Where has all the science gone?
Short time passing,
The powers have blurred them every one,
Oh. When will we ever learn?

The Covid-19 pandemic was not a surprise. The surprise was that it was a coronavirus not influenza.

Influenza becomes ‘pandemic’ when a mutated virus escapes containment from the mucosal compartment of the airway to threaten the gas exchange part of the lung. Uncharacteristically on this occasion, a coronavirus mutated giving it invasive features.

We feared a pandemic like the Spanish flu in 1919 – and that is what we got! A common denominator was our ‘island quarantine’ protecting us from high mortality early pandemic experience; the world mortality for Spanish flu was about 10 per cent, and for Covid-19 it was one per cent. In both, 40 to 50 per cent of Australians had infections, with overall mortalities similar at 0.6 per cent for flu, and 0.2 per cent for Covid-19 (though 3 per cent 12 months earlier).

There are two reasons why Australian pandemic experience relates to Covid-19. First, with bubonic plague in 1900, then four influenza pandemics, health professionals built an independent world-class medical, scientific, and public health framework tailored to pandemics in an Australia influenced by its geography. This history began with Ashburton Thompson’s refusal to accept plague as ‘place infection’. He replaced accepted practice of quarantining patients and contacts, with eradication of ‘sick rats’, reducing both mortality and costs. There followed science-based programs culminating in the Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza (AHMP) in 2019.

Second, the influenza experience was a valuable model for Covid-19 management, with similar pathogenesis and epidemiologic metrics. Yet Covid-19 came with a narrative developed by USA interest groups supported by the World Health Organisation, centred on a novel genetic vaccine using technologies untested in man. Missing was 100 years of Australian experience, embodied in the evidence-based AHMP that differed substantially from the ‘Covid-19 narrative’. The critical differences between strategies were the place of vaccines, and the respective roles of the physician or the health bureaucracy and government in medical decision making. The AHMP saw vaccines as an important component of management, but not its centrepiece, based on an 80-year experience with influenza vaccines, and an understanding of mucosal immunology.

The AHMP emphasised communication and integration of services, the values of learned experience and of maximising current evidence, the importance of transparent surveillance data and a flexibility enabling responses proportionate to needs. Three key components of the Covid-19 narrative ran counter to the AHMP: shutdowns, failure to use available safe re-purposed drugs, and placing novel untested genetic vaccines front and centre of Covid-19 management.

The AHMP’s stated response was to characterise the epidemiology of the pandemic in an Australian context, and identify at-risk individuals, to enable a targeted response.

That was not done in Australia. It was in California by Stanford epidemiologists within weeks of the first case report, finding 2.8 per cent had already been infected, 40 per cent asymptomatic, and mortality at 0.17 per cent. Covid-19 was a highly infectious mild-moderate illness, more widely spread than anticipated. These surprising results led to the Great Barrington Declaration aimed at protecting the at-risk elderly and frail while allowing a more normal lifestyle amongst the healthy young, who by exposure to the virus would develop natural immunity. Sweden chose this approach: infection rate was half that of Australia with less economic contraction and open schools and businesses. Lockdowns delay but do not reduce infections as they also delay natural immunity.

The AHMP emphasised the immediate use of innovative available evidence-based therapies. That was not done in Australia. Without precedent safe, cheap, available and effective re-purposed drugs were denigrated, made illegal, and targeted by conflicted non-medical ‘fact-checkers’. Yet early treatment showed 76 per cent reduction in mortality for hydroxychloroquine (16 studies) and 49 per cent for ivermectin (51 studies). Australians were told, ‘There is no treatment – stay at home until you are breathless, then go to hospital.’ Doctors were unable to make decisions that could save lives.

The AHMP recognised that access to a customised vaccine based on the infecting strain is ‘one of the main goals of response’, not the main goal. It was understood that injected vaccines give short-term protection to airway infection and such vaccines had most impact on severe outcomes. Repeated vaccination, akin to repeated antigen injections to suppress allergy, leads to progressive immune suppression. Annual spacing was critical to avoid disease promotion. Traditional antigen vaccines were safe.

This did not occur in Australia. Opportunity to use antigen vaccines was declined in favour of untested mRNA genetic vaccines. mRNA vaccines behaved as expected with short-term protection against severe disease but requiring as many as four or five vaccinations in two years to maintain protection. Repeated boosters stimulated progressively less immunity of shorter duration, creating a cycle where repeated boosters were used to maintain some protection and avoid disease promotion due to ‘negative immunity’.

Safety must always be the primary consideration for any vaccine. A watershed moment for mRNA vaccines came with a secondary analysis of company data from the registration trials made available only following a court order. There was a greater chance of hospitalisation from adverse effects, than there was reduced hospitalisation from vaccine-induced protection. mRNA spreads systemically, creating ‘foreign’ antigens on cells throughout the body as targets for autoimmune disease, particularly in the heart. Across the vaccinated world increased unexplained deaths of 10 to 20 per cent link only with vaccination. At best, the profusion of adverse events reported are red flags demanding review.

A tsunami of genetic challenges due to reversal of ‘message’ into host DNA, contamination of vaccine with DNA, and liposomal carrier toxicity add to the unanswered question, why take this route, that is toxic without advantage? I posit that, as per the AMPH guidelines, early epidemiological analysis of infection followed by high-level protection for those identified ‘at-risk’, with extensive use of repurposed drugs then antigen vaccines spaced to avoid suppression as the pandemic merged into a seasonal pattern, would have shortened the pandemic, reduced morbidity and mortality, avoided safety concerns for mRNA vaccines and minimalised economic costs.

Retention of primary decision-making for strategic responses to pandemics and planning for long-term medical self-reliance based on Australian science-based experience, strong institutional frameworks, and geographic peculiarities, was in relief with Covid-19 due to the imposition of external self-serving strategies. National interest must guide objective review of our Covid-19 experience, the rejection of ‘one-size-fits-all’ WHO control of our pandemic future, and pausing development of industrial production of mRNA vaccines unless toxicity concerns are resolved.