Some people claim that 60 per cent of all statistics, like this one, are just made up out of thin air. On 26 March, the ABS published its monthly statistics for all of last year. The baseline average used is for the number of deaths in the four years 2017, ‘18. ‘19 and ‘21. The first thing to note is that the number of Covid-related deaths increased from 855 in 2020 to 1,231, 9,840, and 4,387 in the next three years. The vaccine rollout from early 2021 had a very high take-up: 95.5 per cent of over-16s were double vaccinated by the end of April 2022. Yet there were 43 per cent more deaths in 2021 and a staggering 11.5 times as many deaths in 2022 as in pre-vaccine 2020. And there were more than five times as many deaths in 2023, by which time the pandemic was supposedly over. If this indicates vaccine success, what would constitute vaccine failure? This contradicts all the bombastic claims of the public health clerisy about the great success of their pandemic management interventions (lockdowns, masks and vaccines). How many times did Scott Morrison claim that his Covid management policies saved 40,000 lives? Rather, it vindicates the core claims of vaccine critics. Once a virus is already seeded in the community, it cannot be eradicated but only managed until it becomes endemic. Stringent restrictions on social interactions would delay but could not avoid a reckoning. Consequently, the trajectory of the rise and fall of the coronavirus was likely to be policy-invariant. Among countries, the standout proof of this is Sweden which took the sensible decision of staying with the existing science and policy recommendations based on 100 years of research, data and experience, rather than risk the radical, evidence-free lockdown and mask measures instituted by panicked governments. Its Covid health outcomes today are no worse than the European average and its economic, educational and social outcomes are substantially better. A 34-country study in November in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the US ‘would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden’.

Let that sink in.

The second striking feature of the ABS data is the phenomenon of excess deaths, defined as ‘the difference between the observed number of deaths in a specified time period and the expected numbers of deaths in that same time period’. During the Covid years, excess death estimates were ‘used to provide information about the burden of mortality potentially related to the Covid-19 pandemic, including deaths that are directly or indirectly attributed to Covid-19’. Notice the sleight of hand here. There is no mention of deaths resulting, either directly or indirectly, from the policies to deal with the pandemic, only to the viral disease. Why does this matter? ‘Iatrogenic’ means a disease or problem ‘caused by medical treatment or by a doctor’, says the Cambridge Dictionary. An example of its use in a sentence is: ‘Over 100,000 deaths occur in North America from iatrogenic disease, which means doctor- or drug-induced disease’.

Because billions of Covid vaccines were administered by the revolutionary mRNA platform under emergency use authorisation before the traditional multi-year safety and efficacy tests normally required of new vaccines, public health authorities and drug regulators should have been extra vigilant about potential iatrogenic harms caused by vaccines. Instead, too many seem to have operated as drug enablers rather than regulators. There has been an extensive debate – out in the real world beyond the one inhabited by the top executives of the major vaccine manufacturers, public health bureaucrats and the medical establishment – of the full magnitude and severity of Covid-19 vaccine injury, including deaths. Many studies have found strong correlations between vaccination rollouts, rates and number of shots with excess deaths.

Igor Chudov, for example, found that vaccination rates explain 24 per cent of the excess mortality across 31 European countries, which is statistically highly significant. A study published in February looked at death rates by vaccination status among hospitalised patients with Covid and found that in the over-50s, the vaccinated group had almost double the mortality rate of the unvaccinated group. Moreover, those with more doses had higher mortality rates.

A major risk-benefit assessment of vaccine booster shots for 18 to 29-year-olds published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in January found that to prevent one Covid hospitalisation of a previously uninfected person, 22,000 to 30,000 must be boosted with an mRNA vaccine. But for one hospitalisation prevented, between 18 to 98 serious adverse events can be expected. The net risk-benefit ratio is even less favourable owing to the high prevalence of post-infection immunity in that population group and the lack of compelling public health benefits as vaccines have only transient effectiveness against transmission. Mandates cause wider social harms, like curtailing access to educational and job opportunities, reputational damage, threats of disenrolment and deportation, generating mistrust in society and public institutions and fuelling vaccine hesitancy for life-saving paediatric and adult vaccines.

Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, and clinical epidemiologist, Dr Tom Jefferson, ask why the UK Health Security Agency refuses to disclose to parliament and the public data that it holds on mortality by number of vaccine doses? Could it be because data from the complementary Office of National Statistics show that excess deaths have been primarily in the vaccinated, suggesting but not proving that vaccines may be playing some role? On 2 March, a cross-party group of 21 British MPs and peers criticised the ‘wall of silence’ on the topic and wrote to Health Secretary Victoria Atkins about the ‘growing public and professional concerns’ at the UK’s rates of excess deaths since 2020. On 21 March, it was announced that the House of Commons will have a debate on excess deaths on 18 April.

Returning to Australia, the non-Covid number of excess deaths was 16,046 in 2022 (9.7 per cent) and 12,345 last year (7.5 per cent). There’s no conclusive evidence that vaccination is a, or the, primary cause of excess mortality. But there are enough concerning safety signals that the matter needs proper investigation. On 26 March the Senate voted 31-30 to hold an inquiry into factors contributing to excess deaths by the Community Affairs References Committee. Senator Ralph Babet, the prime instigator behind the motion, thinks this might be a world-first inquiry. All the Green and Labor senators voted against this. Seriously? What do they want to keep hidden? In striking contrast to the enthusiastic vaccine take-up in 2021 and 2022, in the six months to March this year, only 3.3 per cent of 18 to 64-year-olds had received a booster and in the much more vulnerable 65 to 74 year olds, only 21.4 per cent had, according to the Department of Health. Are the Greens and Labor not interested in knowing the vaccine truth and restoring public trust in the integrity of our public institutions, including health systems and parliaments?