The past couple of months have seen some quite startling Covid studies published in reputable medical journals that should be dominating our discussions in Australia about how we handle the virus as we move into its fourth year.

One of the most concerning papers – from a US government agency no less – has revealed that the serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines recorded during the original clinical trials, may have been more prevalent than first suggested.

More disturbingly, two of the papers’ esteemed authors have expressed serious concerns that the pharmaceutical companies, and the US Food and Drug Administration, are withholding critical data that could help us understand more specifically who these adverse events are most likely to impact.

Published in an official US government journal, one paper was a re-analysis of the original Phase 3 Trial studies conducted by the main mRNA vaccine developers, Pfizer and Moderna.

Why a re-analysis? Because back in 2020, before the vaccine rollout, the World Health Organisation endorsed a way of categorising adverse events known as the Brighton Collaboration. A group of scientists – including Prof. Robert M Kaplan, Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of California’s UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and Prof. Sander Greenland, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology and Statistics at UCLA – set about mapping the original clinical trial data against these new agreed categories.

What they found (perhaps unsurprisingly) hasn’t had the media attention it deserved.

The re-analysis showed there were 101 more ‘serious adverse events of special interest’ per 100,000 people vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine and 151 more per 100,000 for the Moderna shots than in a placebo control group.

That’s an average of one serious adverse event for every 800 people vaccinated with an mRNA shot, or to put it another way, 1,250 events per million people. Given 20 million Australians have had two shots, mostly with mRNA vaccines, that means around 25,000 people would have experienced serious adverse events.

Not only did our health bureaucracies knowingly promote the mRNA vaccines on the basis of this data, they coercively mandated them for the majority of Australians. This is inexcusable.

This US government study follows one conducted by the highly respected Paul Ehrlich Institute, an agency of Germany’s federal health department, which showed there were 1.7 suspected adverse events, and 0.2 serious adverse events, per 1,000 doses of vaccine given. This study covered all vaccines – not just the mRNA ones – and the data are reported per shot given, not per person treated. That’s 20 serious events per 100,000 shots. A more conservative figure perhaps, but no less concerning. 64.5 million shots have been given in Australia, so this study suggests 12,900 serious adverse events will have occurred.

Given there’s a lot of unexplained excess deaths happening, it’d be good if the authorities considered whether Australians not in high-risk groups really do need Covid vaccine booster shots.

The Australian Actuaries Institute’s special Covid working group puts excess deaths from January to August 2022 at 15,400 – 13 per cent more than usual – attributing 8,200 of the excess directly to Covid and 2,100 having it as a contributing cause.

That leaves 5,100 excess deaths having no link to the virus, in just eight months. Can these be attributed to factors other than vaccination injury? Delayed diagnoses and treatments caused by Covid lockdowns – another hasty and dubious government intervention Australians enjoyed thanks to their state bureaucrats in 2020 and 2021 – could certainly be one factor.

It’s interesting to note however that deaths from cancer were not above the expected levels, while cardio-vascular (heart and blood vessel) related deaths accounted for most of the excess.

Of course, the $64 million question remains: how many people would have died of Covid, or suffered serious long-term injury, had the vaccines not been rolled out? But the ethical argument that an overall public good outweighs individual suffering, is not a view that modern Western liberal democracies usually accept without question. That’s how authoritarian and collectivist regimes tend to think. We’re supposed to put far more weight on the individual’s right to make a fully informed personal decision about the risks and benefits. We don’t typically ‘kill ten to save a thousand’ unless the ten volunteer to take the risk, fully aware of the probable outcomes.

Even if we were throwing out centuries of Western liberal ethical thought to save the majority, in the way China or the Taliban might, a public policy mandate would still only have been justifiable in the times of the more deadly Wuhan, Alpha, and Delta strains. The far less dangerous Omicron variants, dominant since mid-late 2021, greatly impact the risk-benefit equation.

‘Given that we are in Omicron times now and that, for the vast majority of people, this is a much less serious infection, the risk-benefit analysis has changed,’ notes popular UK medical educator Dr John Campbell in one of his almost daily video talks.

Yet what change do we hear in the advice from our esteemed Australian health bureaucrats regarding vaccination and boosters? Almost none.

In Australia’s most pro-big-government state, Victoria, the Health Department’s website has mellowed its rhetoric to more legally cautious language. There’s a bit less ‘selling’ of the vaccine than in the early days, but the adverse effects warnings don’t provide any specific risk data.

‘All vaccines have a rare risk of severe side effects. Your provider will share what to watch for. If you experience these side effects, you should talk to a GP immediately,’ the site suggests.

Queensland Health’s vaccine website is a little more specific: ‘There is a very rare and serious risk of a condition called TTS with AstraZeneca vaccine and myocarditis or pericarditis from Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines,’ it warns.

Government actions in improving communications around Covid seem to be focused only on removing ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ and shutting-down dissent like an authoritarian state. A far more effective and intelligent approach would be to provide more correct information and education – clearly, openly, and honestly answering obvious questions of concern and being truthful about the knowns and unknowns at each point in the journey.

But no. In nanny-state Australia, it’s ‘shut up and do what we say and don’t ask questions!’

It’s little wonder health bureaucrats’ credibility with the general public is on such shaky ground and conspiracy theories flourish. Continuing to treat the public like children and expecting blind compliance, is not the way to build trust and confidence.

Dr Campbell notes that the 1976 Swine Flu vaccine was withdrawn on the basis of just one serious adverse event per 100,000 people vaccinated. Similarly, the 1999 Rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn temporarily when it was found there were 1-2 serious adverse events per 10,000 people inoculated.

The readiness of our public health officials to tolerate much more risk on our behalf and without our approval these days is concerning, to say the least. It’s more than a little irresponsible when you’re heavily promoting a vaccine, but completely unforgivable when you’re mandating the thing.

But the story gets even worse.

Professors Kaplan and Greenland have noted that the authorities are knowingly hindering research that could help us identify which age-groups and genders are most risk of serious adverse events.

In a letter written after their team’s research was conducted, the UCLA professors noted that:

‘Regrettably, our analysis was hindered by an addressable problem: The individual-level data that could confirm or refute our analysis have not been made public. Pfizer, Moderna, and the FDA have these data, but have kept them hidden from public view. This information is essential to the understanding of the balance between vaccine benefits and harms. We are calling upon Pfizer, Moderna, and the FDA to release all information needed for a comprehensive assessment of these products.’

It’s fair to ask why a government agency like the US FDA is withholding this data. It’s supposed to be the agency that takes care of the public’s interests by putting pressure on pharmaceutical companies to behave responsibly, not join-in the irresponsible game of withholding vital information.

‘Covid vaccines are now among the most widely disseminated medicines in the history of the world. They have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars,’ the professors rightly note. We’ve already paid handsomely for this data they’re keeping from us.

‘“Open data” is becoming the norm in science,’ they add. ‘The time has come for the FDA and EMA to reopen their investigations, and for Pfizer, Moderna, and all vaccine manufacturers to provide the data that will allow scientists and physicians to address outstanding concerns.’

I’ve deliberately limited my new year analysis of Covid vaccine adverse events in this article to the most rigorous published science. This will no doubt frustrate the many Spectator Australia readers who are already highly sceptical of vaccines brought to market in record time, but I hope they will understand my obvious reasons for relying only on published studies to make this case. We cannot allow the continuing childish cries of ‘conspiracy theory!’ to drown out scientific truth any longer. This focus on hard science only, in no way should detract from the reality that more anecdotal cases of vaccine injury emerge every day, even from sources as unlikely as Dr Kerryn Phelps.

Three things are now certain: coercive mandates were unjustifiable and we must put strong laws in place to ensure this can never happen in our country again; we immediately need an independent Australian investigation into Covid vaccine-related injury and death; and we need to demand from our American friends the urgent release of the individual participant data from the original trials as the UCLA professors have urged.

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