They backpedaling fast
https://www.health.gov.au/news/atagi-2023-booster-advice
Critical risk’: push for vaccine safety office
By Christine Middap Associate editor, chief writer April 27, 2023
A new independent immunisation safety office should be established as part of an overhaul of Australia’s vaccine monitoring and response systems, a leading expert says.
Professor Nick Wood, Professor of Clinical Vaccinology at the University of Sydney, said the new office could be independent of the federal health department, which funds the national immunisation program, and separate to the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the regulator responsible for vaccine registration. The TGA derives most of its funding through fees and charges on the pharmaceuticals industry.
Professor Wood has also recommended that long-term follow-up of people who suffer a severe reaction to their immunisation should be a routine part of the vaccine surveillance system.
“Short and long-term clinical follow-up of serious conditions is neither systematic nor routine in Australia. This means that long-term outcomes, risk factors and causes of serious adverse events following immunisation is poorly understood,’’ he said.
Professor Wood’s report was part of a Churchill Fellowship study of some of the world’s leading vaccine safety and clinical vaccine research units.
It follows sustained complaints from Australians who suffered rare but serious side effects linked to their Covid vaccination that there has been little official follow-up or investigation of their cases, leaving many in limbo.
“It is important that we have sufficient knowledge to be able to tell a person who had an adverse event after a vaccine what the long-term outcomes are likely to be and whether it is safe to have another vaccine,’’ Professor Wood said.
His report comes days after a class action was lodged in the Federal Court alleging the TGA was negligent in its approval and monitoring of Covid-19 vaccines. The TGA says on its website that suspected side effects are closely monitored: “This is the most intensive safety monitoring ever conducted of any vaccines in Australia.”
The lawsuit is seeking greater access to compensation for people who suffered a severe adverse reaction.
A limited compensation scheme exists in Australia for people seriously injured by a Covid vaccine but Professor Wood said this should be expanded to include all vaccines on the immunisation register, and could be funded by a vaccine excise tax on pharmaceutical companies.
While there is no doubt that immunisations save lives, they carry a small risks of serious side effects and Professor Wood said as new types of vaccinations come online, strong systems should be in place to ensure public safety and confidence.
“As these technologies are new there is a need to improve our understanding of their real-world safety and effectiveness in all members of our community. The potential emergence of unforeseen adverse reactions related to these new technologies, offsetting the anticipated benefit of vaccines, is a critical risk,’’ he said.
Professor Wood, the associate director of clinical research and services at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, said the new immunisation safety office (ISO) should be embedded in the planned Centres for Disease Control, which is due to open next year to improve Australia’s preparedness and response to public health emergencies.
“If Australia is to have a national immunisation safety office, the model needs to be discussed. We would want to have that debate including with the TGA, and the state and federal governments,’’ he said.
“In the US, it’s embedded within the CDC, which has its advantages. Or it could be a completely separate and independent authority.”
He said it could build upon and link Australia’s comprehensive vaccine safety system that involves the TGA, which collates reports from all states and territories, the surveillance system AusVaxSafety, and a national network of clinicians who collaborate on serious adverse events linked to vaccination.
Currently, these systems function independently of each other with no overall co-ordination. “One of the benefits of having a national ISO in Australia would be the overall co-ordination of safety activities, comprehensive surveillance and identification of gaps in safety knowledge to inform and enable research.”
He also recommended that a national consortium of clinical vaccine trial sites should be established within the CDC to conduct vaccine trials.
Canberra man Rado Faletic, who helped found Coverse, a support group for people injured by Covid-19 vaccines, said he would support the implementation of Professor Wood’s recommendations so long as they led to real help for patients.
“We hold Nick in high regard. He’s one of the few experts in this area who is taking our concerns seriously and is doing what he can to effect better patient outcomes,’’ Mr Faletic said.
“We particularly support the recommendations about establishing a vaccine safety body that is completely independent from the TGA and making ongoing follow-up a routine part of the system.
“However, even if all of Nick’s recommendations are implemented, we maintain reservations about how this will improve much for patients.”
NEWS WITH A BIAS FOR TRUTH
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WHAT HAPPENED IN HOSPITALS DURING COVID?
Apr 28
By Stella Paul
Hospitals should be places you can trust to provide comfort and healing when you’re most vulnerable. But that trust may have been shattered by brutal Covid protocols that critics claim turned many hospitals into hellscapes of systematic medical murder.
The victims’ stories have been muffled by the mainstream media, but they’re starting to break through. For one thing, lawsuits against three hospitals have been filed in California by 14 bereaved families who claim their loved ones were killed by a deadly protocol. Meanwhile, activist organizations like Protocol Kills, the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, and American Frontline Nurses are collecting and documenting stories from bereaved families about what happened to their loved ones when they entered a hospital hoping for healing and, instead, were led to bizarre and tortured deaths.
I find it heartbreaking to read their stories, which share a haunting similarity, a feeling of being trapped in a highly organized nightmare. The ritual progresses in predictable stages: first, the patient is isolated from family, who are unable to advocate for their loved one or monitor what’s happening. Next, the patient is diagnosed with Covid-19 or Covid pneumonia, even if they came to the hospital because of a broken arm. Then, they’re bullied into getting remdesivir, a highly toxic drug which killed 53 percent of Ebola patients who had the misfortune to take it. Next, according to the California lawsuit, “They are placed on a BiPap machine at a high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe. Their hands are often tied down so they can’t take the BiPap machine off their face.”
I know this is getting unbearably painful to read, but stay with me to the bitter end to memorialize the victims’ suffering. As the patients writhe in agony, psychiatrists are brought in to diagnose them with agitation and sedate them. Now, shot up with remdesivir, sedated with drugs that make it tough to breathe against the BiPap ventilator, and strapped down in restraints, the victims are denied food and sometimes even water. Should they try to summon help, they may find the hospital played a vicious trick on them, placing their phone and call button for the nurse out of reach. In the final stages, they are intubated and slowly die alone, left to rot into a skeletal corpse with bed sores. Is this America?
It’s almost impossible to comprehend the magnitude of this moral collapse. How did doctors and nurses who spent years studying so they could help people all of a sudden turn into ruthless sadists, presiding over enforced deaths? How did hospitals metastasize from places of healing into chambers of horror? According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), the answer is quite simple: money. The federal government incentivized this protocol with massive payouts to the hospitals. AAPS writes, “Our formerly trusted medical community of hospitals and hospital-employed medical staff have effectively become “bounty hunters” for your life.”
AAPS explains that two Covid emergency acts from the government created this catastrophic loss of life. The CARES Act, a $2 trillion stimulus package, was passed in 2020, purportedly to ease the financial impact of Covid on American families. It provided gigantic bonuses to hospitals to institute federal protocols on Covid, ensuring that Covid would be massively diagnosed and treated with deadly combinations of remdesivir, ventilators, and other lethal methods.
Now that this top-down death protocol was bought and paid for, the government made sure that patients and their families were helpless to fight against it. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) granted waivers to hospitals allowing them to remove critical patient rights. Your ability to give informed consent, receive visitors, and be free from solitary confinement – gone! Vanished, obliterated with a single magical government “waiver.”
These actions destroyed the ability of doctors to make independent judgements based on their patients’ needs and turned highly trained medical staff into killer robots obeying the federal government’s commands. If you want to understand the enormity of the government money gusher, here’s AAPS on what the hospital payments included:
- A “free” required PCR test in the Emergency Room or upon admission for every patient, with government-paid fee to hospital.
- Added bonus payment for each positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
- Another bonus for a COVID-19 admission to the hospital.
- A 20 percent “boost” bonus payment from Medicare on the entire hospital bill for use of remdesivir instead of medicines such as Ivermectin.
- Another and larger bonus payment to the hospital if a COVID-19 patient is mechanically ventilated.
- More money to the hospital if cause of death is listed as COVID-19, even if patient did not die directly of COVID-19.
- A COVID-19 diagnosis also provides extra payments to coroners.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died due to these protocols, and we urgently need an investigation into this butchery. Who designed this protocol, which forbade safe drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and incentivized known toxins like remdesivir? Who enforced it? Were hospital administrators personally rewarded for their participation in this scheme? Were patients illegally deprived of their constitutional rights and defrauded with phony medical information? Why were patients denied nutrition and water? How was hospital staff forced to comply? Where’s the money trail? Who signed off on it?
Understanding what happened in the hospitals is a crucial piece of solving the Covid puzzle. A vast ecosystem of confusion, manipulation, and artificially induced panic was created by the government and their media lackeys to stampede the public into welcoming soul-crushing lockdowns and dangerous experimental injections. Hospitals were shut down for elective surgeries, depriving them of their usual income and making them more desperate for government payouts. Covid patients were forced into nursing homes, immediately killing thousands of frail victims and terrifying the public with the skyrocketing death count. Safe, widely used drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were demonized, and studies were fabricated to lie about their effectiveness. Doctors and scientists who tried to speak the truth were fired, investigated, and censored. Why?
We’re living through a time of historic crimes against humanity, rife with atrocities that once would have been unimaginable in America. We don’t yet know how many innocent people were killed in the hospitals during Covid, but whatever that number is — some experts estimate hundreds of thousands — it’s too many. Every one of those innocent dead was someone’s son, daughter, mother, father, husband, wife, friend.
For all the faceless dead, let’s pause for a moment to pay tribute to Grace Schara, a sweet 19-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who died on October 13, 2021, at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin. Grace was injected with a lethal mix of sedatives and as she sank into death, her sister was prevented from seeing her by an armed guard. Her parents begged over Facetime for the nurse to save her, but they were told that Grace was coded DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), although they had ordered the hospital to take all life-saving measures. Alone, uncomprehending, and in pain, Grace slowly died as her parents watched on Facetime. Her father, Scott Schara, is now suing the hospital to “pave the way for thousands of other victims’ families to file similar claims.” Grace was loved. May her memory be a blessing and an inspiration.
This article was first published in American Thinker
Why the WHO Pandemic Treaty needs an inquiry
This week in Parliament the Senate voted down my motion on establishing an inquiry into the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty.
This was the speech I gave trying to convince Labor, the Greens, David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe that the inquiry was needed.
You can read a transcript of the full debate from all parties and how each Senator voted: https://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/senate-debates-establishing-an-inquiry-into-whos-pandemic-treaty/
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: I seek leave to amend business of the Senate notice of motion No. 2 relating to a referral to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee.
Leave granted.
Senator ROBERTS: I move the motion as amended:
That the following matter be referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee for inquiry and report by 1 December 2023:
The World Health Organization’s pandemic treaty, also known as the pandemic prevention, preparedness and response accord, with reference to:
(a) the conceptual zero draft of the pandemic treaty and any other draft of the pandemic treaty;
(b) Australia’s input to the drafting and negotiating process for the pandemic treaty;
(c) the principles of Australian autonomy in responding to health crises and pandemics;
(d) the effect of proposals contained in the pandemic treaty, and
(e) any other related manners.
As a servant of the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, I want to read out the amended motion because I want the provisions in the Hansard:
That the following matter be referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee for inquiry and report by 1 December 2023:
That will give plenty of time for consideration in detail.
The World Health Organization’s pandemic treaty, also known as the pandemic prevention, preparedness and response accord, with reference to:
(a) the conceptual zero draft of the pandemic treaty and any other draft of the pandemic treaty;
(b) Australia’s input to the drafting and negotiating process for the pandemic treaty;
(c) the principles of Australian autonomy in responding to health crises and pandemics;
(d) the effect of proposals contained in the pandemic treaty, and
(e) any other related manners.
I note that when one of the world’s most influential people, someone famous for valuing the liberty and sovereignty of human existence, makes a comment about the risks that the United Nations World Health Organization’s pandemic treaty poses it’s worth listening to. In response to my video of my Senate speech last week criticising the proposed increased health powers of the pandemic treaty, Elon Musk said: Countries should not cede authority to WHO.
Regardless of what you think of Elon Musk, he’s one of a handful of people invited into the global backrooms of power. He knows better than anyone sitting in this chamber what the world looks like when the press aren’t watching. So threatened as a result of this comment was the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, that he felt the need to reply to this tweet. Perhaps four million impressions and 1.2 million plays of my speech got his attention. Tedros is a man that no sensible Australian would want anywhere near the health response of this nation, not least because of his prominent role as a terrorist in a violent Marxist political party with a track record of using health care as a political weapon.
In his reply to my speech in this chamber three weeks ago, Tedros failed to address the key point that I was making. That key point is that 83 World Health Organization staff were found to have committed rape and sexual exploitation of women in the Congo, some women as young as 13. Who made that finding? The World Health Organization’s own investigators. Those investigators went on to say that UNWHO must take any action against their staff and, if they failed to take any action of their staff, it meant the World Health Organization was ‘rotten with rapists’. Tedros deliberately ignored that part of my speech, so I can only assume those rapists will remain employed in the UN World Health Organization and free to commit further crimes. The World Health Organization really is rotting from the head. Tedros only replied on the issue of sovereignty, which I briefly mentioned, so now let’s discuss sovereignty in detail.
Tedros insists countries aren’t ceding sovereignty to the World Health Organization and that the pandemic treaty won’t change the sovereignty of member states. It is, he promises, simply a device to help countries better guard against the pandemic. Oh, really? As the United Nations World Health Organization’s advise already achieves that, why go to all this trouble of a three-year development cycle for a treaty that doesn’t change anything? Here’s the case that suggests Tedros is deliberately misleading the public about what the World Health Organization are doing. Remember, this is out in the open. All these documents and statements are available on the World Health Organization website. The zero draft—they had to come up with a new number because the first draft was an embarrassment—clearly shows this is not an agreement about passive advice. The pandemic treaty, despite Tedros’s lies on Twitter, proposes to hold the same authority as all other United Nations treaties. It is a set of instructions that nations, corporations and individuals scripted, people and organisations who had their own interests at heart, not the health, safety and welfare of the Australian people.
Included in the pandemic treaty are the powers to enforce mandatory detention, compulsory vaccination, lockdowns, forced medical procedures, vaccine passports—vaccine prisons, really—closed borders and generally
all the worst parts of the gross global COVID deceit and mismanagement. Australia could be locked down and its people medicated without public consent with no democratic mechanism to reprimand violations of civil liberty—none. Every country is different. Bespoke solutions are essential. The World Health Organization cannot maintain 195 bespoke solutions. It would take the bureaucrats easy way out, one size fits.
The World Health Organization did not offer the best solution to COVID. Arguably that was Sweden with their business-as-usual approach. Several Indian states went their own way, which is now offering rich data on
vaccination and herd immunity. If we’d had an all-powerful Tedros pandemic treaty in place at that time, Sweden and India would have had to comply and the world would not have the information we now have about what worked and what did not work. Perhaps that’s the point. If the World Health Organization can require the whole world to follow the same response, how will we know whether the response was the wrong one? We wouldn’t know. The United Nations World Health Organization loves to hide the truth. The World Health Organization has a proven record of hiding the truth.
As it stands, the only reason that a mob of unelected health bureaucrats based in Geneva is not governing Australia is thanks to a collection of African nations who voted down the first version of the pandemic treaty presented as regulation changes last December. This will not happen again. The 42-member African nations bloc has been offered money, technology, bribes and resources in exchange for their support. Western nations, including Australia, are being sent the bill for this bribing of African nations to the tune of billions of dollars—Australian taxpayers paying bribes. We won’t have it. This is how much Western money Africa has been offered to support the pandemic treaty.
How many understand that this treaty is not just about pandemic management but a permanent system of healthcare aid to the third world? The pandemic treaty proposes allowing health stakeholders, such as vaccine
companies, to sit as voting members to a World Health Organization committee running a pandemic response, with the United Nations World Health Organization declaring potential pandemics—they wouldn’t even have to declare a pandemic, just a potential pandemic. Vaccine companies would have the power to order the use of their vaccines around the world, under World Health Organization orders. These would include companies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the World Health Organization’s second-largest donor. In return, the World Health Organization promotes vaccines from pharmaceutical companies that Bill and Melinda Gates own. The Gates Foundation returns a profit from vaccine purchases to an organisation that promotes vaccine use. It’s a nice circle.
Welcome to cronyism and corruption World Health Organization style, Gates style, big pharma style.
In the detail, the World Health Organization has decreed that this policy instrument makes the WHO ‘the directing and coordinating authority on global health and the leader of multilateral cooperation in global health governance’.
It further insists that it will have powers to control the health response from a global to a regional, national and community level, meaning the World Health Organization—the crooked, corrupt, incompetent and dishonest organisation—will have powers inside every Australian town and suburb, every GP surgery and every state and federal health bureaucrat’s desk. That would leave little room to doubt that the intention of this document is to invade the domestic health processes of each country, right down to the local community health centre.
Who will really exercise these powers? I’ll tell you. The document clearly states that national sovereignty ends where the impact on other countries begins, at which point the United Nations World Health Organization takes over. Who determines what impacts on another country? The World Health Organization, apparently, setting itself up as judge, jury and executioner, with the only right of appeal being the World Health Organization itself. We should ask ourselves: if the World Health Organization declared Sweden to be causing harm to neighbouring countries during the last pandemic, what action would Tedros and the World Health Organization have taken against them? No-one has given an answer to this; indeed, no-one is even curious about these extreme hypothetical powers and what they would look like in even in the most basic real-world scenario.
The SWIFT system of processing international financial transactions was used to enforce sanctions against Russia. This is the most likely method of delivering World Health Organization sanctions, and it has been mooted. The treaty will create a monstrous health bureaucracy that binds Australia to funding the health systems of developing nations, even though we can’t seem to find the money to build hospitals in our own country. Only today there were reports in the media of mothers-to-be in Gladstone, Queensland having to travel hours to get to a maternity centre. Gladstone is a city of 35,000 people, not a village, and it has a maternity unit that is effectively closed to new deliveries. This is a first world country, or it was. Perhaps, if the treaty comes in, Premier Palaszczuk can apply to the World Health Organization to pay for a new birthing unit. That’s sarcasm, by the way. I’d never want them to build any damn thing.
Our states have some of the worst health records in half a century and yet we cannot wait to rush in as global saviours of international health and throw what little money we have left behind the World Health Organization.
The Zero Draft of the WHO pandemic treaty, accord or instrument—whatever the rebranding—must be referred for a detailed review, including the costing. We need to know exactly what the price tag is going to look like. We need to know exactly how much sovereignty will be ceded to an international body that has proven itself to be politically compromised to China, a nation offering sufficient security concerns that our defence minister decided we needed to sign up to AUKUS, in part to provide protection against China.
Under the pandemic treaty, the private medical data of citizens becomes the property of global health bureaucrats and their corporate stakeholders. Your private health data becomes their property. Will this data be deidentified? Not on the current wording, it won’t. We all, in this country, will become vulnerable to foreign health rules, procedures and orders, dictates from bureaucrats that Australia cannot vote out of power and from whom we cannot protect ourselves, nor can we hold these bastards accountable. With unending unlimited power, the pandemic treaty will ensure that nations like Australia, which are least likely to be the cause of a global pandemic, are required to bear an unfair burden of cost for the mistakes of other regimes.
The pandemic treaty is a political document, not a health document, and it must be treated as such. The treaty dictates how much money Australian governments must spend on pandemic prevention—five per cent of annual health budgets. It cedes sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Geneva and New York. It requires Australia to give away a defined percentage of our GDP on international cooperation and assistance on pandemic prevention. It cedes sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Geneva and New York. Under our Constitution’s external affairs powers, the Commonwealth government is empowered to sign away our sovereignty and require the state to make this expenditure. The external affairs powers are being used here in a manner our founding fathers did not envisage. What about the other UN agencies? I imagine they’re all eyeing this one up. What a way to extend their power and their funding—their control! Since when did Australia’s governments allow the UN World Health Organization to make binding demands on public money and the allocation of funds? One Nation completely opposes the UN World Health Organization being issued with a magic credit card, with Australian taxpayers paying the bill.
And what of reviewing the severe risk a unified health response places on national security? Do we want potentially hostile nations knowing exactly how Australia will respond to a pandemic, given that a pandemic might come in the form of a biological weapon? That is what the pandemic treaty demands. Signing this is a violation of national security. We can’t wait until the treaty is completed and passed through parliament, a fait accompli, as every other sovereignty-sapping agreement has been. We can’t wait until then. We have to hit this now. This is far too important. People’s lives are at stake. People’s health is at stake. Our nation’s sovereignty is at stake. Our negotiating committee—permanently based in Zurich!—needs to receive their instructions from the Australian people, not from the pharmaceutical establishment.
At the very least, the pandemic treaty must be submitted for a rigorous, detailed and forensic review to determine exactly what we are agreeing to. This must happen now so the negotiating body understands what the public will accept and what it will not accept. After that, the public must be allowed to decide if it is prepared to cede control of health care, something that has always been proudly under the control of Australia, instead to the international bureaucracy. It’s a question so significant that it’s worthy of a plebiscite. Yet the best we can do is to come into the Senate chamber and beg for a Senate inquiry. This treaty needs an inquiry now to help our negotiators make good decisions—decisions in the national interest, decisions that everyday Australians struggling with an out-of-control cost of living can afford.
I want to make the point that Senator Alex Antic, Senator Pauline Hanson and Senator Ralph Babet are cosponsors and co-movers of the motion. This work on the United Stations started in my very first speech in the Senate in 2016. It has continued, thoroughly, completely, continually, until now. It will continue, because the United Nations and the World Health Organization are corrupt, dishonest, disgraceful, inhuman entities. I will not shut up on this until we exit from the United Nations. I call on an Aus-exit. After years of Liberal, Labor and the Greens gutlessly ceding sovereignty over many aspects of this country, we will chase and hold accountable governments on this, just as we did on the cash ban and won on that.
Senator Malcolm Roberts
The World Health Organisation is a vehicle of corruption and deceit
A dose of trouble: Australians injured by Covid vaccines ‘forgotten’
Many of those who experienced severe reactions and even the death of loved ones want their experiences studied so they can understand: Why were most people absolutely fine after their Covid vaccines while others, clearly, were not?
By Christine Middap
Bruce and Sophie Sedgwick with a photograph of daughter Amy. Picture: Britta Campion
From Inquirer
April 1, 2023
It was a reassuring announcement that most people would have missed in those dark days of August 2021 when Melbourne had just entered its sixth Covid lockdown and the army and police were patrolling parts of Sydney to enforce strict stay-at-home rules.
Covid deaths were edging close to 1000 and only about a quarter of adults had received their second immunisation. People were spooked by changing advice about the readily available AstraZeneca vaccine following higher than expected cases of a rare blood-clotting disorder that, by August 5 that year, had been linked with the deaths of six people aged 35 to 72 and sent others to hospital.
It was a confusing and frightening time when federal health minister Greg Hunt announced a comprehensive national no-fault indemnity scheme would provide Australians moderately or severely injured by a Covid vaccine with a “simple and quick” process for compensation. “Serious and life-threatening side effects are very rare, but it is important that we provide a safety net to support those affected,” he said.
Eighteen months on, that compensation scheme is mired in confusion and obscurity – further evidence, say people who have suffered a severe reaction, that they have been neglected and forgotten like bad memories.
“It’s a really complicated scheme,” says lawyer Donna McManus, whose small Brisbane-based firm Murphy’s Law has advised more than 300 people, many relating to cardiac issues suspected to be linked to a Covid vaccine. “It’s like they’re making it as hard as they can for people to submit a successful claim.”
Only seven narrow medical conditions are eligible, the paperwork is onerous for applicants and their busy physicians, and the process is lengthy and repetitive.
There’s an added complication: “Doctors will acknowledge their belief it was an injury caused by the vaccine but some are unwilling to put it in writing,” McManus says, citing a directive by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency that medical professionals could be sanctioned for expressing concerns about the vaccine.
Sydney GP Kerryn Phelps, whose wife Jackie suffered a serious neurological reaction within minutes of her first Pfizer vaccination and is still significantly affected, confirms that vaccine injury is a subject few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about.
“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunisation, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration,” Phelps said in her submission to a parliamentary inquiry into long Covid. She revealed she had also suffered a vaccine injury following her second Pfizer shot.
McManus says she has assured medicos they can give evidence for their patients on a government compensation scheme. “But I think it (the AHPRA directive) terrified a lot of doctors,” she adds.
Rather than being a simple and quick process as promised by Hunt, Services Australia, which operates the scheme, now admits the assessment process can be complex. Of the 3395 claims so far, just 126 have been approved and $7.2m paid out. A further 2357 are in progress or awaiting further information, 562 have been rejected and 350 withdrawn.
Naomi Smith suffered pericarditis. Picture: Brian Cassey
“For the few who meet the eligibility criteria the process is extraordinarily complex and places an extreme burden on desperately unwell people,” says Naomi Smith, who suffered pericarditis (inflammation of the thin sac that surrounds the heart) linked by doctors to her Pfizer shot. She is involved in advocating for others through the support group Coverse. “I only personally know one person who has submitted and been successful, the rest are either awaiting outcomes, are ineligible or are waiting until they are well enough to deal with the bureaucracy.”
The Weekend Australian has spoken to several people who have been enmeshed in the process. Sydney chartered accountant Habib Khan suffered heart failure secondary to myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) after his first Pfizer injection and required life support and many months of rehabilitation. Even with his professional background, the claim process was complex, he said, and the compensation he received did not reflect his losses.
Habib Khan suffered heart failure secondary to myocarditis. Picture: John Feder
Adelaide mother Rachael Crabb made a claim after her then 15-year-old son developed pericarditis medically linked to his second Pfizer vaccine. He required surgery and has ongoing effects but Crabb’s claim was knocked back by Services Australia because, as a child, Ethan hadn’t suffered financial impact even though his parents had.
Brisbane man Mike Hand, who developed myocarditis that his doctors believed was likely caused by his AstraZenenca vaccine, says his claim was refused because myocarditis is claimable only against a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. This is despite the Health Department’s own advisory that says, “There is a small risk of myocarditis and/or pericarditis following AstraZeneca.”
The compensation scheme involves public money and no one is suggesting it should be open slather; claimants must be able to show medically that their condition is causally linked with the vaccine. But in an environment where everyone had to “do their bit”, and where personal freedoms and, for some, the ability to work were curtailed by the requirement to be fully vaccinated, the small cohort who were injured expect it should at least be fit for purpose.
Pediatrician Nick Wood, a professor in clinical vaccinology at the University of Sydney, recently returned from a Churchill Fellowship looking at the management of vaccine reactions. He says compensation is an important part of a vaccine safety scheme.
“The fact is that although serious adverse events after vaccinations, both Covid and non-Covid, are rare, these should be acknowledged, explained and compensated by the government and well managed and resourced,” he said.
Wood says Australia should expand its claims scheme to cover all vaccines on the national program. “New vaccines are coming, for example respiratory syncytial virus vaccines, which use new technology and may potentially lead to new adverse events. An Australian claims scheme is particularly needed given our mandates – No Jab No Pay and No Jab No Play.”
His next statement, made on a Churchill Fellowship media statement, will give people who suffered side effects some hope. “One of my key findings is that long-term follow-up of rare but serious adverse reactions should be a routine part of our vaccine safety surveillance system.”
Dr Nick Wood says Australia should expand its claims scheme to cover all vaccines on the national program.
Compensation issues aside, people who have spoken to The Weekend Australian want their experiences to be recorded and studied so they and others can understand a simple question: Why were most people absolutely fine after their Covid vaccines while others, clearly, were not?
Jennifer Martin, a general physician and clinical pharmacologist at the University of Newcastle, explains it in the context of an unprecedented public health emergency. “We didn’t initially have any medicines or vaccines and we were seeing significant mortality,” she says. “When treatments and vaccines became available there was relief that this mortality could be prevented. We were very busy with the pandemic response, and people were so focused on preventing hospitalisation or death from Covid that we hadn’t had time to set up systems to collect national data on health outcomes from the various interventions including vaccines.
“I think it’s easy to forget the situation we were in, in 2020, and the decisions that had to be made to protect the population. Out of necessity we had to be focused on preventing harms from Covid. Knowledge of the rare but real adverse events that were being reported from the surveys post vaccine, and through the regulatory agencies globally on medicines, were known but appeared relatively similar to other medicines and vaccines.”
Martin says information is needed as more vaccines roll out. “People ring me, as a clinical pharmacologist and toxicologist, worried that if they had an adverse reaction to the last one should they go ahead and get a fourth or fifth vaccine. Or if they had rebound Covid symptoms from their antiviral course should they take a repeat course – again, this is an evidence-free zone currently – so we give the best advice we can. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation has made recommendations to guide doctors on the risk-benefit for a particular vaccine for a particular population group.”
Now the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, many experts have said they want more information, not just about vaccine side effects but long Covid and why some people suffered a severe response to the infection itself.
This quest for more data, and growing recognition of the small cohort who suffered vaccine injuries, doesn’t deny the benefits of the vaccination program or diminish how serious and deadly a Covid infection was for many people.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, up to January this year Covid was the underlying cause of death for 12,639 people. It was a contributing factor in the deaths of a further 3033 people who died of other causes. The median age for those who died was 85.6 years (83.9 years for males, 87.6 years for females).
The Therapeutic Goods Administration’s most recent vaccine safety report says of more than 65 million doses of Covid vaccines, almost 138,000 adverse events have been reported. (A report does not mean the event has been determined to be caused by the vaccine.) Of 982 deaths reviewed, 14 have been linked to vaccination (13 to the first AstraZeneca dose and one to the Moderna booster). The age range was 21 to 81.
“Vaccines can lead to death in extremely rare instances,’’ the TGA notes. “However most deaths that occur after vaccination are not caused by the vaccine.”
The regulator says a causal relationship between the vaccines and the side effects is usually not certain. “The symptoms may be related to an underlying illness or to other factors … The symptoms may have occurred coincidentally.” Some people’s symptoms may reflect long Covid. It’s a complex picture. But the TGA advice is clear: “Vaccination against Covid-19 is the most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from infection. The protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks.”
However, questions have arisen about the process for reviewing and following up adverse reactions and deaths. Sydney parents Bruce and Sophie Sedgwick recently spoke of their frustration in trying to get answers after their daughter Amy’s health suddenly and drastically deteriorated following her Pfizer immunisations. The previously healthy 24-year-old, who had a mild underlying condition, unexpectedly died in her sleep 12 months ago. An autopsy could not determine a cause of death.
Her father reported her severe reaction, linked by her treating physician to the vaccine, to the TGA. But even after Amy’s death, her family has heard nothing more from the regulator or any other expert review panel. A year on, her case sits with the coroner, who may take many more months to report an outcome.
Amy Sedgwick’s health suddenly and drastically deteriorated following her Pfizer immunisations.
“In our opinion, all aspects of that government vaccine portal are grossly inadequate,” her parents told a parliamentary inquiry. “Lessons must be learnt.”
In one case where the TGA investigated and accepted a link between a young woman’s death and her Moderna booster, her family has said they were kept out of the loop. Natalie Boyce, 21, was a healthy law student with an underlying blood-clotting condition, antiphospholipid syndrome, who developed myocarditis following her booster. The TGA convened an expert panel that accepted her death was likely linked to the vaccine and recommended that existing health warnings in the product information be updated to clarify that myocarditis could occur in females as well as males and after a booster dose. The symptoms, they said, could be atypical
Natalie’s mother, Deborah Hamilton, told news.com.au the first she heard of the investigation was when the coroner’s office contacted her last September as a “courtesy” to inform her the TGA would be releasing a report that might attract media attention. “I’m disgusted that the TGA has not contacted or given me any of those reports,” she said.
As a regulatory organisation the TGA does not routinely give feedback or contact individual cases. But after the largest mass immunisation program to be conducted in Australia, who should be responsible for closing the loop between families and patients affected by vaccine injuries and the authorities?
The federal government is planning to establish a Centre for Disease Control to improve Australia’s response and preparedness for public health emergencies. Wood says a dedicated immunisation safety office could be part of this new body.
And he says some long-term studies are now under way. The organisation AusVaxSafety is tracking outcomes in patients who developed myocarditis associated with the mRNA vaccines, and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a rare blood-clotting condition related to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
A larger Queensland study of 10,000 people that aimed to uncover why the Covid virus and vaccinations affect people differently will not be funded beyond June this year and is looking for a new sponsor. A global genomics study is looking at Guillain-Barre syndrome, TTS and myocarditis/pericarditis to understand who is at risk from these rare adverse events and why.
Wood and his colleagues will have no problem finding subjects willing to participate in future studies. Brisbane physiotherapist Amanda Sires, 44, developed a constellation of side effects that began with pericarditis and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which causes rapid heart rate, dizziness and fatigue, before progressing to other neurological symptoms. She says the pericarditis was bad but, 17 months on, it’s the ongoing neurological issues that are proving debilitating. “I’ve got partial paralysis of my legs, I can only walk 100m on a good day. I’ve had to hire a carer to look after my kids and I’ve spent $50,000 on medical bills over the last 17 months. It’s crippling financially, emotionally and physically.”
Sires is in a unique position in that her identical twin, Tanya Winter, had a near identical response following vaccination. “There’s obviously a strong genetic link as to why we’ve reacted this way and I’ve been saying, ‘study us!’ ” she says, adding that she updates the TGA regularly on her progress even though it never responds.
“You think you are reporting something that is quite alarming and/or interesting and/or could be the key to solving why certain people are responding badly to the vaccinations, and you never hear back.
“I cannot understand why no one is interested.”