Today I received a gratifying message from my mother who lives in Brazil. The message, which refers to Brazilian journalists reporting on Dr Anthony Fauci’s recent appearance to the US Congress, is translated as follows:

‘They are now praising all those who were against vaccines and in favour of alternative treatments. Today I will praise you, my son, who was an ardent defender against these “vaccines”. You were right from the very beginning, as were some brave medical doctors.’

I was deeply moved. My mother knows how much, during those awful times, I took the risk of opposing Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates that had no real scientific backing.

I feel myself entirely vindicated.

It is now public knowledge that Dr Anthony Fauci, former Chief Medical Advisor to the President of United States, allegedly obscured the suspected origins of Covid and potential health effects of Covid vaccines.

Although Dr Fauci allegedly attempted to suppress the ‘lab-leak theory’, his newly released private diary entries and internal emails appear to reveal that he acknowledged the virus was possibly engineered and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

We also know there was what can only be described as an obstruction of information by other individuals when it comes to what I believe are the severe risks associated with mRNA vaccines. Vaccine side effects, such as instances of myocarditis or blood clots, were ultimately identified and published in reputable medical science publications.

Former US President, Joe Biden, issued a full and unconditional pardon of Dr Fauci in January 2025 during his final hours in office. He received a pre-emptive pardon which protects him from potential federal offences related to the disastrous pandemic response work, covering:

• The period between January 1, 2014, and January 19, 2025.
• His official duties as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
• His service on the White House Coronavirus Task Force and COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.

During the Covid years, I addressed many public gatherings and wrote numerous articles and books expressing serious concerns about the measures that were being taken across the world, especially in Australia.

The first of these articles, published on March 26, 2020, was an Open Letter the then Prime Minister of Australia.

Entitled Dear PM, a World to Ponder: Proportion, I advised Scott Morrison to exercise due caution and not make hasty decisions with devastating socio-economic impacts for the nation.

Unfortunately, my advice was completely ignored.

As a consequence, it is my view that the people of Australia paid a very heavy price.

I continued writing my articles during Covid, especially about lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I estimate that I published more than 50 articles, some of them published in The Spectator Australia.

Many of these articles were co-authored by Emeritus Professor Gabriel A. Moens AM. We even wrote a book a few weeks before vaccination was made mandatory in Australia – Emergency Powers, Covid-19 Restrictions & Mandatory Vaccination: A Rule-of-Law Perspective (Connor Court Publishing, 2022).

The book introduced its readers, inter alia, to potential harms of what we believe to be insufficiently tested vaccines and the unconstitutional use of emergency powers in Australia. It focused on an interpretation of section 51(xxiiiA) of the Australian Constitution to assess the constitutional invalidity of vaccine mandates.

It is also worth mentioning that the law journal I am its editor-in-chief, published a special edition in October 2020 entitled Fundamental Rights in the Age of Covid-19 (Connor Court Publishing, 2020). It gathered an impressive list of leading legal academics and policy makers to address the profound impact of Covid measures on the enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms.

In this book, Emeritus Professor Rex Ahdar critically reflected upon the serious cost of lockdowns. His chapter showed that the mitigation strategy was a preferable strategy once the indirect and long-term costs and benefits of more radical measures were considered.

Professor James Allan explained how the Australian government mishandled its response to the coronavirus, significantly infringing civil liberties and dramatically expanding the government’s role with no palatable route out of this situation.

Morgan Begg critically analysed Victoria’s public health emergency laws. He provided an insightful examination of the heavy costs of policy responses, indicating that Victoria’s modern public health legislation gave too much scope to ministers and the Chief Health Officer.

Professor David Flint AM argued that the Australian government’s response to the coronavirus was based on an overreaction that failed to pay due regard to the best scientific evidence. There was no guarantee of minimal restrictions on the exercise of fundamental rights. To the contrary, the response of Australia’s political authorities was disastrous, proving deeply costly to millions of Australians.

Professor Anthony Gray considered whether Western Australia’s border closures in response to Covid-19 were consistent with section 92 of the Australian Constitution, which provides that trade, commerce and intercourse among the States shall be absolutely free. He concluded that these border restrictions should be held constitutionally invalid, because they were not proportionate to a legitimate objective, and because they did not show to be reasonably necessary.

Dr Rocco Loiacono, in turn, provided an exposure of the ‘dictatorship of the health bureaucracy’ whereby unelected officials enacted policies that exerted unreasonable control over our lives. This would have, as he correctly predicted, serious implications for the right to informed consent, which is fundamental in the administration of medical treatment.

In his contribution, Professor Gabriël A. Moens AM briefly described the restrictions imposed on people to allegedly combat Covid. He characterised these restrictions as having an enormously deleterious effect on the basic rights of Australians, including unintended consequences for the protection of their own personal health. Professor Moens also assessed the constitutionality of Covid-19 laws and regulations, highlighting the arbitrariness of government actions.

These were just some of the articles published by our law journal, The Australian Jurist (formerly The Western Australian Jurist), in the very first days of Covid.

Australian States relied on lockdowns and border closures to slow, or to eliminate, the spread of the virus and its variants. These measures were promised to be only temporary, and they were welcomed by the electorate that returned the governments of Queensland and Tasmania to power, and the government of Western Australia, in March 2021.

When Covid vaccines, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna became available, Australian governments, embarked on what I view as a reckless program of coercively vaccinating the majority of the population. It promised to relax the restrictions and to abandon lockdowns and border closures, provided at least 80 per cent of the population was vaccinated with a first and second dose. The Australian governments also encouraged those who are vaccinated to get a booster shots, available six months after the second vaccination.

To reach or to surpass the goal of 80 per cent of fully vaccinated people, the Australian States decided that the unvaccinated would be treated differently to the vaccinated. In practice, this meant that they would lose their freedoms to travel and to socialise, or even to go to restaurants and attend football matches, or music festivals.

The unvaccinated were barred from locations, dismissed from their jobs under a ‘no jab, no job’ policy, and denied movement freedoms. In the same vein, businesses that accepted unvaccinated people were subject to exceptionally heavy fines. Private employers were ‘encouraged’ to require their workforce to be fully vaccinated. In many States, unvaccinated people were not allowed to visit clubs, restaurants, cafés, theatres, museums, and libraries. Even supermarkets excluded unvaccinated customers.

Relying on the advice of World Health Organisation during Covid, the official narrative in Australia was that these vaccines are safe, efficacious, and working well.

However, it is my view this claim has been found to be untrue, as demonstrated by both the science and the statistics. Indeed, medical scientists have now discovered that mRNA vaccines can, in some cases, cause serious health issues, up to and including death.

For example, a cost-benefit analysis by Dr Stephanie Seneff, senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posits that: ‘All age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a Covid vaccination than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a Covid death.’

Be that as it may, the Australian government effectively treated any reasonable concern about the safety of vaccines as a form of domestic terrorism. From 2017 to 2022 alone, the Department of Home Affairs petitioned social media sites to censor all information about these matters no less than 13,646 times. This included suppressed Covid posts from doctors who disagreed with or even questioned official public health and vaccine information.

Especially egregious was the admonishment and deregistration of Australian doctors who attempted to provide vaccine exemptions or prescribe alternative medicines, such as ivermectin, to alleviate or prevent Covid–19. ‘The conclusion taken from the collective authoritarian decisions is that medical choice is no longer a prerogative of the doctor-patient relationship in Australia,’ says Robert Clancy AM, a clinical immunologist and emeritus professor of medicine.

The fact is that it is now increasingly difficult to hide the fact that many people have suffered because of these poorly tested vaccines. The tragic consequences of forcing the entire population into getting vaccinated are now all too obvious to be simply denied.  It is now increasingly difficult to hide the evidence that some Australians have died or suffered serious health consequences from these forced inoculations.

Of course, I do not expect an apology from all those directly responsible for such a horrible tragedy. And yet, I consider myself fully vindicated in my warnings made on the very first day of the pandemic. Undoubtedly, I was right from the very beginning and no one, especially our former Prime Minister, can say I didn’t try to warn about everything that those arbitrary measures during Covid would inevitably cause to our society.

Augusto Zimmermann is foundation dean and professor of law at Alphacrucis University College, and Distinguished Scholar at The Wagner Center for Faith and Freedom (Spring Arbor University, USA.). He served as associate dean at Murdoch University and as law reform commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia.