gaps in health workforce capacity hindered ATSI communities’ capacity to manage the pandemic effectively. The premise suggests that improvements were necessary for better outcomes to emerge. Yet the reality of far more favourable COVID-19 outcomes for ATSI populations compared with the broader Australian population directly contradicts this notion. If workforce deficiencies were a major limiting factor, ATSI communities should have experienced worse outcomes, not significantly better ones.

Postscript conclusion

The article’s central claims remain inadequately substantiated. Demographic variations, differential “vaccination” rates, and more comprehensive data collection practices offer far more plausible explanations for the gap in COVID-19 outcomes between ATSI peoples and the Australian population. By centring their argument on allegedly superior ATSI leadership and community-led initiatives, the authors’ case is unscientific and unconvincing and the reasons we propose in this article are more valid conclusions for the more favourable ATSI COVID-19 outcomes observed.

Yet, it was not until a 20 March 2020 press conference where President Trump gave hydroxychloroquine a very public endorsement (despite the best efforts of Anthony Fauci to water it down) which rocketed it to popularity.

Globally, the surge in hydroxychloroquine’s popularity from this press conference was the catalyst for the commencement of a coordinated global takedown by the Bio-Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, combining legacy media propaganda with the efforts of financially compromised and institutionally aligned researchers under its influence.1 Under U.S. law, an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) for a vaccine or therapeutic can only be granted if there are no adequate, approved and available alternatives for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition. Therefore, the promise of hydroxychloroquine was the prime threat to any future EUA granted to the “vaccines” being “warp-sped” into production at the time.

In Australia, a series of logistically impossible events were also set in motion by this press conference, which could not have happened organically. Within a matter of days, practically every State and Territory in Australia were locked down for the first time, and by 24 March 2020, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) had responded to “reports” of alleged increased “off-label” (meaning for an indication not approved by the TGA) prescribing of hydroxychloroquine by removing the authority of doctors (with the exception of some specialists) to issue new prescriptions for patients without the registered indications for the medicine.

The TGA cited concerns of safety risks and shortages in making its decision. Yet, our investigation of the TGA’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN) matched against the Department of Health’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) prescriptions data for the same period reveals that these concerns about hydroxychloroquine’s safety were unfounded, and our analysis of historical data from the TGA’s “Medicines Reports Shortages Database” shows that no shortage of hydroxychloroquine occurred until much later in 2020; even following the logistically fanciful surge in demand for the medicine in March 2020.

The conclusions we draw in this article, therefore, are that the decision to restrict access to hydroxychloroquine had very little to do with safety or risks of shortages.

While we are sure everyone is well aware of the broader debates surrounding this issue, the intention here is to provide evidentiary support to expose the myths underpinning the TGA’s intervention in restricting access to a vital treatment which could have prevented lockdowns; masks; “vaccination” mandates; and above all, could have saved Australian lives.

The safety of hydroxychloroquine

In reviewing the TGA’s DAEN for adverse events relating to hydroxychloroquine, we found very few examples showing significant adverse events linked with the medicine which could have warranted the TGA restrictions.

First, there was not one single adverse event report citing “off-label” use for hydroxychloroquine in the period from 18 April 2019 to 18 June 2020.2 This means that the restriction was imposed on the basis of the presumption of an apparent risk using the medicines, not because of increased, or extensive DAEN reports.

Second, the first “off-label” adverse event report for hydroxychloroquine (occurring 18 June 2020) included many other medicines, raising the possibility that hydroxychloroquine might not have even caused it or the other adverse events where many other medicines were listed in other reports. In fact, there are very few adverse event reports where “hydroxychloroquine sulfate” is listed as the “single suspected medicine” with few exceptions.

Let’s take a brief detour here to explore these exceptions where hydroxychloroquine was reported as the “single suspected medicine” in DAEN:

The last DAEN report for hydroxychloroquine as the "single suspected medicine" prior to the TGA-imposed restrictions of March 2020, was 18 August 2019. 

There are only a handful of instances where hydroxychloroquine is reported as the "single suspected medicine" in causing an adverse event in the entire reporting period from the first report in 1985 to the most recent in December 2024. 

Yet, quite strangely, it appears there were several unfortunate days where some form of hydroxychloroquine-bingeing occurred, causing all manner of harm (occurring after the restrictions were imposed):

- 29 April 2020: 22 "Females" and 2 "Males" with ages ranging from 34-88 who attended the first hydroxychloroquine-binge party suffered "Maculopathy" and "Retinal Toxicity" with another 13 of these same people experiencing "Retinal Depigmentation".

- 12 May 2020: Not heeding the warnings, another 23 "Not specified" people and one "Female" succumbed to the wonderdrug again, once again ending up with "Maculopathy" and "Retinal Toxicity". One of these 24 people also suffered "Toxicity to various agents" from this second hydroxychloroquine-binge event.

- 27 December 2022: 23 "Females" and 2 "Males" this time suffered "Retinal Toxicity" and "Retinopathy" from, yes you guessed it, the "single suspected medicine": hydroxychloroquine.

~ Source: TGA, DAEN, Google Sheet, column E, adverse events reports with a single suspected medicine are highlighted in orange.

These dates with multiple entries on the same day are the only occasions in the entire history of DAEN reports for hydroxychloroquine where more than three reports occurred on the same date. 

Third, prior to the imposition of the restrictions, there were relatively few of the “significant adverse event[s]” reported to DAEN for hydroxychloroquine as the “single suspected medicine”.3 Keyword searches for these adverse events were conducted in DAEN returning the following:

• “Cardiac”: three reports, one in which the single suspected medicine was hydroxychloroquine; 2005, 2009 and 2017;

• “Cardiomyopathy”: three reports, all of which the single suspected medicine was hydroxychloroquine; 994, 2007, 2012;

• “Hypoglycaemia”: no reports;

• “QT”: two reports, none of which where hydroxychloroquine was the single suspected medicine; 2014, 2019;

• “Retinal”: 13 reports, 12 of which where hydroxychloroquine was the single suspected medicine ; 1977, 1988, 1996, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2016, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2018, 2018, 2019.

The above list is not exhaustive, but it provides further credence to the argument that the alleged risks of hydroxychloroquine were overstated and that its safety profile had been sufficiently established with very few reports of significant adverse events, particularly in the period between the pandemic commencing and the TGA’s 24 March 2020 intervention.

Fourth, the incredibly small numbers of adverse event reports relative to the number of prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine reveal just how rare these adverse events reports are. Here we run the risk of sounding like the TGA to prove a therapeutic’s safety by calling to attention the number of doses relative to the few adverse event reports. We acknowledge that DAEN does not capture all of the potential adverse event reports because of the“underreporting rate”, which some estimate to be as high as 99%.4 However, rather than simply rely on this contention alone to prove the safety of the drug, it adds to our three preceding points in this argument that hydroxychloroquine is, and was demonstrably safe.

Fifth, we have good reason to believe that safety is evidently not one of the TGA’s primary concerns when deciding to restrict access to medicines, given its continued promotion of COVID-19 “vaccines” despite the extraordinary number of adverse events reported in DAEN linked with their use. So, the TGA’s apparent concerns about the presumed risks of hydroxychloroquine are inconsistent with its approach to the COVID-19 “vaccines” and we have very good reasons to disbelieve this justification for its intervention.

Finally, even if we accepted the TGA’s pernicious argument about the potential for harms caused by “off-label” prescribing of hydroxychloroquine, its intervention undermined trust in medical professionals, disrupting the doctor-patient relationship and denying a proven safe and effective early treatment for COVID-19 to Australians.

In sum, there are very good reasons to believe that the decision to restrict access to hydroxychloroquine on 24 March 2020 had little to do with concerns about its safety.

The risk of potential shortages of hydroxychloroquine

Aside from concerns about the safety of hydroxychloroquine, the TGA also expressed concerns about potential shortages which could result from increased “off-label” prescribing.

We reviewed the PBS data for 2020 and learned that despite an extraordinary near 100% increase in the number of prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine in March 2020, there was a continued uninterrupted supply of the medicine in this period:

As shown above, the number of prescriptions recorded in Australia’s PBS “Date of Supply” data revealed an unprecedented spike in the number of hydroxychloroquine prescriptions for March 2020, but, again, no shortage followed in April 2020.

Historical data from the TGA’s “Medicines Reports Shortages Database” reveals that the only shortages which occurred for hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic occurred many months after the restrictions were imposed.5 The first shortage for hydroxychloroquine commenced 24 August 2020 and ended almost a month later on 21 September 2020. It occurred because of “Other” and was rated “Medium” in impact (out of three options including “Critical” or “Low”). The second shortage for hydroxychloroquine (for a different brand of the medicine) commenced 3 September 2020 and ended 9 October 2020 and was rated “Low”. The second shortage, curiously, was caused by “Unexpected consumer demand”.

It would appear, therefore, the TGA’s decisive action averted any potential shortages for hydroxychloroquine at the time the restrictions were imposed, yet, we question the integrity of the PBS data for hydroxychloroquine in March 2020 and the claims that “off-label” prescribing was driving the allegedly “unprecedented demand” for the drug.

The integrity of the PBS data

There are several reasons to be doubtful of the integrity of the PBS data and claims that it was driven by “off-label” prescribing because interest in hydroxychloroquine could only have surged in Australia in a matter of days prior to the imposition of the TGA’s restrictions.

First, it would be uncontroversial to state that ordinary Australians do not base their health decisions on what has been published in the academic literature. Even if they did, there were very few studies proposing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 before the imposition of the TGA restrictions. The earliest study was published on 19 February 2020, but the most influential preprint was published much later, on 20 March 2020. Despite the growing interest in hydroxychloroquine in academic circles, it was highly unlikely that interest in hydroxychloroquine could have been driven by ordinary Australians’ attention to these studies. Even if ordinary Australians had been paying attention to scientific discourse, it was not until much later in March when this influential preprint was published, and only three days before restrictions on hydroxychloroquine were imposed. Therefore, it is improbable the surge in interest in hydroxychloroquine could have been driven by these developments in academia and the surge in demand for the medicine must have had another cause.

Second, the spike in interest in hydroxychloroquine occurred so late in March that it was a logistical impossibility for Australians to have sought and obtained prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine. This spike was caused by President Trump’s endorsement of the medicine in two consecutive press conferences, the first on 19 March 2020 where he called it a potential “game changer” and another glowing endorsement on March 20 2020 (shown below):

These were the first public promotions of hydroxychloroquine from important figures outside of academia which would have drawn attention to the medicine. In the press conferences Trump (and Fauci albeit begrudgingly) affirmed the established long-term safety of hydroxychloroquine and its promise, even if “anecdotal”, for treating COVID-19. Two days after this press conference, Trump tweeted about the previously mentioned influential preprint, drawing further attention to hydroxychloroquine:

Undoubtedly, these public endorsements would have piqued the interest of people scared of COVID-19 who were desperate for a cure, but we question the extent to which this interest could have created the surge in demand reported in the PBS data, particularly given the implausibly tight timeline.

Trump’s second press conference occurred in Washington D.C. on Friday 20 March 2020 at 11:50am EDT (Saturday 21 March 2020, 2:50am AEDT). Realistically, how many people would have woken to their morning coffee several hours later, seen this news, rushed to their general practitioner (GP) requesting “off-label” hydroxychloroquine prescriptions? Did this really happen on the weekend of Saturday 21 March to Sunday 22 March 2020?

What makes the reported surge in hydroxychloroquine prescriptions even more extraordinarily unbelievable is that the TGA restrictions were imposed on 24 March 2020. Australians, therefore, had approximately four days, two of which spanned a weekend, to see the news and demand their hydroxychloroquine fix: an impossible window of opportunity for 25,653 extra, allegedly “off-label” prescriptions for March 2020 to have been issued.

The third reason for disbelieving the data showing a surge in demand for hydroxychloroquine is that most of the legacy media were late to catch-up with this “news” to report on it, and therefore, to influence consumer behaviour to the extent reported. We have conducted searches of Australia’s major legacy media publications for articles using the keyword “hydroxychloroquine” from January 1st 2020 to March 23 2020 (the day before the TGA restrictions were imposed) which returned only limited results. The earliest legacy media article in Australia mentioned chloroquine, published in a Daily Telegraph article on 18 March 2020. Hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19 then appeared in The Guardian on 19 March 2020, and several News Corporation publications on 20 March 2020. Based on results from our search, there were so few legacy media articles early in March which could have influenced the demand for hydroxychloroquine to the enormous extent reported for the entire month. The reported surge in demand must have coincided with the publication of these articles, but the sheer increase in the number of prescriptions relative to the previous month defies logic.

The fourth reason we have for calling the integrity of the PBS data into question is that Australia had just entered its first “COVID-19 wave” at the time. Face-to-face consultations with GPs were discouraged, and those with COVID-19 symptoms were encouraged to get PCR-tests prior to doing virtually anything. At the time, PCR-test results were returned via SMS no sooner than 48 hours, likely limiting the number presenting to their GP to request a hydroxychloroquine prescription. Although telehealth services had been expanded so people did not have to leave their homes, telehealth appointments accounted for only 15% of all GP presentations for March 2020. So, not only did Australians have a limited window to have learned about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 following Trump’s press conference and the slow catch-up of the legacy media, but they also had reduced access to their GPs to obtain prescriptions for the medicine to the level reported in the PBS data.

A fifth reason to disbelieve the prescriptions data for hydroxychloroquine for March 2020 is the reduced community movement at the time. “COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports” reveal that the commencement of the first COVID-19 wave had caused a reduction in community movement in “retail and recreation” spaces where GPs are often located.

So, not only did Australians have an implausibly narrow window to learn about and seek prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine, they were facing increasingly fear-based messaging from the State and were on the cusp of the first “two weeks to slow the spread” lie. Surely, fear might have driven some people to present to their GP, or book a telehealth appointment to find the only available “cure” at the time, but we question the extent to which these prescriptions could, or would have been given by prescribers in the timeframe suggested.6

The sixth reason we have for disbelieving the PBS data for hydroxychloroquine in March 2020 is based on our analysis of Google Trends data. From 1 March 2020 to 23 March 2020, web searches for “hydroxychloroquine” only surged from 18 March 2020, again, supporting our contention that Australian interest in hydroxychloroquine commenced around this time. In any event, a simple web search is neither evidence of an intention of, nor opportunity to obtain a hydroxychloroquine prescription. Even if we assumed that Google Trends data actually reflected the intentions of Australians to seek hydroxychloroquine, then these intentions did not emerge until late March. Again, this shows the impossible timeline for nearly double the number of prescriptions to have been issued in March 2020 compared with February 2020:

A seventh reason to disbelieve the March 2020 PBS data for hydroxychloroquine is the obvious inconsistencies in the concerted campaign to discredit the medicine which commenced after Trump’s press conferences. The campaign spanned only a matter of days and combined an open letter from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA) president Chris Freeman and a follow-up article covering this open letter in the State-sponsored legacy media.

Freeman’s open letter, published Saturday 21 March 2020 (less than one day after Trump’s second press conference), remarkably called for pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine and for prescribers to stop issuing prescriptions for it because of the “unprecedented demand for the drug” at Australian community pharmacies:

“On the background of some promising data showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19 and with President Trump’s announcement yesterday, 20 March 2020, that the drug hydroxychloroquine may support the care of patients affected by COVID-19, Australian community pharmacies have seen unprecedented demand for the drug . . .

Our strong advice to pharmacists at this point in time, until further advice is available, is to refuse the dispensing of hydroxychloroquine if there is not a genuine need . . .

PSA would like to keep safe any stock of hydroxychloroquine held in local pharmacies – so it is available to treat patients who genuinely need this medicine. The only way this is possible is for prescribers to not write prescriptions for this medicine as a ‘just in case’ measure and for pharmacists to refuse the supply outside of these indications at this point in time.

While the data may not yet be clear, if hydroxychloroquine is shown to be effective for COVID-19, we want every dose available to treat those who may require it.”7 [emphasis added]

Consider the timeline of events suggested by Freeman in his open letter. Trump’s second press conference had commenced in Washington D.C. at 11:30am EDT (2:30am AEDT). Trump and Fauci’s exchanges with journalists occurred between the 37th and 46th minute of the press conference (3:07am-3:16am AEDT). Following this press conference, it was alleged:

1. Australian pharmacies faced unprecedented demand for hydroxychloroquine;

2. They reported this unprecedented demand;

3. The PSA collated these reports;

4. The PSA recognised a signal;

5. Freeman was prompted to write an open letter;

6. Freeman drafted his open letter; and,

7. The open letter was published at 1:09pm on the PSA webpage.8

The sequence of events culminating in Freeman’s open letter demonstrates either an unparalleled example of organisational efficiency on behalf of the PSA, or something a little more creative.

There are very good reasons, as we have stated, to doubt that ordinary Australians had paid any attention to the limited but “promising data showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19” in scientific studies, and so, Trump’s press conference was the catalyst for this surge in demand for the medicine. But, when Freeman suggested there had been “unprecedented demand” for hydroxychloroquine at Australian pharmacies, he suggested it was Trump’s second press conference, occurring 20 March 2020 in the USA, which caused this surge. Recalling that Trump finished talking about hydroxychloroquine at 3:16am AEDT on Saturday 21 March 2020, only hours before Australians woke up to the news and the open letter was published, it makes the sequence of events proposed in the open letter even more fantastically impossible.

Freeman surely must have been referencing Trump’s statements in the 19 March 2020 press conference that caused this surge in demand, but even then, the opportunity for ordinary Australians to learn about this “news” was limited because of the near-total void of legacy media coverage of the press conference, let alone their limited opportunity to have sought the drug. We conclude, therefore, Australian pharmacies did not experience unprecedented demand for hydroxychloroquine, as claimed in the open letter.

Finally, evidence presented in an Australian study supports our contention that the number of “off-label” prescriptions did not surge in March 2020. Using the same publicly available data from the PBS as we have, combined with an additional dataset consisting of a 10% random sample of all PBS-eligible people provided by Services Australia for analytical use, the study concluded that 78% of the spike in dispensing in March 2020 was among people previously treated with the medicine.9 So, if the PBS data is to be trusted, it was not unprecedented demand caused by “off-label” prescribing of hydroxychloroquine, it was stockpiling among existing users of hydroxychloroquine which caused this surge in demand for the drug. If the conclusions of the study authors are accurate, it would also explain why shortages never actually occurred in April 2020; because the existing supply could be used in the following months by those who had hoarded them in March 2020.

Unpacking the TGA’s decision

Days after the PSA’s open letter was published, Australia’s State media repeated its incredulous claims, embellished with the grievous error that actual shortages of hydroxychloroquine had occurred because of this unprecedented demand.

An Australian Medical Association committee member was quoted in the article as being supportive of restrictions for hydroxychloroquine to avert potential shortages for those with indications for the medicine. In other words, to save the medicine for “those who actually needed them” for “painful flare-ups”, contrasting with those who might have been improperly using it to simply save their lives from lethal COVID-19.10

With consent appropriately manufactured, the TGA announced its decision to restrict which health professionals could prescribe hydroxychloroquine to new patients the very next day on 24 March 2020:

“Initiation of hydroxychloroquine is restricted to the following medical specialties as per the Medical Board list: dermatology; intensive care medicine; paediatrics and child health; physician; and emergency medicine.”11

The logic of the TGA’s intervention was an obvious false dichotomy. On the one hand, we had a devastating virus sweeping the globe threatening to wipe out entire populations and a specific medicine was showing hope it could end COVID-19. But on the other hand, we needed to preserve precious supplies of this medicine to provide relief to those suffering the symptoms of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Could we really only supply medicine to one group or the other?

No.

Shortages are not only overcome by trying to curtail demand (through regulations or increased prices) but also by increasing supply. If shortages were honestly the concern, then these could have easily been alleviated by sourcing hydroxychloroquine from one of the many global producers.

Supply could have also been secured through investments in manufacturing hydroxychloroquine domestically. The original patents for hydroxychloroquine had long since expired, making it available as a generic and low-cost medication. Its synthesis involves well-known chemical processes, and the raw materials are generally accessible. Many countries, even those with developing pharmaceutical industries, have the capacity to manufacture hydroxychloroquine at scale.

Yet, we picked mRNA.

Though shortages of essential medicines could be concerning, (and even after the TGA restrictions were imposed, hydroxychloroquine shortages occurred twice in 2020) these should have been easily managed by an advanced industrialised economy with a properly functioning pharmaceutical procurement system.

However, a brief four-day period of heightened media attention and so-called “recent reports” were sufficient to prompt the TGA’s intervention:

“Recent reports of increased off-label prescribing of medicines containing hydroxychloroquine have raised concerns that this will create a potential shortage of this product in Australia.”12 [emphasis added]

The “recent reports” were the only evidence cited by the TGA in its decision and it failed to provide the source(s) for these “reports” in yet another example from the recent past of its opaque decision-making, which we have regrettably come to expect from the organisation.

So, who kept using hydroxychloroquine in 2020, causing the shortages?

Two shortages for hydroxychloroquine occurred between late August and early October 2020.

The exact nature of the first shortage was unknown, but the second was caused by “unexpected consumer demand”, which we presume to mean Australian consumers.

Curiously, however, the PBS data, revealed a consistent pattern of prescribing hydroxychloroquine during this time (highlighted in red below) suggesting that the use of hydroxychloroquine had increased even though the number of prescriptions had not:

So, what could have driven the “unexpected consumer demand” to have caused at least one of these shortages?

One possible answer was its increased use in clinical trials. But, there were limited clinical trials being conducted at the time, with the exception of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. Its August 2020 COVID Shield Clinical Trial was reported to have planned the recruitment of only 650 participants: not enough to have caused the reported shortage. Prior to the COVID Shield Trial, many other clinical trials had removed hydroxychloroquine from its multi-drug trials too. The increased use was not, therefore, caused by large clinical trials sapping the supply of hydroxychloroquine.

The second, more plausible answer, is that hydroxychloroquine was being used in hospitals “unexpectedly”. Both public and private hospitals’ inpatient treatment is funded by the hospital or state health budgets, not the PBS, and so, these supplies do not appear in PBS statistics which could explain why the prescriptions had remained within expected bounds in the second half of 2020. The TGA intervention, as restrictive as it was, still allowed for “initiation of hydroxychloroquine” in “intensive care, paediatrics and child health, physician and emergency medicine”, meaning that the clinical judgement of doctors in hospitals was still respected and hydroxychloroquine could be prescribed freely: even for COVID-19 in Australian hospitals.13

Throughout 2020, Australia’s Federal Government continued to stockpile hydroxychloroquine, waiving regulatory requirements for the importation and supply of the drug. It was reported at the time that doctors never ceased providing it to COVID-19 patients in hospital too.

But, why would doctors in hospitals be using more hydroxychloroquine in late August 2020 to have caused these shortages?

It surely had everything to do with Australia’s second COVID-19 wave commencing in July 2020.

As shown above, during the second wave beginning in July 2020, both COVID-19 hospitalisations and ICU admissions climbed steadily, with ventilated patients remaining a subset of those in ICU. Although these categories peaked in July and early August, they later decreased, suggesting many individuals were discharged or recovered. Throughout both waves, the data demonstrate that a sizeable fraction of hospitalised individuals did not progress to ICU care, and only a portion of ICU patients required mechanical ventilation.

Remember, all of these “COVID-19 hospitalised” and “COVID-19 ICU-admitted” and “COVID-19 ventilated” patients presenting to hospital (about 12.5% of all “COVID-19 Cases” in 2020 in Australia) were all “unvaccinated” too.

Something was responsible for these recoveries, and it was all before the arrival of the miracle “vaccines”.

Could these outcomes have been, at least in part, driven by the unexpected surge in hydroxychloroquine demand?

There are two other strange coincidences in the data which support this hypothesis. First, the start of the downward trajectory in the number of “COVID-19 hospitalisations” occurred almost exactly to the day that the first hydroxychloroquine shortages were reported in the TGA’s database, perhaps providing a clue that the available hydroxychloroquine stock was used up to treat these patients. Second, the “supply impact end date”, for the resolution of the “unexpected consumer demand” coincided with the return to “normal” “COVID-19 hospitalisation” numbers, suggesting that hydroxychloroquine stocks were predicted to be replenished once the “unexpected” overuse in hospitals had ceased.

Australia’s record with “COVID-19 deaths” also shows how the standard of care provided in Australian hospitals was highly effective in 2020. In 2020, Australia recorded only 909 “COVID-19 deaths”, most of which, however, occurred in Residential Aged-Care Facilities (RACFs), where the standard of care in many facilities was inhumane.14 678 of Australia’s 909 “COVID-19 deaths” in 2020 occurred in RACFs, and so, even if we assume that the entirety of these remaining 231 deaths occurred in hospital, from the nearly 30,000 “COVID-19 cases” in 2020, the Case-Fatality Rate (CFR) for “COVID-19” patients (not RACF patients) was still less than 1%; only slightly higher than the CFR for seasonal influenza.15

Conclusion

Our article reveals how the TGA’s decision to restrict the supply of hydroxychloroquine was neither a measured response to safety concerns nor a necessity driven by genuine shortages. Instead, it was a capitulation to the interests of its pharmaceutical sponsors who had no financial stake in an inexpensive, off-patent drug like hydroxychloroquine, but a much larger financial stake in the development of new “vaccines”.

In 2020, there was a continued supply of hydroxychloroquine to those hospitalised with COVID-19 and the evidence shows that in 2020, Australian doctors had developed a standard of care which, on two occasions, had “flattened the curve” in Australian hospitals and, remarkably, resulting in the near complete elimination of “COVID-19 cases” in the community.

We know that hydroxychloroquine continued to be used as a treatment for those hospitalised with COVID-19 to the extent that it caused at least one shortage for the medicine in 2020 and, despite likely fraudulent anomalies in DAEN, there were no safety signals for hydroxychloroquine in 2020 despite this increased use.

Yet, somehow, within a matter of days starting in late March 2020, hydroxychloroquine went from the “game-changer” to the drug which could kill indiscriminately from all manner of horrible side-effects.

These events show how swiftly and in unison the Bio-Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex can pull its many levers to influence governments and regulators, co-opting legacy and State media mouthpieces to shape medical policies and public perception about a once “Essential Medicine”.

On 25 October 2024, Justice Robert Beech-Jones delivered the “John Perry Oration”, the annual address hosted by the “Hellenic Lawyers Association”. His speech, “Lawyers and Dictators: Ten Lawyers, and Counting”, examined the ethical challenges lawyers face when confronting “oppressive regimes”.

It was a fitting theme considering Beech-Jones’s history of navigating important ethical challenges relating to oppressive regimes.

In his speech, Beech-Jones recounted the challenges and choices faced by courageous lawyers like Hans Litten, a brash 28-year-old lawyer who subpoenaed and cross-examined Adolf Hitler in 1931 (Litten was executed two years later), South African barristers Sir Sydney Kentridge and Bram Fischer who were punished for fighting court battles against the apartheid regimes, and Demosthenes and Cicero who resisted autocratic forces in ancient Athens and Rome.

The stories of these individuals highlighted the role of lawyers in opposing injustice and the lasting importance of their actions (and sadly in our case: inaction) in defending democratic principles.

He warned his listeners in the introduction to his speech:

“I am sorry but the speech is a bit grim. It is a bit grim because it is meant to be a reflection of our times and, in particular, the threats liberal democracies face, not in this country, or at least not yet, but definitely overseas.

I do not think it is too alarmist to see the slide towards autocracy in countries, including those with strongly established democratic traditions, as deeply disturbing. It is not just the rise of a particular individual or party that is the concern, although that is part of it. What we are witnessing is the success of methods of gaining and exercising power that are reminiscent of an evil past: the harvesting of outrage, grievance, and hate; the denigration of the weak and the vulnerable; the rejection of democratic norms; the perpetuation of lies on a grand scale and the use of violence.” [emphasis added]

On a first reading, Beech-Jones’s comment about the “slide towards autocracy” was seemingly about American politics.

If so, what was striking here was how Beech-Jones seemed strangely oblivious to the Australian experience. His account of how autocrats “gained and exercise[d] power” resembled what happened in Australia starting in 2020. For a shameful period, the political class used “emergency powers”, suspending “democratic norms” to lock healthy populations in their homes to mitigate the alleged risks from a novel virus to the infirm. Those responsible for “exercising power” bypassed regular legislative processes, eroding safeguards for individual rights and freedoms all for “public health”.

No slide to autocracy in Australia though.

Not in our country.

At least not yet.

Despite the official end of the pandemic in 2023, the threat of government overreach continues in Australia under new guises of “won’t someone think of the children!” and the failed (for the present moment) attempt to inoculate the feeble-minded from the perils of State-declared “wrongthink”.

In this article, we reflect on what might be considered the “slide to autocracy” from a learned and important figure in Australia’s COVID-19 story.

As we shall see, the lamentations about the “success of methods of . . . exercising power that are reminiscent of an evil past” are eerily similar with the Australian experience.

We therefore question whether Beech-Jones was trying to tell us something else with his speech.

“The harvesting of outrage, grievance and hate”

The first strategy for “exercising power . . . reminiscent of an evil past” during the pandemic was the “harvesting of outrage, grievance and hate”.

For the most part, it was those who dared question the wisdom of the official narrative, whether it was the lethality of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, or the wisdom of illogical “public health” interventions who were targeted for the grievance, outrage and hate.

For example, imagine going to the beach without wearing a facemask in 2020. It was reported in the legacy media like you were signing your own death warrant!

What about the strange logic of being told by the Police Minister “if you don’t want to be in lockdown, obey the rules”…when the rules were to obey lockdown:1

Or the temerity of the “unvaccinated” nurses who worked while COVID-19 infectious in a Sydney hospital:

Was this different from working while infectious if you were vaccinated?

Presumably yes, it would have been, for reasons unknown.

“At least you had done your bit and gotten ‘vaccinated’!” they would say.

The denigration of the “unvaccinated” was also a feature of the daily propaganda press conferences.

There was NSW’s (then) Premier Gladys Berejiklian:

7 September 2021 - “I wouldn’t want to be in the room with lots of people who aren’t vaccinated” (Source)

13 September 2021 - “I personally don’t want to go into a workplace or a venue where there’s [sic] unvaccinated people.” (Source)

There was Bradley Ronald Hazzard, the former science teacher who became NSW Health’s grumpiest talking-head during the pandemic. He too did much to harvest “outrage, grievance and hate” against the “unvaccinated” in the NSW context:

31 August 2021 - “[A]s I said earlier: get out and get vaccinated. Don’t be so selfish or self-entitled to think you’re different from the rest of us. You’re not.” (Source)

17 January 2022 - “Can I just say to those people who have chosen not to get vaccinated - it’s time to give a damn about someone other than yourself. Give a damn about your community, your family and most particularly, the health staff across New South Wales who you expect to be looking after you, if and when, you end up in our hospital system.” (Source)

In Victoria, Dan Andrews was as enthused about the “vaccine”, emboldened by his die-hard comrades:

5 September 2021 - “We’re going to move from a system where we’ve got everyone locked down to a situation where, to protect the health system, we’re going to lock out people who are not vaccinated and can be . . . This becomes absolutely a pandemic of the unvaccinated and, when we open everything up, it’s not going to be safe for people who are not vaccinated to be roaming around the place spreading the virus.” [emphasis added] (Source)

And who could forget the Northern Territory Chief Minister, Michael Gunner and his crazy-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth invective directed at the “unvaccinated”:

22 November 2021 - “If you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely anti-vax. If you support, champion, give a green light, give comfort to, support anybody who argues against the vaccine, you are an anti-vaxxer.” (Source)

These are just a select few of the moments where dog-whistles were used to inflame the majority, harvesting outrage, grievance, and hate against the “unvaccinated” to maintain public compliance with extreme and illiberal interventions.

“The denigration of the weak and the vulnerable”

The second strategy for “gaining and exercising power . . . reminiscent of an evil past” was the “denigration of the weak and the vulnerable”.

Though the “unvaccinated” were neither “weak” nor “vulnerable” (quite the contrary!), they were loudly scapegoated by health bureaucrats through their official propaganda channels in the legacy media to unify the majority against a perceived common enemy.2

The scapegoating of the “unvaccinated” was usually a variation on the theme of an allegedly very small minority of the population somehow wielding COVID-19 superpowers, from filling hospital beds (thankfully putting a stop to cringe-worthy dance routines in the wards), to superspreading SARS CoV-2, prolonging the pandemic and cancelling family get-togethers.

Scapegoating the “unvaccinated” served several interrelated purposes:

1. Manufacturing consent for the extreme interventions in our daily lives (“hit the ‘vaccination’ target and we can all get out of lockdown!”):

“After 114 days of hard lockdown and months of sacrifice and uncertainty, Monday will bring new freedoms and the start of a well-earned celebration for many.” [emphasis added] (Source)

2. Reinforcing the idea that you “made the right choice” if you got “vaccinated”, both for your own protection and because the “unvaccinated” were such a risk to your own health:

From the above article:

“But healthcare workers here are no longer just fighting a war against coronavirus, they are now battling a never-ending scourge of misinformation about the disease.

Increasingly, the vast majority filling the hospital are severely ill unvaccinated people, some who remain adamant that COVID-19 does not exist even when they are succumbing to the virus.

Others come to the realisation too late that the deadly virus is real, begging for a vaccine before being hooked up to a ventilator, unsure whether they will regain consciousness.” (Source)

Of all the things that didn’t happen during the pandemic, we should remember that they’re stories like these which were the most spectacularly “didn’t” of them all.

Pure propaganda.

Pure fiction.

Well, perhaps not the most “didn’t” after all, but it would be a podium finish with this one:

Back to the story at hand though. Spurious science was usually incorporated to draw conclusions about the risks the “unvaccinated” posed:

And if spurious science could not be drawn on, the opinion of an “Expert” was sufficient for the denigration of the “unvaccinated”:

3. Deflecting from the failings of government public health policy (“pandemic of the unvaccinated caused hospitals to become overrun”).

For example, the “overworked doctors and nurses” who had to “dig deep” to “find compassion” for “unvaccinated” patients:

By late 2021, COVID-19 was rampant among the “fully vaccinated”, exposing the myth that the hospital crisis was solely caused by the “unvaccinated”.

If hospitals were overrun due to the “unvaccinated” earlier in 2021, how did they withstand the surge in hospitalisations and ICU admissions among the “fully vaccinated” later that year?

The answer is simple: they didn’t.

The narrative blaming the “unvaccinated” for hospital overcrowding was always a lie. It was only after widespread vaccination, when the majority of the population had subjected themselves (or were coerced) to the “vaccine”, that hospitals truly became overwhelmed. The unvaccinated were never the root of the crisis, rather, it was a failure of the promised protection.

As we can see, the “denigration of the weak and vulnerable” served several interrelated purposes during the pandemic, and it too was “reminiscent of an evil past”.

“The rejection of democratic norms”

The third strategy for “exercising power . . . reminiscent of an evil past” was “the rejection of democratic norms”.

It would be hard to imagine a democratic norm that was not tested, bent, or outright broken during the pandemic because of the Reichstag Fire “public health”. Some of these “norms” and how they were rejected include:

• The rule of law: laws apply equally to everyone, no matter how powerful or rich they are:

  • Inconsistency with mask-wearing by politicians;

    • Travel exemptions for the rich and powerful while families were locked out of, or in Australia;

    • Unequal and discriminatory lockdowns for different regions of NSW;

    • Allegations that certain politicians avoided mandatory isolation rules; and,

    • Politicians avoiding vaccination mandates.

• Freedom of speech: people can express their opinions without fear of punishment, even if they criticise the government;

  • The Federal Government intervening to censor posts about the pandemic on social media;

  • The false imprisonment of journalists during the pandemic and here; and,

  • A pregnant mother’s arrest for promoting an anti-lockdown protest with a social media post.

• Accountability and transparency: government officials and their decisions are open to scrutiny from the public:

  • Regular parliamentary processes were suspended and “National Cabinet” secrecy prevented scrutiny of its decisions;

  • There was the (then) Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s assumption of the “secret ministries”; and,

  • The abuse of emergency powers.

• Respect for rights: everyone’s basic rights—like freedom of religion, assembly, movement, work and bodily autonomy —are protected;

  • The closure of places of worship and their impact on Catholics, Muslims, and over $35,000 in fines given to those who defied “public health orders” to attend church;

  • The denial of anti-lockdown protestors’ right to assembly only months after allowing “Black Lives Matters” protests during the pandemic;

  • Coercive “vaccine” mandates in Australia violating the fundamental principle of informed consent: consent must be given voluntarily;

  • Violating the human right to work by barring individuals from employment based on their vaccination status, forcing many to choose between their livelihoods and personal medical decisions; and,

  • The world’s longest cumulative lockdown in Melbourne (totalling 262 days across six separate periods).

The list goes on and we have captured but a few of the major stories here.

We learned during the pandemic that “democratic norms” could be rejected if someone uttered the phrase “public health emergency”. Doing so paved the way for all manner of illiberal interventions in our daily lives, subverting existing legislation protecting individual rights and freedoms; again, reminiscent of an evil past.

“The perpetuation of lies on a grand scale”

The fourth strategy for “exercising power . . . reminiscent of an evil past” was “the perpetuation of lies on a grand scale”.

We could devote an entire series of articles to the lies told about COVID-19 from lockdowns, masks, “vaccines”, DNA contamination of the “vaccines”, the clinical trials, the robust pharmacovigilance, to the excess mortality and so on.

There are too many to quote here and this would distract from the purpose of this article.

So, to reflect on this fourth example of “exercising power” we will leave it to your memory of the pandemic years and instead offer some of the memes we have preserved from this time:

“The use of violence”

The fifth strategy for “exercising power . . . reminiscent of an evil past” during the pandemic was the “the use of violence”.

During the pandemic, police were put in the unenviable position of having to understand, explain and enforce ever-changing health orders as described by the former NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller:

“There was a light-level approval process. Brad Hazzard, minister of health at the time, would sign off and ultimately that would empower those orders. Then police had to operationalise those as best as possible . . . It was a challenging time. I don’t feel as though we over-policed, but I totally understand the community disliked the health orders, and police didn’t like them either, to be honest” (Source)

Understandably, this pitted law enforcement against frustrated, anxious, and divided communities. The implementation of excessively rigid and poorly conceived public health policies often resulted in violent clashes, which, while not always instigated by police, became an almost inevitable consequence of the tension and distrust created by such measures.

There are many examples of these violent clashes, the majority of which occurred during the longest lockdowns of 2021. For example:

• In August 2021, a video circulated on WhatsApp of a group of men from Western Sydney “resisting” police by simply taking a walk in a group outside on a neighbourhood street:

• In September 2021, following the suicide of a construction worker after the shutdown of the construction industry in Melbourne, extreme protests erupted and protestors were fired upon with rubber bullets:

However, on many occasions police used unjustified violence in response to these protests and cases of indiscriminate police brutality were sometimes not prosecuted;

Therefore, the last of the strategies of “exercising power. . . reminiscent of an evil past” being “the use of violence” was the unfortunate outcome of these poorly conceived public health diktats.

The police were the ones who merely had chosen to “follow orders”.

From the evidence presented, it would appear some “followed orders” more enthusiastically than others during the pandemic.

An esoteric reading of the Beech-Jones speech

In the introduction to this article, we raised the question of whether Beech-Jones could be so strangely oblivious to the Australian experience of the pandemic, when the rather large body of evidence freely available to anyone willing to pay any attention, would seem to indicate that the “slide to autocracy” was not unique to countries other than Australia.

Beech-Jones would surely know how it was in Australia.

He is, after all, a very smart man.

So, was he trying to tell us something else in his speech?

An esoteric reading of Beech-Jones’s speech could be interpreted as a subtle commentary on Australia’s pandemic governance. As we have shown, the “emergency powers” and their implementation bore striking similarities to the authoritarian regimes Beech-Jones critiques.

The conclusion to Beech-Jones’s speech provides yet another clue supporting this esoteric reading. In it, he lists the three options the conscientious lawyer has in responding to dictatorships, autocracies and repression:

“[F]irst, going about your business and hoping the unpleasantness will all go away; second, working within an immoral system trying to mitigate its evils and defend its victims; and third, actively opposing and undermining the system from without.”

Did Beech-Jones face these same challenges of “working within an immoral system trying to mitigate its evils and defend its victims”?

Without doubt he did.

In recounting the actions of lawyers like Hans Litten and Sidney Kentridge, Beech-Jones emphasised their choice to work within unjust systems to mitigate harm.

This resonates with his own judgment in Kassam v Hazzard, where he upheld vaccine mandates but framed the decision with limits, noting that forced vaccination would be unreasonable:

9. “Although it was contended that the impugned orders interfere with a person’s right to bodily integrity and a host of other freedoms, when all is said and done the proper analysis is that the impugned orders curtail freedom of movement which in turn affects a person’s ability to work (and socialise). So far as the right to bodily integrity is concerned, it is not violated as the impugned orders do not authorise the involuntary vaccination of anyone.”3 [emphasis added]

Had the impugned orders authorised the involuntary vaccination of anyone, then they would have been “unreasonable” and the plaintiff’s challenge in this case would have been successful. Though this was perhaps the smallest of victories for the “unvaccinated” and it prevented a safeguard against “forced vaccination” at the time anyhow. Sadly, all it would take is a simple revision of The Public Health Act to remove this safeguard in future pandemics.

Conclusion

As we have shown in this article, the challenges faced by the characters of Beech-Jones’s speech mirror those we face today. The “slide towards autocracy” and political extremism, as Beech-Jones warned, can destabilise and “poison” the courts.

“[M]y simple point is that when a political system starts to break down, its disputes spill over into the courts and eventually poison them.

. . .

An independent judiciary upholding the rule of law on the one hand, and a cruel and dictatorial system as existed under apartheid on the other, cannot co-exist for ever. Ultimately, one has to give.” [emphasis added]

Have we reached that point in Australia yet?

Without proof, it would be alarmist to suggest that we had.

Just as Hans Litten and his cohort probably knew they had little chance of “winning” against Nazism and Adolf Hitler, they pursued the case nevertheless:

“Litten and his cohort did not approach the courts because they had a benevolent view of the Weimer [sic] Republic’s judiciary. They approached those courts because they had nowhere else to go.”

Perhaps our lesson here is that we can understand the limitations of the judiciary working within an autocratic system that can potentially poison the courts.

To that end, when “political extremism takes hold” we are reminded by Beech-Jones not to judge those who have to make decisions within these oppressive systems:

“No doubt judges in similar situations have similar choices to make and, just as tonight I am not judging the lawyers I have talked about, I am not judging them and I would caution others against doing so as well.” [emphasis added]

Beech-Jones pleads with us for amnesty.

The “slide to autocracy” was not, and will not be the fault of the judiciary.

We must be watchful, instead, for political extremism for the reasons outlined in his speech.

We must remember the following:

On 25 October 2024, the COVID-19 Response Inquiry Team (The Team) handed its Final Report (The Report) to Australia’s Prime Minister.

Predictably, The Report provided the template to “Build Back Better” for the soon-to-be monkeypox or bird-flu pandemic, or whatever zoonitic spillover event they are busily concocting at the Ministries of Health and Truth.

The Report is the culmination of a nearly year-long exercise in “roundtables” and “puzzle-solving” limited to the curated few invited to this presumably round table.

We had asked to participate, offering to extend our direct experience of vaccination mandates, discrimination and other absurd pandemic-era policies but were politely refused:

“Thank you for your interest in the COVID-19 Response Inquiry roundtables. Due to the high interest in the inquiry, and to ensure we can balance the need to capture the insights and ideas from a range of stakeholders with the sensitive nature of some discussions, participation at roundtables is limited. Given the above, we are unable to extend an invitation for you to participate in the sector roundtables.”

The rejection response we received suggested some degree of pre-determination regarding The Team’s conclusions.

Not that we were surprised.

Despite this extensive inquiry, prompting over +2000 submissions, the puzzle remains to be solved and The Report is drenched with meaningless business jargon like “moving forward” and other stupid platitudes.

In advance of the final publication of The Report, several dominant themes were disseminated to the legacy media. Aside from the obviously dishonest “we didn’t get ‘vaccines’ soon enough to save the millions from dying because they lacked the protection of the miracle elixir!”, The Team at least acknowledged the significant erosion in public trust following all levels of what we might call the “pandemic response”.

No agency or group was spared in this bleak assessment of truth-telling as shown in the submissions regarding:

• The Experts;

• Government at all levels;

• The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA);

• The Bureaucracy;

• The legacy media;

• COVID-19 “vaccines”;

• “Vaccines” in general; and,

• The “health advice”.

Methodology

As we did in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series of articles, we performed a content analysis on the 1,814 submissions published and (formerly) downloadable as a .pdf attachments from the COVID-19 Response Inquiry’s webpage (the page is now “not found” though you can find an archived link here or where we have previously made these submissions available).

On this occasion, our analysis focused on identifying the prevalence of specific keywords associated with vaccination mandates including:

• “mandat*” (using the wildcard ‘*’ to catch all variations of this keyword such as ‘mandate’, ‘mandates’, ‘mandatory’ or ‘mandated’);

• “terminat*”;

• “my employment”;

• “sacked”;

• “no jab”;

• “stood down”;

• “was suspended”;

• “was employed”;

• “dismissed” and,

• “dismissal”.

The submissions discovered using these search terms were read in full and selected extracts were included in this article.

Due to this time-consuming approach and the sheer number of submissions, it is possible that we missed some accounts because these keywords were not mentioned in the submission.

Though other mandates were returned in our search results such as “mask mandates” and the “government mandate” for example, our analysis here focused solely on vaccination mandates which related to employment, interstate or overseas travel, hospital visits, or access to other restricted spaces.

The submissions in this article are a record of the authors’ direct personal experience of vaccination mandates, including those of their friends, family, colleagues or acquaintances.

We know that due to the extensive and often arbitrary redactions of many submissions, this may be an incomplete account of those submissions revealing the harmful impacts of vaccination mandates.

Additionally, as a result of such a disappointingly limited submissions window (approximately two weeks) in the weeks preceding Christmas 2023, even more stories about vaccination mandates will have been omitted from the public record. As a result, we will not have captured the scale and impact of vaccination mandates of countless others.

Nevertheless, we present the direct and harrowing impact of vaccination mandates in the 370+ of the 1,814 published submissions in the space below without further discussion or comment.

Submission # 40

Submission # 50

Submission # 52

Submission # 60

(This submission appears to be the author’s letter to her employer prior to the termination of her employment for not being “vaccinated”)

Submission # 61

Submission # 62

Submission # 63

…

Submission # 67

(The following is an excerpt from the Amnesty Australia International (AIA) submission. The exact number of complaints received by AIA is not disclosed, however, their submission captures the impact of vaccination mandates from an organisation advocating for “change [to] oppressive laws” and to “free people who have been jailed just for voicing their opinion . . . and everyone whose freedom or dignity are under threat”)

Submission # 69

…

Submission # 77

(The TGA Batch Analysis submission???!!!)

Submission # 82

Submission # 83

… (large redacted section)

Submission # 89

Submission # 90

Submission # 101

Submission # 108

Submission # 122

…

Submission # 123

(This is an excerpt from the submission from Full Stop Australia, “Full Stop Australia is a not-for-profit working to end domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) by providing counselling to victim-survivors and engaging in victim-centric advocacy”. Their submission captures the impact of vaccination mandates in research they conducted for the National Mental Health Commission which is summarised in this submission)

…

Submission # 127

Submission # 131

Submission # 135

Submission # 144

Submission # 145

Submission # 152

Submission # 158

…

…

…

…

Submission # 162

Submission # 164

Submission # 167

Submission # 176

…

…

Submission # 190

…

Submission # 192

Submission # 194

Submission # 201

…

Submission # 204

Submission # 226

Submission # 236

Submission # 249

Submission # 251

Submission # 253

Submission # 259

Submission # 270

Submission # 280

Submission # 288

Submission # 301

Submission # 305

Submission # 306

Submission # 307

Submission # 310

…

Submission # 312

Submission # 329

Submission # 334

Submission # 339

Submission # 345

Submission # 347

Submission # 348

Submission # 358

Submission # 362

Submission # 379

(It is implied in this submission that the author was working in a workplace subjected to a vaccination mandate)

Submission # 382

Submission # 385

Submission # 386

Submission # 389

Submission # 390

Submission # 399

Submission # 409

Submission # 412

(This submission appears to be from a NSW Department of Education employee because the vaccination mandate for these employees was strangely announced prior to the Public Health Order mandating vaccination. It is presumed that author of this submission was subjected to the mandate which took effect 8 November 2021, though not confirmed)

Submission # 414

Submission # 415

Submission # 419

Submission # 421

…

Submission # 427

Submission # 433

Submission # 435

Submission # 443

Submission # 453

(This submission is from the “Australian Childcare Alliance”, the national peak body for the Australian Early Childhood Education and Care sector)

Submission # 454

Submission # 455

(It is implied, but not confirmed, that this author had a personal experience of vaccination mandates)

Submission # 462

Submission # 473

Submission # 474

…

Submission # 476

Submission # 477

Submission # 478

Submission # 488

Submission # 494

Submission # 496

Submission # 498

Submission # 499

Submission # 501

Submission # 503

Submission # 505

Submission # 509

(This submission appears to be a letter to a prospective employer from the author. The submission is also duplicated in Submission # 572, though strangely, that submission has different redactions)

Submission # 516

Submission # 517

Submission # 537

Submission # 550

Submission # 561

Submission # 572

Submission # 582

Submission # 588

Submission # 598

Submission # 600

Submission # 613

Submission # 624

Submission # 626

Submission # 635