A musical flash mob popping up in Brisbane over the weekend is a masterclass in how to peacefully oppose bad laws.

The 400-strong crowd wigged up as Aussie music icon John Farnham — famous for his flowing blonde mullet — went viral on social media for singing the 80’s ‘Farnsy’ hit Two Strong Hearts while holding Palestinian flags in protest of new hate speech laws banning the phrase “from the river to the sea.”

Lyrics from the song, which includes the line “reaching out forever like a river to the sea,” have also popped up in street art and on wearable merch to protest the laws.

The singalong highlighted the ridiculousness of banning words, when the real problem facing the Jewish community is actual terrorism, and intelligence and policing failures.

Video via Middle East Eye on X

Last month, Queensland became the first state in Australia to criminalise the pro-Palestinian slogans “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” if they cause a person to feel menaced, harassed, or offended, as part of a package of new hate speech laws in a bid to stamp out antisemitism, with penalties of up to two years in prison.

While no one was arrested at the flash mob, two Jewish people, along with 18 others, were arrested for uttering the forbidden phrases at another weekend protest, part of the ‘NOT OUR LAW’ campaign spearheaded by activist group Justice for Palestine Magan-djin (Magan-djin is the Indigenous word for Brisbane).

Several arrests were made earlier this month under the new laws, including an 18-year-old woman wearing a pro-Palestine slogan on her top, subsequently released without charge, and a 33-year-old man who has now been charged with one count of reciting or publicly displaying a prohibited expression that is reasonably expected to menace, harass or offend a member of the public.

Lawmakers say the banned phrases endorse violence and are an expression of support for a terrorist group (like Hamas).

But Remah Naji, spokesperson for Justice for Palestine, says that’s not what protestors mean when they say these words.

It’s not antisemitic to advocate for “equal rights and freedom for the Palestinian people,” said Naji, a Palestinian migrant and former Greens candidate for Moreton.

“When people say ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ they mean free from apartheid, free from illegal occupation, free from violations of international law.”

If people oppose protesters’ right to say these things, then “that’s an indictment on them,” she said.

Up until now, I have not posted about Israel and Palestine. War reporting is not my beat, and I resist making moral proclamations on whatever the ‘current thing’ is, especially if it’s something I don’t know a lot about, as was the case when everything kicked off a few years ago.

However, hate speech laws are my beat, and I am committed to commenting truthfully no matter the social or professional cost, as I did during Covid.

When I posted the viral Farnsy protest this week commending the protesters for peacefully opposing unreasonable restrictions on political debate in Queensland, there was a lot of hate in social media comments over their support of Palestine.

To me, this is missing the point.

Hate speech laws are bad for all of us, especially in Australia, where existing speech protections are less than robust. We have no bill of rights, no First Amendment — just ‘implied freedom of political communication’ in the Constitution, which state and federal governments increasingly feel at liberty to trample all over.

It’s important to understand that the creep of speech regulation is not a left or right issue. First, they targeted the right, with hate speech laws being weaponised against anyone who dared publicly question trans ideology, and censorship of dissenting opinions on Covid lockdowns and mandates. The left mostly cheered this on, smearing dissenters as bigots and granny-killers.

Now, they’re targeting the left, effectively criminalising public support of Palestinians. Elements on the right are backing this overreach to the hilt, smearing protestors as ‘deranged leftists’ calling for the eradication of the entire Jewish race.

The only stakeholders this kind of division benefits are those who want to shut down freedom of expression, giving the government more and more control over what can and cannot be said in the political discourse.

Today, the opinion being banned might be one that you don’t agree with.

Next time, the government might ban your opinion. Chances are, something you believe in has already been banned or censored at some point.

We should celebrate peaceful protest against bad laws, even if you disagree with the political views of the protesters.

“Once this is normalised, everyone is at risk,” Naji said today of the Queensland government’s overreach on speech.

“Freedom of speech should be a basic and fundamental right that is not up for debate.”

Justice for Palestine is currently organising a High Court Challenge on the basis that the Queensland hate speech laws are invalid under the federal Constitution. Find out more here.

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It is the eleventh oil refinery globally to suffer a fire or explosion since the beginning of the Iran War.

The unprecedented fire at Viva Energy refinery at Geelong, Victoria, broke out on Wednesday night and was extinguished by lunch time Thursday and is believed to have been caused by a gas leak from a faulty mechanical part.

The plant, which supplies around 10 percent of Australia’s fuel and more than 50 percent of fuel in Victoria, can process up to 120,000 barrels of oil per day but will operate below capacity until it is deemed safe to ramp up production again.

No one was injured in the blaze and the government says there was no evidence of sabotage, although journalists at the government’s press conference questioned how this ‘coincidence’ could have occurred.

Experts have predicted a price shock at bowsers in Victoria and the possibility that Australia will move to level three of the national fuel security plan, just one level short of fuel rationing.

From the Sydney Morning Herald,

Rystad Energy, a global research firm, says it raises the likelihood of the government moving to the next stage of its fuel-saving strategy, including directing fuel to priority areas, promoting voluntary measures like car-pooling or working for home, and further releases from strategic reserves.

“Australia carries the unenviable distinction of being one of the most import-dependent nations in the world for refined fuel products, while simultaneously holding some of the lowest strategic reserves of any developed economy,” it said. “You can be heavily reliant on imports, or you can hold minimal reserves — but you cannot be both.”

Energy Minister Chris Bowen said in a press conference yesterday that while the fire was “not great timing” and was “not a positive development,” any shortfall can be made up by imports.

That’s well and good for now while stocks are available and as we have leverage with LNG exports (Australia is currently the second highest exporter of LNG globally), but it’s betting on this being a short-term crisis. Prediction market traders are betting at long odds that this will be the case.

Bowen denied that the incident alone would trigger a move from level two to level three of the national fuel plan, but did not rule out moving to level three on the balance of circumstances — including the Strait of Hormuz blockade and Australia’s ability to secure further imports — which Bowen will discuss in a meeting with state and territory energy ministers next week.

We’re currently at level two of the plan: the government is shoring up fuel supplies and Aussies are to carry on as normal while being mindful to conserve fuel where possible.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Thursday that the Australian government had secured two shipments of diesel from Brunei and South Korea totalling 100 million litres.

That’s just over a day’s supply to add to Australia’s roughly one month’s supply of petrol (38 days), diesel (31 days) and jet fuel (28 days) reserves — well under the 90 day minimum required by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

In the past few weeks, the government has bent over backwards to communicate to Australians that everything’s fine and no one should panic.

A new $20 million ad campaign suggests that Aussies can take the pressure off fuel demand by removing roof racks, inflating their tyres and driving smoothly.

The PM was ripped for a heavily stage-managed three-minute national address on April 1st that “should’ve been an email” in which he stopped the nation to tell us to stay calm and catch the bus. Previously, PMs have only used national addresses in times of war or national emergency.

However, this English major couldn’t help noticing the subtle warnings delivered in Albo’s reassuring tone:

“Economic shocks caused by this war will be with us for months.”

“The months ahead may not be easy.”

“No government can promise to eliminate the pressures that this war is causing.”

“Working together – and looking after each other.”

It’s all very Covid-esque.

Albo and other government ministers have stayed on message, assuring that fuel rationing is “not around the corner” and that “we are not going down the path of Covid-style mandated demand management measures,” despite calls for ‘Covid-style measures’ if the rubber hits the road.

Some of us remember that the last time a PM assured us there would be no mandates, mandates were enforced soon after.

Given the tenor of messaging, it looks as though our politicians are being advised that heavy-handed restrictions would be very unpopular at this point.

That’s why if energy lockdowns, rations or mandates are implemented, it will be because they had no other choice. You know, like if shipments stop coming, fires break out at refineries, that sort of thing.

Or, it will be state and territory Premiers acting under their own steam, as they did during Covid.

Or, none of these measures will be necessary, because the rising price and increasing scarcity of oil will make driving or flying long distances a luxury ticket item, and anyway everyone will be preoccupied with the downstream problem of food scarcity.

Is it just the Covid trauma talking?

I don’t suppose I’d place a bet, but I used to get straight A’s for this kind of stuff.

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Edit 17 April: This article was updated to add that the Viva refinery was the eleventh oil refinery globally to suffer a fire or explosion since the beginning of the Iran War.

Vaccines will be redefined in Australia, paving the way for emerging technologies like monoclonal antibodies and mRNA therapeutics to be listed on the National Immunisation Program (NIP) alongside traditional vaccines.

The National Health Amendment (Passive Immunological Products) Bill 2026, passed in the Senate this morning, changes the legal definition of ‘vaccine’ to include passive immunisation products, which give your body pre-made antibodies.

The current definition of vaccines only encompasses ‘active’ immunisation products which teach your body to fight a disease by provoking an immune response.

The change will be a boon for pharmaceutical companies, as products listed on the NIP are bulk purchased by the government, which will have carte blanche to spend even more than the $2.4 billion it typically spends on distributing vaccines for ‘free.’

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This is the second major change in the definition of a vaccine in the last several years, after the standing definition was amended during the Covid pandemic to include mRNA technology, which is arguably a gene therapy, not a vaccine.

Political discussion around the bill has focused on how it will improve access to monoclonal antibodies such as Beyfortus to protect children and babies from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and who wouldn’t want that?

While few babies in Australia die from RSV each year, the Australian government says that 12,000 babies are hospitalised every winter, and researchers have found that administration of monoclonal antibodies to babies prevents enough RSV hospitalisations to have a net cost-saving effect.

Not discussed, but totally possible, is that this bill opens the door for a slew of mRNA passive immunisation therapeutics to make it onto the NIP. The federal and state governments are heavily invested in mRNA research, development and manufacture, with cancer therapies, antibodies for HIV and the flu, and mRNA-encoded autoimmune suppressors being just some of the products in the pipeline.

That is the what of the bill. Then there is the how of it. This was one of 22 bills rushed via guillotine motion, which means very limited or no debate, through the Senate over the past several days.

Obviously, the House of Review can do very little review on such a short timeframe and with no opportunity for proper debate.

It must be said, though, that while this is a recurring theme with the Labor government, which has a habit of ramming through new laws in a mad rush right before holidays as it did with the under 16s social media ban, it’s not a partisan problem, but an all of government problem.

The Coalition has been equally if not more likely to use the same tactics to stifle debate and blitz through stacks of bills — in fact, the Morrison government was one of the worst on this front.

This procedural bugbear might seem like not that big of a deal, but the consequences of not properly considering the impacts of this bill could be significant for Australian families.

Vaccines listed on the NIP schedule for children are mandatory for families wishing to access childcare subsidies and family tax benefits under No Jab No Pay legislation. Moreover, in some states children cannot access daycare at all unless they have received every single shot on the schedule under No Jab No Play rules.

If products added to the NIP are optional, that’s one thing, but if the list of shots required for babies and children expands, that’s a real concern. Australian children already receive 40-50 antigen doses across 16-18 injections by the age of 18.

Meanwhile, Australia’s rate of childhood immunisation has fallen to a 10-year low according to recent government data, with only 90 percent of children aged 24 months or less being fully immunised. This represents an almost three percent decrease since the Covid pandemic, most likely due to vaccine fatigue and loss of trust in vaccines.

Where new technologies offer a safe alternative to riskier forms of disease prevention, increasing access is a good thing. But if increasingly risky ‘vaccines’ are added to the NIP, we can expect the number of parents deviating from the schedule to continue on the current trajectory.

The Department of Health did not respond to request for comment before publication deadline.

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Credit to Michael Arbon for drawing attention to this bill on Twitter.

New South Wales leader Chris Minns — whom Matt Taibbi once called “Australia’s biggest wanker” over his enthusiastic support for hate speech laws — yesterday said a “nationally consistent approach” was needed to implement measures such as fuel rationing and working from home.

This comes as petrol prices have soared up to $3 a litre and hundreds of fuel stations around the country are reportedly without diesel and unleaded fuel. Food security is in question as fishing trawlers grind to a halt, and farmers are unable to obtain fertiliser or operate machinery, and are fending off diesel theft.

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Energy Minister Chris Bowen says the problem is not supply, but consumers running the fuel stations, like the toilet paper frenzy during Covid. Even if that is true, it won’t remain the case, given that Australia imports approximately 90 percent of its fuel, and we have only 38 days worth of fuel in reserves.

Bowen has so far talked down the possibility of fuel rationing at the federal level, but state and territory governments could easily step in to enforce rations and other lockdown measures just as they did during Covid.

Last Friday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a list of ten smart-city style recommendations, including remote working, road use restrictions, reduced speed limits, and reduced air travel, which would essentially amount to ‘energy lockdowns’ if enforced by governments.

It’s enough to make a seasoned conspiracy theorist ponder the possibility of heightened surveillance and control via tech to ensure we don’t drive on the wrong day, purchase too many steaks, or exceed our allotted flight miles.

An opportunity perhaps for a Great Reset, mused very based Senator Alex Antic in parliament yesterday.

Meanwhile, the situation has highlighted Australia’s vulnerability to energy supply shocks.

While the Labor government has taken steps to ease the crisis — releasing some fuel reserves into the market, temporarily lowering diesel quality standards, setting up a taskforce to coordinate fuel distribution and planning — its response has been reactive, with limited effect. Fuel imports were said to have been secured, but shipments have already been cancelled.

There’s only so much you can do if you don’t produce or refine your own oil. Australia used to have eight oil refineries. We’re now down to two, and fossil fuel projects are increasingly hard to get up and running because of green and red tape.

At the same time, Australia produces an abundance of gas, but almost all of it is exported to foreign markets, tightening domestic supply and driving up prices.

In a sane world, this crisis would prompt our leaders to turn their attention to securing Australia’s energy supply, while simultaneously working to bring cleaner energy to market.

But going off our insane Covid response, I’m not betting on it.

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Advocacy group Stand Up Now Australia is running a petition to secure Australia’s fuel supply. Requests include cutting the fuel excise (we currently pay 52c tax for every litre of petrol), suspending the GST on fuel (tax on tax) and rebuilding Australia’s refining capacity. Read and sign the petition here.

There was strong interest, with tickets selling out.

On the book website you can find a video of the evening including my Q+A with authors Julian Gillespie and Prof Gigi Foster exploring what secession might look like.

The next step is to see if there’s enough interest - and money - to turn the idea fleshed out in the book into a political movement.

I’ll let the authors explain further:

Thank you for the interest you have expressed in the Western Australian secession project that we revealed publicly on March 13 with the Perth launch of the book, Secession by Western Australia. You can (re-)watch the launch and read reviews of the book on our main book website, here: https://www.secessionwabook.shop/home

Over the coming months, we plan to continue building the base of support for this initiative, and to put together the founding building blocks of the CoreWest Institute whose mission will be to further develop the blueprints and implementation plans outlined in the book, drawing on expertise from around the world and input from Western Australians. To keep up to date with developments, we strongly encourage you to subscribe to the Secession by Western Australia substack, here:

Secession by Western Australia

Secession WA - it's time.

Going forward, this substack will be the primary means through which we will communicate with supporters about the secession project. We envision that this substack will be populated over time not only with our own writings but with contributions from the community that are aligned with the goal of WA secession. Please put your hand up at any stage if you would be interested in penning a contribution for us to consider for the substack, or would like to refer us to someone who does.

Other ways you can assist our efforts include the following:

• Connecting us with supporters of secession who have the financial capacity to help fund the CoreWest Institute. To this point, our work has been a labour of love, but this necessarily limits the scale of what we can achieve. Without funding, our initiative cannot succeed. Please ask potential funders to email us at SecessionWA@proton.me.

• Indicating if you have interest in participating in the political advancement of secession. While the authorship team are not politicians, we envision that a new political party will need to be set up in order to carry the proposal of secession to the WA state elections in early 2029. We are happy to facilitate connecting people to this end, although we will not ourselves be taking any political roles at any stage in the process.

• Going onto Amazon and posting a public review of Secession by Western Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Secession-Western-Australia-Julian-Gillespie/dp/1764485114# which will assist in drawing attention to the book. (Note that you can still get a far better deal if you purchase copies of the book directly from our main book website here: https://www.secessionwabook.shop/home.)

• Requesting that your local bookstore and your local community, school, or university library stock Secession by Western Australia, and informing us on SecessionWA@proton.me if they have trouble sourcing it, so we can follow up with them and their suppliers.

Finally, if you have particular professional experience or knowledge that you are prepared to contribute on a paid or unpaid basis to our initiative as it matures, please kindly let us know. We will maintain a roster of this information to call upon as needs arise over the coming months and years.

If this movement can get some serious money behind it, it will no doubt generate some worthwhile discussions on how to improve governance and conditions in Western Australia.

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New Zealand has formally rejected amendments to international health regulations, implemented by the World Health Organisation in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.

The 2024 amendments, along with the pandemic treaty, were touted as enabling stronger international collaboration in global health emergencies, but critics warned that they afford far too much power to the Director General of the WHO in declaring emergencies and dictating how countries must respond.

New Zealand is one of twelve member states that has rejected the 2024 amendments, including the US, Argentina, and Italy. For these countries, previous versions of the IHRs continue to apply, with the exception of the US and Argentina, which withdrew from the WHO in January and March, respectively.

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While the New Zealand Government gave no official reason for its decision in an announcement on Monday, Winston Peters, Foreign Minister and leader of centre-right populist party New Zealand First, indicated that protecting national sovereignty was the main concern.

“New Zealand First has always said that any decisions about the health of kiwis should be made from Wellington, not Geneva,” Peters posted to X.

”We have fought on your behalf for these IHR amendments to be fully rejected, we made a promise to put the national interests of New Zealanders first, to maintain our sovereign decision making, and to push back on globalist bureaucrats - and we have kept that promise.”

Zooming in on the threat to national sovereignty, advocacy group Voices for Freedom described what that would look like in a letter to Peters last month.

The amended IHRs and pandemic treaty would “establish permanent international governance arrangements requiring new domestic authorities, expanded surveillance and data-sharing obligations, alignment with WHO-directed standards, and acceptance of binding international decision-making processes outside New Zealand’s parliamentary system,” said the letter.

This would include “financing commitments, digital health infrastructure, border and traveller powers, and pathogen-sharing obligations,” all of which “remain undefined or unresolved, yet would constrain future governments once accepted.”

Aside from rejecting these latest IHR amendments, New Zealand rejected an earlier round of amendments (2022) which reduced member states’ deliberation time for rejecting amendments from 18 months to 10 months.

The pandemic treaty, which was formally adopted at the World Health Assembly last year, has yet to be signed and implemented, as the final details are still being negotiated.

It is ironic that the island nation that made world headlines for going off the deep end during Covid under Prime Minister and ‘single source of truth’ Jacinda Ardern is now one of the few member states pushing back on WHO pandemic reforms.

This is testament in part to the power of a strong third party in an ostensibly two-party system. New Zealand First holds the balance of power in the current government and has previously formed coalitions with both left and right parties.

Second, where governments went too hard on Covid rules, people have become wary of such overreach, and populist leaders are responsive to this mood shift. Presidents Trump in the US and Milei in Argentina are case in point.

One country where this is not the case is Australia. Despite considerable public concern, our government is determinedly sleepwalking into a surveillance and control state and is in, boots and all, with all WHO pandemic reforms. However, the recent surge in popularity for the right-populist One Nation Party, which opposes the WHO pandemic reforms, could well turn the situation around at the next election in 2028.

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Related reading

Since Covid happened, or more specifically, the government response to the virus, it’s hard to conclude anything other than that the system is broken.

Guard rails in place to protect citizens from government overreach were mown down. The individuals who did most of the wrecking have moved on to cushy jobs, and courts have consistently thrown out cases seeking justice for inflicted harms.

Drawing on “lessons learned,” our leaders have mostly reformed the system in the wrong direction: more centralised control (a new CDC, WHO pandemic reforms), more mRNA factories, and more resources allocated to the pandemic industry.

What if you could divorce from the broken system and start over?

A new book, Secession by Western Australia, lays out a vision of how it would work.

Like Alberta in Canada - where separatism is currently a hot topic - Western Australia is rich in natural resources, and pays more than its per capita share to federal coffers.

Legal expert and lead author Julian Gillespie argues it’s not a good deal, and that West Aussies would be better served by leaving the federation and going it alone.

A collaboration with economists Professor Gigi Foster and Michael Baker and medical expert Professor Ian Brighthope, Secession by Western Australia sets out a blueprint for sovereignty encompassing fiscal independence, a new constitution, currency and defence strategy, major institutional reform, and a health system focused on preventative care rather than ‘sick care’.

All this will be funded by a 20 percent resource royalty which would replace almost all other taxes, including personal income tax and payroll tax. This will benefit some mining companies, but others would lose out and so would likely not be in favour.

Bureaucratic bloat would also be slashed, drastically reducing overheads for running the newly established nation.

It’s a bold vision, and will be expounded on in more detail at the book launch next week.

Yours truly will be there to run a Q+A with Gillespie and Prof Foster. Perth friends, details for the launch are below.

The book Secession by Western Australia is available for purchase now in hard copy or digital format here.

Book launch: 6:30pm Friday 13 March, Adam Armstrong Pavilion, Dalkeith. Tickets available here

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I dropped into the Hard Yarns studio this week to shoot the breeze with comedian Cameron Branch (co-host Daniel Delby was out of the studio due to a heavy show schedule — it’s festival season here in Perth).

Our discussion ran the gamut of sticky issues from hate speech laws, police brutality at recent protests, the growing ideological and cultural fractures shaping public debate, medical choices for children, and whether feminism has gone too far (I think it has, but tune in to find out why).

As always, feel free to agree, disagree or build on anything we discussed in the comments below!

Listen on Spotify:

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

A few notes on this episode —

At one point we discussed how harmful blanket public health directives can be and I emphasised the role of bureaucratic inertia in institutionalising bad ideas and preventing new and/or nuanced science and ideas from cutting through.

I realise I may have given the impression that I don’t think there are any nefarious actors trying to corral us into digital ID, smart cities and the like. That’s not the case — I do acknowledge that there are key players at high levels that are very invested in creating these systems of control. I just don’t think that’s the only explanation behind suboptimal government policies, so my point on the show was to discuss what I considered to be a major driver in the context of our conversation.

For listeners who like to go to the source, the studies I discussed relating to formula use in babies’ first week of life are:

Bhasin M., Cooper M., Macchiaverni., et al. (2025), “Colostrum as a Protective Factor Against Peanut Allergy: Evidence From a Birth Cohort,” Allergy [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/all.70043]

Key findings: Babies given formula supplementation in the first three days (partially fed colostrum) had a higher risk of developing multiple food allergies, including about 5× higher odds of peanut allergy and 11× higher odds of multiple food allergies, including cows milk allergy, by 12–18 months, compared with infants exclusively fed colostrum.

Press release: https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/article/2025/september/research-links-exclusive-colostrum-intake-to-reduced-peanut-allergy-risk

Urashima M., Mezawa H., Okuyama M., et al. (2019) “Primary Prevention of Cow’s Milk Sensitization and Food Allergy by Avoiding Supplementation With Cow’s Milk Formula at Birth: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” JAMA Pediatrics, (Vol. 73 No. 12).[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2753281]

Key findings: High risk of developing cow's milk sensitisation, allergy, and anaphalaxis by the age to two in breastfed neonates supplemented with cow's milk formula during the first three days of life.

And the report on German censorship that I referenced, produced by liber-net, can be found here: https://liber-net.org/germany/

A final note — I realise I have lapsed into being a bit sweary, as you will hear in the podcast! It’s prompted me to set up a swear jar at home. I quite look forward to seeing what vocab I can rummage for next time I feel the urge to cuss…

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I’ve missed you!

Merry Christmas from my little family to you and yours.

Sitting on the Substack sidelines and settling into motherhood this past half year has provided a wonderful opportunity to disengage from the churning digital news cycle.

I miss researching and writing, and I am eager to ease back into it next year. That said, it feels too soon right now. When I do return to this Substack I intend to be wholehearted about it, but right now I need a bit longer to just be Poppy’s mum.

While I haven’t been producing articles during my leave, I have been reading and reflecting particularly on issues relating to my current life circumstances. Pregnancy and birth, millennial motherhood, child health and development, Australia’s ongoing cost of living hikes and housing shortfall (bad), our healthcare system (good), and of course, recent policy and legislative developments pertaining to hate speech, digital ID, online age assurance and so on.

I’m interested to know, what are the big issues and questions on your mind this year?

Wishing you all the very best for the start of 2026 and I look forward to returning to this newsletter in due course.

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Years ago, I wrote a thesis on how what the world needs now is love, specifically in the form of good faith engagement built on non-judgemental listening.

Open debate with genuine interest in each others’ experiences and perspectives, and earnest efforts to persuade each other in good faith - this is the antidote to the increasingly polarised, hostile and violent state of our public discourse, I argued.

Yesterday, one of the rare public figures who embodied my pipe dream was executed with one fell shot to the jugular on a public stage, and I’m left wondering if I’ve been hopelessly naive.

I’m used to seeing American violence in my social media feed, especially in the past week with the fatal stabbing of a Ukranian refugee in Charlotte, but this one felt heavy in a different way.

I never paid close attention to Charlie Kirk. His politics didn’t map onto mine, and I don’t particularly enjoy or very often consume the kind of political sparring content he produced.

However, you couldn’t be online in the past few years and not know who Kirk was and what he did. The conservative activist and founder of political advocacy non-profit Turning Point USA rose to prominence touring US university campuses with his ‘Prove Me Wrong’ open debates, spawning viral videoed exchanges that proliferated across the internet.

Young people showed up in increasingly large numbers to pose questions and hash out ideas. Some people changed their minds, some didn’t, but the important thing was that Kirk set a (mostly, as far as I can tell) respectful tone and allowed everyone and every topic at the table.

Partisans loved or hated him for his political views and influence (the 31-year-old father of two was credited with pulling in a significant portion of the youth vote for Trump in 2024). I respected him from afar for putting into action what I could only theorise about.

Now, Kirk is dead, and we will contemplate for the coming days the fact that some people cannot be reached by civil debate. Some people would actually kill to silence views they don’t want aired. They don’t want a hearing. They don’t want an exchange. They just prefer to hate.

Fatal violence is the end-point of this attitude, but upstream is culture fuelled by articles like Jezebel’s now-viral abomination ‘We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk’ and the unending avalanche of Literally Hitler content casting Trump and his allies as the second coming.

This beast was fed by millions, even if only one did the deed.

There is a Shakespearean level of irony in the fact that Kirk once called the trade-off of “some gun deaths every single year” as the cost of Second Amendment gun-ownership rights a “prudent deal” that was “worth it” to maintain a bulwark against tyrannical government. Could he ever have imagined that his own life would be counted in that trade-off?

As an Australian who has grown up in a mostly gun-free society, I find this hard to get my head around, but I hope that the loss of Kirk’s life will “work for good,” as the Bible promises (Romans 8:28). A devout Christian, Kirk would certainly have wished the same.

Commentators are already calling Kirk’s death a flashpoint for political violence in the US.

If people are willing to reflect honestly, it can become a turning point.

And I mean for all of us. The politicians who inflame public discourse with divisive rhetoric, the journalists who write fear porn trash for clicks, audiences who love to rage.

I know I am being idealistic. Politicians are incentivised to do the expedient thing, not the right thing. Media outlets will keep chasing clicks.

But surely we, the people at the bottom of the food chain, can start turning the ship. We can stop clicking through, stop with the trash talking. We can take Charlie Kirk’s ethos of respectful, open debate into our online and offline lives and refuse to be part of the problem.

Yes, it should start from the top. No, we shouldn’t have to take the lead. But it won’t, and we do.

I do worry I’m being naive, but I hope to be proven wrong.

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Our planned home birth went out the window as everything went sideways in the final week of my pregnancy. We ended up spending 11 days in hospital and I can’t express enough my gratitude to the midwives, nurses and doctors at King Edward Memorial Hospital for their outstanding care during this undesirable situation.

Allopathic medicine is not the best port of call for managing chronic disease, but in emergency conditions, it can save lives, and it did mine (and possibly Poppy’s).

I’ll probably tell you about it when I’ve finished processing it - and when we’re getting a bit more sleep!

On the sleep front, Ryan says, “I’m getting more sleep than I thought I would but less than I’d like.” Ditto! That said, we’ve been blessed with a fairly chill baby so far. She’s a champion feeder and sleeper and rarely squawks unless it’s to tell us it’s time to feed now, like NOW.

It’s good to finally be home and settling into my new full time role as CFO (Chief Feeding Officer). Hope you’re all doing well, and I’ll send another missive next time I have something to say.

R

I’m about to undertake my biggest project to date.

Or smallest, I suppose. Either way, as everyone knows, when a baby arrives there is room for nothing else for the first little while!

Therefore, this Substack is now on indefinite pause. All subscription payments are frozen effective immediately. The site and its archives will remain online.

When publication resumes, your remaining subscription time will continue to be valid. If you’ve just purchased a full-year subscription in the last month feel free to contact me for a refund, although I greatly appreciate your support and trust should you choose to wait.

At this stage I anticipate a three month hiatus at a minimum. I love this work and assume I’ll be keen to get back to it. But one thing I’ve learned from the rollercoaster of pregnancy thus far and from listening to the experience of other mothers, is that hormones do weird things to your brain, so I intend to ‘wait and see’ what timing feels right in terms of returning to this Substack with the consistency and quality that you are accustomed to.

I may still send updates during this time if the urge overtakes me and I will keep you posted with plans for my return.

Thank you for support for the past several years. I feel very privileged to be able to work independently and cover stories which legacy journalists don’t have the leeway to touch, and I am regularly delighted by the intelligence, curiosity and empathy of our subscriber community.

I very much look forward to coming back.

Until then, wish me luck!

Rebekah

It’s hard for me to write about about Laura Delano’s new book Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance without getting personal because for much of the book I felt like I was reading my own story.

Longtime readers of this Substack know I have in the past dealt with what we politely call these days ‘mental health issues,’ a journey which involved a severe eating disorder, depression, and nearly a decade on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.

Laura dealt with all this and more. At age 14 she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and so began her initiation into the world of psychiatric medicine. Medicated according to an ever increasing cascade of prescriptions and repeatedly institutionalised, Laura became a full-time Patient.

However, despite all these psychiatric drugs and interventions, Laura’s state did not improve.

Or, it finally dawned on Laura, because of all these psychiatric drugs and interventions, her state did not improve.

Eventually, Laura was able to taper off the drugs, find her feet, and leave her previous full-time Patient identity behind. Writer, speaker, consultant, wife, mother, Harvard graduate - Laura is many things, but most of all, she is herself.

Unshrunk is a compelling memoir threaded with close examination of the scientific evidence base for the drugs that Laura spent a decade and a half imbibing under the close direction of her various treating doctors.

Having had a family member who was similarly diagnosed and medicated for several decades before finally succeeding at their own suicide, I wish this book had been published earlier.

Anyone whose lives have been touched by emotional, mental and addiction struggles, particularly of the type that psychiatry has labels and medications for, and maybe of the type that prove ‘treatment resistant,’ will find comfort and insight in this book.

But also, Unshrunk serves as a powerful educational text for anyone scratching their head as to why, with all the psychiatric services and medications at our fingertips, we in the West are struggling more than ever before with mental health.

Fresh off the back of an interview with Tucker Carlson (which has been seen three million times on Twitter and over 390,000 times on YouTube) Laura joined me for a Q&A. I’m thrilled to share it with you:

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RB: We met in person at a Brownstone event in Connecticut last year and got to swap stories, and my impression was that our experiences of mental health struggles had a Sliding Doors sort of duality. In my case, my religious upbringing centred on the moral and spiritual causes and cures for my troubles, which meant psychiatry and medication were not the first port of call in my ‘treatment.’ For you, it was straight to the psychiatrist, and then the prescription cascade. What was it about your family and social context that had you headed straight for the psychiatrist’s office - and to the prescription counter - at the first sign of teen troubles?

LD: Growing up, my family had unquestioning faith in medical authority. I had chronic ear infections as an infant and toddler, for example, and rather than step back to wonder what might have been happening in my body to set these off – this was the 1980s, and no one seemed to know anything about the microbiome, inflammation, et cetera – my parents took me to the doctor every few months and put me on a constant stream of antibiotics. I don’t blame them, of course; they were doing the best they could with the information they had available to them. We now know the hazards that come with overprescribing antibiotics – but back then, it was just how many American parents did things: Do what the doctor says.

I also grew up in a town built on the illusion of perfection. People appeared put together: happy, successful, high-functioning. Because of this, my parents and I felt convinced that the struggles I began having as a kid were unique, which made it easy to conclude that something was wrong with me, something bad. There were no support groups for struggling teens and there were no conversations about where to turn for help beyond doctors. So that, for my parents, seemed like the only path forward. They felt overwhelmed and scared, and they weren’t alone either. It’s been the default for parents for years, given the absence of other types of support.

RB: In Unshrunk, you take readers through the scientific evidence supporting many of the medications you were prescribed and we discover that the evidence base is shockingly thin. How do you account for this? Do you find that mental health professionals are aware of the lack of evidence for their prescribed medications, or are they somewhat oblivious?

LD: This is such a great question. Many mental health professionals are unaware of the evidence base – or lack thereof – for psychiatric drugs. Most rely on guild journals, but we know that those conclusions often distort the data and don't accurately reflect the raw information. Professionals tend to look around, see the standard of care, observe what their colleagues are doing, and go along with it - assuming that the official recommendation must be safe and effective.

The reality is that understanding these medications takes immense effort. It's taken me 15 years, and I've barely scratched the surface. Mental health professionals are caught in a challenging system: they're overworked, drowning in paperwork, stressed, and often afraid of rocking the boat. It's easier to follow the standard practice than to invest their limited free time in becoming experts on the drugs they prescribe.

Changing this requires courage. The more mental health professionals educate themselves on alternatives to the prescription-based psychiatric approach, the more likely we are to see meaningful change. When I meet professionals who've done the work of learning about these medications and their patient outcomes, I have profound respect for them.

The information manipulation in the medical/pharmaceutical industry is complex, and demands time and diligent research to fully understand, and a command of resources that most people simply don't have.

RB: In the book, you challenge the disease/treatment model, offering an alternative perspective on many of the experiences and behaviours that are commonly labelled as mental illnesses. Can you expand on this?

LD: For years, I understood my struggles through a medical lens, believing I was "sick" with various “illnesses” that lived in my brain. This perspective taught me to reduce my experiences to clinical symptoms with a biological cause. I came to believe my brain had faulty chemistry that could never be cured, but only managed with life-long psychopharmaceuticals. This, in turn, led me to give up on the idea that I could grow, change, evolve, transform – even that I could (or should) take responsibility for my problematic behaviors. If they were caused by a brain condition I had no control over, I came to believe, what was the point in trying?

After taking this for granted through the most formative years of my life, I eventually discovered that the medical model of mental illness is subjective, not scientific. And if this was the case, I realized that I could choose to let go of this story and make sense of my mental and emotional difficulties in a different way.

By medicalizing my experiences, I was preventing myself from understanding my pain. When I stopped doing that, I began to see my emotional struggles differently - as intelligent responses to life circumstances. My pain wasn't a defect, but a wise reaction to challenging personal relationships, cultural experiences, and societal pressures. This change of perspective enabled me to address my difficulties in ways beyond medication.

We need to expand our understanding of human experiences. Professionals and prescriptions can be helpful sometimes, but they shouldn't be the only path. We can also find our way through pain by rethinking relationships, addressing unhealed wounds from hard things that happen to us, and understanding ourselves in the broader social, economic, and political contexts of our lives. The key is recognizing that our struggles tell a story - and that story is far more nuanced than a diagnosis.

RB: After coming off your medications, you dedicated your life to helping others do the same, if they so choose, with your non-profit Inner Compass Initiative. Why is it necessary and what are you offering that the medical/psychiatric establishment does not?

LD: After coming off medications, I realized how complex the process of recovering from them can be. I recognized that I had significant advantages - family support, access to education, and the ability to research dense pharmacological information. So many people lack these resources when trying to navigate psychiatric medication and withdrawal.

This understanding led me to create Inner Compass Initiative (ICI), a charitable organization with a critical mission: helping people make informed choices about psychiatric drugs, diagnoses, and treatment. We provide comprehensive information about how medications are researched and brought to market, the history of psychiatric diagnoses, and what’s known (and not known) about antidepressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and sleep aids.

We’re also a community. Inner Compass Exchange is our online, worldwide mutual aid network that operates similarly to a 12-step group, in the sense that we facilitate the growth of decentralized, nonhierarchical groups that are absent professional power dynamics or financial exchanges, and coalesced around a shared vision and purpose. Our focus is on human connection driven by empathy and personal experience. The capacity to be there for others emerges from our struggles, from surviving a medicated life and later withdrawal from it, and using that experience to assist others.

A key part of our work is addressing the gap in tapering resources. In the United States, there are no safe places to turn within the conventional mental health system for guidance on safely reducing psychiatric medications. The UK – and, to my understanding, Australia – is just beginning to incorporate safe tapering protocols pulled from the layperson withdrawal community. My hope is that the US follows suit.

Our self-directed tapering manual and community aim to fill this void. We aim to empower individuals to make informed choices about their relationships to psychiatric diagnoses and drugs.

I would love to live in a world where there’s no need for our organization: one where comprehensive, compassionate, trustworthy resources are readily available everywhere. Until then, ICI will continue supporting people, offering information, connection, and hope.

RB: Why is telling your own personal story important to this work?

LD: For decades, we've known about the unscientific underpinnings of the psychiatric diagnostic paradigm and the questionable evidence base for psychiatric medications. The flaws inherent to much psychiatric research have been documented, yet most people — patients, family members, mental health professionals, academics, and educators — remain uneducated about the psychiatric enterprise.

More data or scientific evidence won't spark awareness or critical thinking. Instead, it's the power of identification — reaching people at the heart level by sharing stories of individuals who sought help in the mental health system and were inadvertently harmed by well-meaning professionals.

For me, reading Robert Whitaker's book Anatomy of an Epidemic was a transformative experience. It wasn't just the extensive, rigorously researched data that impacted me, but the personal stories woven through the book. Hearing people describe how they started medications during difficult times, and then got worse taking them, while doctors told them they were getting sicker, sparked an “aha moment” in me.

These stories sparked anger, grief, outrage, and curiosity. Seeing myself reflected in their experiences, I couldn’t help but resonate with what they’d lived. It made me ready to learn and, more importantly, unlearn.

My story — which is far from unique — is a powerful tool for educating others. By being open, vulnerable, and authentic about my experiences, I increase the chances that others might recognize themselves and have their own moment of clarity.

I hope my book will inspire others and give them the courage to listen to their instincts and act accordingly – whatever choices that might mean. There's nothing more threatening to the mental health industry than those of us who have found our way out and are now sharing our stories.

RB: I have seen some media coverage around the launch of your book implying that you are putting people at risk by encouraging them to stop life-saving medications, both through the publication of Unshrunk and your work with ICI. However, I noted that in your book you explicitly state that you are not anti-medication. How do you respond to these sorts of implied accusations? What is your view on the utility of psychiatric medication?

LD: It never ceases to amaze me how, in sharing my personal story, I'm often accused of telling others what to do when it comes to medication and psychiatrization.

This misunderstanding reflects a deeper societal pattern where discussions about mental health and pharmaceutical drugs are seen as exclusive territory for licensed professionals. But those of us who've taken psychiatric medications are arguably qualified to discuss them. Our experience counts for something.

I'm not anti-medication; I'm pro-informed choice. People need credible information to make decisions, especially when current pharmaceutical marketing often peddles scientifically invalid narratives like "chemical imbalance" or "depression as a disease."

This issue is nuanced, but in a polarizing time where people feel drawn to jumping into “pro” or “anti” camps, people often miss this. Psychiatric drugs, especially when taken in acute situations, can feel helpful, but not for the reasons we’re told. They aren't fixing a pathology; they are disrupting brain function in ways that might feel useful – for example, sedating agitation, numbing intensely painful emotions, or quieting down a racing mind. When people understand these drugs from this perspective, they can make informed choices about whether it makes sense to try them. My goal is simple: empower individuals with comprehensive information and options, so they can decide their next right step.

RB: In Australia, some GPs (equivalent to American PCP) can now diagnose ADHD and prescribe stimulants, and GPs prescribe more than 80% of antidepressants. The idea is to make diagnosis and treatments more accessible by reducing the need for lengthy wait times to see costly specialists. Are we heading in the right direction?

LD: We have a similar issue here in the US, with a significant percentage of psychiatric drug prescriptions written by general practitioners. And while the goal – making help more accessible – may be virtuous, we've mistakenly narrowed this down to mean: “write a prescription.”

The solution shouldn’t necessarily be to restrict doctors, but rather to expand the visible options for help on offer. We need community resources that offer alternatives to diagnoses and meds. People should have access to non-professional help, lifestyle interventions, spiritual exploration, and community connections – not just a waiting list for therapy or a quick prescription.

RB: If you could offer one insight to people experiencing mental health difficulties (and their families) before they enter the psychiatric system, what would it be?

LD: It's that no one knows you better than you do. No one knows your child better than you do.

It doesn't matter how many letters someone has after their name, or how many years they've spent in their clinical practice. You are the true expert on yourself, and you are the expert on your child.

That doesn’t mean you have to do this alone. Lean into the resources available, and the communities like the Inner Compass Exchange – because there are people going through something similar. And then (and this is the hard part)– try to make space to sit with the discomfort and the confusion and the fear, and be curious about what your (or your child’s) struggles mean.

You also need to know that the feelings you’re feeling don’t mean you have a broken brain, or some defective pathology. Your difficulties mean something. They're telling you something about your life. And if you can hang in there and make that space to be curious, and never let anyone convince you out of your own trust in yourself, you’ll find your way.

RB: And to those wondering if their medications are making their conditions worse, not better, what would you suggest?

LD: If you're questioning your medications, the most important next step, besides listening to that inner voice of uncertainty, is to educate yourself. Go to the FDA website and look at the label for the drug you’re wondering about. Visit the Inner Compass Initiative website for our guide on how to navigate these labels if you feel overwhelmed.

So few people take this step and read the fine print because they are told this drug or that drug – or maybe the combination of these drugs–will take their troubles away. But take a close look and learn about the evidence base behind the drug’s approval – about what is meant when someone says that Drug X is “effective.” Learn about the adverse effects, and possible drug interactions that could be problematic. And then seek out the stories of other people who’ve also come to question their relationship to meds.

The bottom line is that if something in you is saying “this might not be the right path for me,” listen to that, because that is your wisdom, your inner compass. It’s the thing that guides you toward your truth. I know how scary it can be. However, you are the expert on what you need, and there is information and a community available to help you.

RB: Finally, if you could change one thing about the way the psychiatry industry operates, what would it be?

LD: It’s so tough to point to just one thing, but in the context of this epidemic of psychiatric drug use, it would be to disentangle psychiatrists from their fears around liability: give them the freedom to do things differently. Many psychiatrists know in their hearts that the medication-based approach isn't helping many people — and may even be causing some harm. If physicians weren’t afraid of being sued, ostracized by colleagues, fired, or of losing compensation, more prescribers might be open to alternative approaches. They might consider avoiding medications altogether, or supporting their patients in safely coming off their meds. This fear of liability in the United States creates a massive barrier to giving people real choices about psychiatric interventions.

Find out more about Laura Delano’s work, new book, and media appearances

BOOK: Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance

WEBSITE: www.lauradelano.com

NON-PROFIT: Inner Compass Initiative

SOCIALS: Laura on X / Instagram / Facebook

MEDIA:

The Tucker Carlson Show — “The Dark Truth About Antidepressants, SSRIs, and the Psychiatrists Lying for Profit”

American Thought Leaders — “What the Mental Health Industry Doesn’t Tell You: Laura Delano”

CNN — “A former psychiatric patient reflects on her medical journey from diagnosis to medication withdrawal”

The Moynihan Report — “Everything you know about depression is wrong”

BBC — “Does a psychiatric diagnosis need to lead to medication?”

DarkHorse Podcast w/ Bret Weinstein — “Prescription for Insanity”

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“We did the best we could with the information we had at the time.”

This is BS and should not go unanswered.

In light of the recent news that Australia’s health authorities no longer recommend Covid vaccines for healthy infants, children, and adolescents under the age of 18 because the benefits do not outweigh the risks, human rights lawyer Peter Fam recalls that this was known three years ago - at which time, about half of Australian under-18s had received these shots.

Peter would know. He brought lawsuits throughout 2021 and 2022 against the Department of Health to challenge the provisional approvals of the mRNAs in particular on the basis that they were neither safe nor effective according to the best available evidence at the time.

Guest post by Peter Fam, human rights lawyer, Maat’s Method

Along with Julian Gillespie and Katie Ashby-Koppens, I spent a big chunk of 2021 and 2022 in the Federal and High Court trying to put forward ~2000 pages of evidence asserting that the Pfizer and Moderna jabs (in particular) were not safe or effective for children.

First, in the Federal Court, we argued that the provisional approval of those drugs was unlawful, because under the Therapeutic Goods Act, the Secretary of the Department of Health can only extend the provisional approval of a medicine to a new age group if "an indication of the medicine is the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of a life-threatening or seriously debilitating condition."

That was clearly not the case here, as there was no clinical evidence to show Covid-19 was life-threatening or that it caused seriously debilitating outcomes in babies and infants aged six months to five years old. However, once being administered this experimental injectable, these children would be exposed to a significant risk of suffering an adverse event from the injectable, including possible death.

The Federal Court wouldn’t allow us to proceed to hearing because they said that our two plaintiffs, a pro-choice organisation with 30+ years experience advocating for informed consent and vaccine safety, and the father of a child who was about to be vaccinated against his will, didn’t have sufficient interest (standing) in the proceeding to go ahead.

So, we then asked the High Court to consider the fact that granting provisional approval to Moderna for use of its product (Spikevax) in children aged six months to five years old in Australia was unlawful.

We pointed out that being provisionally approved meant the injectable was still the subject of human clinical trials for determining whether they are truly safe and effective and that the clinical trial in question sought to include the babies and infants of Australia.

Despite those Covid-19 injectables by 2022 clearly reporting historically unprecedented numbers of deaths, adverse events, and long-term side-effects, Australian authorities refused to remove them from the market, even though the number of reported deaths and adverse events from the Covid-19 injectables, far exceeded, in 2022, the number of deaths considered to be "due to" Covid.

The science in 2022 was already clear:

• Covid-19 poses a statistically negligible risk to children (see here and here among many other such studies); and,

• The Moderna vaccine presents significant risk to those to whom it is administered (see here and here among many other such studies).

In those circumstances, provisionally approving the Moderna injectable for this age group was already very obviously inappropriate and unethical.

In our case, the High Court told us the matter was too scientifically and factually complex and they would have to remit it back to the Federal Court. We knew there was no hope of victory there - they had already knocked us back once, so we withdrew.

[Rebekah’s note] I reported this story here:

Now, in mid-2025, days after the USA equivalent body made the same declaration, the Department of Health is finally admitting as follows. In their own words:

”COVID-19 vaccine[s] is not recommended for healthy infants, children or adolescents who do not have medical conditions that increase their risk of severe illness. This is because the risk of severe illness was extremely low in this cohort over the course of the pandemic, and benefits of vaccination are not considered to outweigh the potential harms.”

This isn’t about “I told you so.”

I don’t care about being vindicated or being right. I already knew we were right. That’s why, like so many, I made major sacrifices in the context of my own life to proceed according to my own value system as opposed to what I was being coerced to say and do.

However, I do believe that this admission from the Department is very important and it should be spread as far and as wide as possible.

The fact is that thousands of parents in Australia subjected their children to injection with a provisionally approved, experimental product which the Department, several years later, admits are associated with potential harms which render them too risky. They also admit that the risk of illness is “extremely low.”

This was all clearly verifiable in 2022. We sent them all of the evidence they could need. The precautionary principle and the functioning of the Therapeutic Goods Act means that they should never have provisionally approved it anyway.

The conclusion must be as follows:

1. The Therapeutic Goods Administration failed in properly assessing the safety profile of the most controversial drug in history for the most vulnerable age cohort, completely ignoring the precautionary principle as well as the relevant provisions of its own enacting legislation;

2. The parents of Australia were misled and coerced into a procedure without the benefit of information which would allow them to give fully informed consent and in fact on the basis of information which was inaccurate and lacking in scientific basis; and

3. Brendan Murphy, the prior Secretary of the Department of Health, is personally responsible for all injuries and deaths which have occurred, or which will occur, in children as a result of his decision to provisionally approve the Covid-19 drugs for that age cohort.

Moving forward, at the very least, this is an about-face that can be pointed to both inside litigation and outside of it.

Peter Fam is the Principal lawyer at specialist human rights law and civil litigation firm Maat’s Method, New South Wales. Peter primarily represents individuals and aligned organisations against Government departments and multinational corporations. He has particular expertise regarding the international human rights framework that Australia is a signatory to and has made several applications to international courts and tribunals on behalf of individuals and groups of people whose fundamental human rights have been breached.

This guest post is republished with permission from Peter’s Substack, Maat’s Mail.

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In an elaborate homage to failing up, Covid-era Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been awarded Australia’s highest honour for “eminent service” to the country, despite a laundry list of scandals and scant achievements to show for it.

As leader of the centre-right Coalition, Morrison, better known in Australia as ‘Scomo,’ was PM for just over three and a half years - between 2018 and 2022 - during which he oversaw Australia’s bonkers Covid response before losing the 2022 federal election to centre-left Labor in a thumping defeat.

Scomo is one of 14 Australians, along with film couple Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, to receive the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) this year, with 830 Aussies being recognised on the King’s Birthday honours list on Monday.

Last year, the top honour went the the two worst Covid strongman premiers, Victoria’s Dan Andrews and Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, who between them took the cake for human rights abuses, corruption scandals, spending blow-outs and bullying.

This year, Scomo has been recognised for a revisionist version of his tenure as PM, which, beneath the glow-up, was marred by secrecy and serial scandals.

The award recognises Scomo’s “notable contributions to global engagement, to leadership of the national COVID-19 response, to economic initiatives, and to national security enhancements, especially through leadership of Australia's contribution to AUKUS.”

What Scomo is really notable for is failing up. That, and spin.

With a background in marketing and tourism, Scomo’s knack for PR-speak, coupled with a seeming lack of genuine convictions, soon had him branded ‘Scotty from marketing’ in national media. We see this instinct at work in his framing of his award in statements made the press overnight.

"From natural disasters to a global pandemic, once in a hundred years, and of course the threats we faced in our region, and a recession caused by that global pandemic," Scomo said.

"Through all of this Australians were just incredible and the one assumption I made is that that's how they would be — their character would pull them through and that's the basis on which we built the policies that helped us to achieve that."

On balance, Australians can’t stand the guy, so leading with flattery is a smart move.

However, one can’t read about natural disasters and Scomo in the same sentence without recalling his disappearance on a family holiday to Hawaii during the first great natural disaster of his Prime Ministership, the 2019 bushfires.

After his office initially lied about his whereabouts, pictures of Scomo in a Hawaiian shirt started doing the rounds online while the country burned. When he finally faced the press, Scomo characteristically passed the buck, telling Sydney’s 2GB radio, “look, I don’t hold a hose mate.”

Similarly, one can’t read about Australia facing a recession without recalling the Morrison government’s decision to close the country’s borders and pay working age Australians AU $90 billion (4.5% of GDP) to stay home and watch Netflix.

In signature fashion, Scomo shifted the blame for his government’s extreme Covid policies - which other governments did not implement - onto a pathogen, which last I checked, had no power to dictate policy.

In other cases, he shifted blame onto state and territory premiers, such as when he promised vaccination would not be compulsory, only to go full Shaggy - “it wasn’t me” - when premiers enforced the toughest vaccine mandates in the world, supported by the federal government’s vaccination requirements for entry into the the country.

Sticking with Covid, Scomo’s biggest scandal of all was surreptitiously appointing himself to five different ministries to afford himself additional pandemic policy decision-making powers, a move which High Court justice Virginia Bell called "corrosive" to trust in government.

Consistent with his penchant for secrecy, Scomo succeeded in keeping the minutes of national cabinet meetings on Covid policy under lock and key. To this day, no one has been able to compel release of the these documents, and current PM Anthony Albanese has inexplicably refused to make them available to the public either.

Scomo was also sharply criticised for encouraging young Australians to consider getting the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine at a time when Australia’s vaccine advisory body, ATAGI, did not recommend it for under-40s, and months after other countries had already paused its use in younger cohorts due to risks of blood clotting.

The following month, in August 2021, 34-year-old Sydney woman Katie Lees died from thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Covid aside, there were the car park rorts and the sports rorts affairs, in which the Morrison government awarded federal grants totalling hundreds of millions of dollars in seats that were consequential to the Coalition, leading to accusations of pork barrelling.

And there was the Robodebt scandal, in which over $1.7 billion was unlawfully clawed from some half a million welfare recipients from 2015 - 2019 based on inaccurate debt calculations, resulting in extreme financial hardship, emotional distress, and some suicides.

As social services minister in 2014 and 2015, Morrison played a key role in the introduction and oversight of the scheme. A Royal Commission into Robodebt found that, during his tenure, Scomo had misled the cabinet and failed to ensure the legality of the scheme, allegations which he forcefully denied.

Among his own ranks, Scomo was known as "a hypocrite and a liar" (then Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce), and "a bully" who used his claimed Christian faith as a "marketing advantage" (then Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells).

Potentially the least ugly item on Scomo’s laundry list of scandals is his brokering the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal with the UK and the US, which has drawn a mixed response. Naturally, this deal too was shrouded in secrecy and scandal.

The deal required walking away from Australia’s contract with French shipbuilder Naval Group at a cost of $835 million - for nothing.

Aside from the $368 billion price tag, the agreement, under which Australia will end up with eight submarines by the early 2040s, includes a commitment to host what is effectively a base for British and American nuclear submarines in Western Australia.

Whether you view AUKUS as a good or bad mark on Scomo’s record depends on your opinions on whether nuclear powered subs are optimal, whether you think entrenching Australia’s security alliance with the US works in our favour, and whether you consider the multi-decade timeline acceptable.

However, few would argue in support of Scomo waltzing straight into a senior executive role with a venture capital fund that invests in AUKUS technologies - Australian founded, US-based DYNE Maritime - a month before formalising his exit from politics.

After losing the federal election in 2022, Scomo was moved to the back bench in the opposition, eventually retiring from politics in February 2024. From there, he exploited his government experience and defence contacts in another private sector role for defence and security consulting firm American Global Strategies. Scomo also took on the role of chairman at Space Centre Australia later that year.

In May 2024, Scomo published an autobiography, Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister's Testimony of God's Faithfulness, the hard copy of which comes with a free vomit bag (kidding, but it should).

Scott Morrison joins the honour roll of former Australian PMs awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia, including Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Howard, Julia Gillard, and Tony Abbott - not to mention the many citizen Australians who earned the award for doing truly great things.

For the second year in a row, the Council of the Order of Australia has rather worn the shine off this once-meaningful award by sticking it on whichever politician managed to show up for work during a pandemic, as though this alone is deserving of a medal. In which case, we all deserve a medal.

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The Queensland Government is facing strong pushback over its plans to destroy a globally significant biobank which could prove invaluable to research into diagnosing and treating long Covid and Covid vaccine injuries.

Campaigners say that biosamples and linked data generated for the publicly-funded $20 million QoVAX Study Set, now defunded and permanently shelved, are of immense scientific importance, and that the government is ethically and legally obligated to make these samples and data available for future research.

Concerns have also been raised that the bank of over 100,000 biospecimens could be required as evidence in future court cases, particularly in relation to Covid vaccine injuries and contamination of Covid vaccines with high levels of synthetic DNA.

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As one of the only studies in the world to include vaccinated and unvaccinated people over an extended time period, and to capture samples and data in subjects who had not yet been infected with Covid, QoVAX provided a unique opportunity for research into the long-term impacts of Covid and its associated vaccines.

However, the award-winning project, which boasted 11 million linked data points from 10,000 adult participants across 86% of Queensland postcodes, was defunded by the state Government just 18 months after its commencement, in June 2023, putting the research in jeopardy.

After no communication on the status of the project for nearly two years, the Government finally notified study participants of the impending destruction of their biospecimens in March of this year, on the grounds that there was “no longer a scientific or public health need” to retain them.

Yet, there is still so much that is unknown about long Covid and Covid vaccine injuries, and these samples and data could be useful in research to better understand these conditions, Professor Kerryn Phelps AM told me for a recent Canberra Daily report.

”We really need to develop biomarkers to be able to make a more definitive diagnosis, both for vaccine injury and for long Covid,” said Professor Phelps, a GP and former president of the Australian Medical Association.

“In parallel, we need to develop a range of evidence-based treatment protocols that are available to GPs and other specialists.”

The promise of this kind of research was the main motivation for Cairns woman Naomi Smith to join QoVAX as a study participant.

“The whole reason I took part in the study was the longitudinal aspect,” said Smith, who was “exceptionally disappointed” by the Government’s decision to destroy her biosamples, without any consultation with study participants.

The human resources consultant, 47, was diagnosed with vaccine-induced pericarditis and a host of other adverse symptoms after her second Pfizer shot in October 2021, and is one of many vaccine-injured Australians whose health has still not returned to baseline years later.

Smith is one of multiple QoVAX participants who is now investigating legal options in an effort to stop the destruction of their biospecimens.

In a strongly worded open letter, Smith and other study participants are demanding that their samples be preserved, as was “explicitly promised” in the participant consent form, and as is required under the relevant legal and ethical codes.

“I agreed to provide my blood and data with the clear understanding that my samples would remain available for ongoing and future studies,” says the letter.

“Metro North Health [custodians of the samples and data] must immediately cease and permanently withdraw any plan, proposal, or intention to destroy, discard, de-identify, or otherwise dispose of the QoVAX Study biospecimens or associated research data.”

Failing a swift and satisfactory response, “I am prepared to pursue immediate legal remedies,” says the letter, which is addressed to Metro North Health, the Human Research Ethics Committee, and Premier David Crisafulli.

Legal avenues may include court orders, administrative complaints, public advocacy, and litigation.

“I’m hoping that they see there are valid reasons for keeping the specimens,” said Smith, who is co-founder and director of COVERSE, Australia’s peak non-profit representing the interests of the Covid vaccine-injured.

“I don’t think any of us were holding out hope that this would give us answers in the short term, but there is an opportunity for these specimens to be used for research to help people who have been incredibly sick.”

There is also the alleged possibility that the QoVAX biosamples will be required for future legal proceedings, a matter raised in a legal notice sent to key Queensland Government figures by former barrister Julian Gillespie.

Gillespie authored the above-mentioned QoVAX participants’ letter, and earlier this year authored a citizens’ petition to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) calling for the suspension of the mRNA Covid vaccines due in part to repeated findings of synthetic DNA contamination in the shots.

Scientists allege that this DNA contamination, which has been confirmed in at least 10 independent studies, can lead to adverse effects such as autoimmune disorders, cancers, genomic integration, and other long-term health effects.

While regulators around the world deny that the contamination poses any risk, internal emails from Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) show that insiders know of the risk potential, even if they aren’t communicating this to the public.

Findings of synthetic DNA contamination in Australian blood samples have only heightened the level of concern for recipients of the mRNA Covid vaccines.

“The QoVAX dataset may prove critical to verifying synthetic DNA contamination findings now confirmed in multiple studies, including Australian blood sample analysis,” states Gillespie’s letter.

“Destruction of this material would irreparably harm the ability of independent scientists and legal investigators to validate these findings and respond appropriately in the interests of public health and safety.”

“Analysis of QoVAX biospecimens and… data is expected to yield further critical public health evidence, and will likely become central to legal proceedings - both domestically and internationally.”

“Any destruction of records or samples following this notice may give rise to legal liability.”

Gillespie advises that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US has also been approached to raise awareness and support for retaining this biobank for international research efforts.

Newly reelected Senator Malcolm Roberts (One Nation), who represents Queensland in the Federal Parliament, has joined the calls to stop the destruction of QoVAX biosamples and data, writing to the Queensland Government leadership to request that planned destruction be immediately halted.

Posting to X, Senator Roberts said that, “Losing the last evidence that could inform a truly objective assessment of the effects of the injections wouldn't just be a tragedy, it could be a crime.”

Source: Senator Malcolm Roberts on X

This is not mere hyperbole - Gillespie highlights that, under Queensland’s Criminal Code Act (1899), it is an offence to destroy evidence, or potential evidence, relevant to judicial proceedings.

Such proceedings could include legal challenges to the vaccine approvals, injury claims, or class action lawsuits.

Metro North Health was asked to comment on the various efforts to stop its planned destruction of the QoVAX biobank, however the response yielded no new information.

A spokesperson reiterated an earlier statement,

“Data for the QoVAX project is currently stored in accordance with the Queensland Government General Retention and Disposal Schedule, Health Sector (Clinical Records) Retention and Disposal Schedule and Health Sector (Corporate Records) Retention and Disposal Schedule.”

On the legal issues raised in letters received by Metro North Health, the spokesperson said,

“We are unable to provide any further information at this time while we consider legal advice regarding future disposal of the samples collected.”

Save QoVAX

A petition to the Queensland Parliament opposing the destruction of QoVAX biosamples and data has collected over 7,000 signatures and is open to all Queenslanders to sign until 8 June 2025.

QoVAX study participants can sign up via COVERSE to find out more about the legal letter prepared by Julian Gillespie to stop the destruction of their biosamples and data.

Concerned readers can write to the Queensland Premier, the Health Minister, and Metro North Health:

thepremier@premiers.qld.gov.au

health@ministerial.qld.gov.au

metronorthfeedback@health.qld.gov.au

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Like the Marvel franchise, with its unlimited instalments and spin-offs, a new Covid scare campaign is underway in Australia.

Like the Marvel franchise, the entertainment content exists largely to create demand for merchandise.

Unlike most Marvel films, this latest virus fear-mongering drive is turning out to be a massive flop.

The hook: There’s a new “highly contagious” Covid Omicron subvariant in town, catchily named NB.1.8.1.

Sticking with time-tested tradition, health authorities, experts, and media are playing the ‘cases, cases, cases’ angle, as the latest variant “sweeps the nation” with what I calculate to be Australia’s twelfth Covid wave since the pandemic scare series kicked off in 2020.

Exposition: “According to Griffith University, the NB.1.8.1 variant makes up more than 40 per cent of total COVID cases tested in Victoria, around 25 per cent in Western Australia and New South Wales, around 20 per cent in Queensland and less than 10 per cent in South Australia,” reports ABC.

“There are hundreds of different strains of Omicron, and the new subvariant NB.1.8.1 is driving up infections and hospitalisations, particularly in Asia and Western Australia,” reports the Daily Mail.

Narrator’s aside: Case counts and hospitalisations are well within the normal range in Western Australia (WA) and no one has been admitted to ICU with Covid for months, according to the latest WA Health reporting.

We’re not seeing anything out of the ordinary in national statistics either.

However, we mustn’t let this contextualising information get in the way of the narrative arc.

Climactic build up: Back to cases, cases, cases. It’s “pretty much everywhere,” according to ABC. “Doctors are expecting a further spike in cases,” so “experts are urging people to get their COVID booster jab.”

Endless vaccination is the only way out!

Climactic escalation: But experts are furious that Australians are not vaccinating enough. You naughty, naughty Australians. In the past six months, only 6.6% of adults have received a Covid vaccine, according to recent federal figures, despite the vaccines being “free,” i.e.: already paid for with your taxes.

Crisis response: Our protagonist takes action to meet the threat head-on. After all, the government has product to shift, so the vaccine advertorial must keep pumping.

Health Minister Mark Butler bravely does the media rounds, imploring anyone who can get a booster to “have a serious think” about following through.

Hero falters: Unfortunately for Butler, boosters aren’t recommended for many cohorts in Australia anymore, because the risk-benefit profile is not favourable for most people.

Current Australian guidelines suggest adults aged over 75 should get a booster every six months, while those aged between 65 and 74, along with severely immunocompromised adults over 18 years of age, should get one every year. Outside of this, boosters are not recommended but are available to all Australian adults, and to children who are severely immunocompromised.

Plot twist: Experts admit that the reason everyone needs another booster is that vaccinating against a fast-mutating coronavirus doesn’t work super well.

“The virus gradually evolves so that some of its proteins are a little bit different so that it can avoid the antibodies that we’ve now got present at population level,” says one.

“In this case, we've got mutations in the spike protein that seems to be making it easier for this virus to attach to our cells and it seems to be making this virus evade our antibodies better,“ says another.

Flashback montage: Every expert who warned of immune imprinting, immune suppression, immune tolerance, the role of vaccines in driving new variants, vaccine-associated enhanced disease (VAEDs), and the general futility of vaccinating against respiratory viruses.

Slow roll a peer-reviewed article co-authored by Dr Anthony Fauci concluding that, “Durably protective vaccines against non-systemic mucosal respiratory viruses with high mortality rates have thus far eluded vaccine development efforts.”

Comic relief: Like the good lackeys they are, media outlets are beating up the BREAKING new variant story, to which the general public response has been LMAO.

An online Murdoch media poll indicates three-quarters of their readers just aren’t interested.

Denouement: Collective apathy. The failure of this latest scare campaign is unlikely to preclude a thirteenth scare campaign, as the government is generally unresponsive to market feedback, and it has mRNA investments and purchase commitments driving its decision-making.

Media will continue to uncritically print government press releases provided they convert to clicks - LMAO or otherwise.

Expect the next instalment just in time for the summer Covid wave.

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A new analysis by the Australian Government comparing Covid outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated Australians was an opportunity to finally provide evidence for repeated claims of the effectiveness of Australia’s vaccine rollout.

But basic flaws render the analysis virtually useless, adding to the pile of ‘bad data’ that authorities continue to pull from to justify their ongoing promotion of the Covid vaccines.

The report, ‘Hospitalisations and deaths following a COVID-19 diagnosis, 2020-2022: a linked data analysis’ by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) is the first official report to link data on infections, hospitalisation, and deaths stratified by age and vaccination status from most states and territories.1

Until now, federal, state, and territory governments have steadfastly refused to release linked real-world data to support their claims of Covid vaccine effectiveness, blocking Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and claiming in court to have erased the data so as not to have to hand it over.

Instead, authorities relied on modelling and overseas studies to support their claims, regardless of whether these findings translate to real-world outcomes on the ground in Australia.

During the pandemic, New South Wales (NSW) Health was the only government department in the country to regularly publish Covid hospitalisation, ICU, and death data stratified by vaccination status, and these reports showed a strong association between more shots and worse outcomes, while in many weeks, not a single unvaccinated person was hospitalised with Covid at all.

Note that the above graphs show representation in hospital and death outcomes for each dose per million people in the population proportional to vaccination status, not raw number, thereby avoiding the problem of base rate fallacy.

However, NSW Health’s failure to stratify by both vaccination status and age made it impossible to tell if the terrible outcomes for the vaccinated were due to negative vaccine efficacy, as it appeared, or if other factors were at play.2

Coupled with Australia’s record high excess deaths, which started clocking up around the same time as the vaccine rollout, and at least half of which could not be explained away by Covid infections, the lack of hard proof for claims of vaccine efficacy in the Australian population left an information vacuum fast filled by speculation.

Ideally, this new linked data analysis by the AIHW would finally put such speculation to bed. But it doesn’t, and it can’t, due to the same miscategorisation errors that have plagued a multitude of Covid-era studies, making their findings not only unreliable, but potentially dead wrong.

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The AIHW analysis: basic miscategorisation errors

The report claims to show that the vaccinated fared much better than their unvaccinated counterparts.

“Covid-19 hospitalisation rates were 4 times as high in unvaccinated older people than those with 3 or more doses,” and “across all age groups, COVID-19 case fatality rates were lower among people who were vaccinated,” are key takeaways, for example.

However, these claims cannot possibly be drawn from the AIHW analysis because:

1. Vaccinations weren’t counted until 14 days after administration;

2. An undetermined number of people with unknown vaccination status were counted as unvaccinated; and,

3. People who had opted out of sharing their vaccination status with third parties were excluded from the analysis altogether.

Per the technical notes at the end of the AIHW report,

“The data on COVID-19 vaccination status in this report was based on data from the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) in the COVID-19 Register. The AIR is a national register that records vaccines given to all people in Australia, including people enrolled in Medicare or people who had a vaccination record transferred from recognised vaccination providers (such as a general practitioner or community health centre).

“This report considered COVID-19 vaccination status based on the total number of COVID-19 vaccination doses recorded 14 days or more prior to a COVID-19 diagnosis. This is to account for a vaccination taking 14 days to become effective, based on studies showing that a single dose of vaccine offers some protection around 2 weeks after vaccination.”

This means that the ‘zero dose’ category in the AIHW analysis included anyone:

• Who had not had a dose;

• Who had one dose up to 13 days prior; and,

• Whose vaccination status was not recorded or matched with their record in the AIR, i.e.: vaccination status is unknown.

Additionally, anyone who had previously opted out of sharing their information with a third party was excluded from the analysis.

I confirmed with the government that this interpretation of the AIHW methodology for determining dose status and inclusion in the analysis is accurate.

The first error alone - counting the newly vaccinated as unvaccinated (or less vaccinated) - can make a placebo or even an ineffective vaccine appear effective in observational studies, according to mathematician Norman Fenton:

The confounding effect that this and similar miscategorisations can have on misrepresenting vaccine effectiveness has been documented in numerous peer-reviewed articles, with effects estimated to be as high as 50% to 70%.

This kind of categorisation error hides any negative effects that may occur in the first 14 days after receiving a shot, while at the same time artificially inflating the incidence of those effects and any other negative outcomes in the group that has fewer or zero doses.

As a majority of Australians received their first vaccine dose before Covid was circulating in the community, this methodological flaw is unlikely to have skewed the Covid hospitalisation and death outcomes in this AIHW analysis too greatly as far as comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated goes.3 It would likely have a greater effect on reported outcomes by dose, where newly boosted people are treated as having fewer shots than they have actually had.

However, the second and third errors - counting some people with unknown vaccination status as unvaccinated, and excluding an undetermined number of others who had opted out of information sharing - are likely to have had a profound effect on the outcome of this particular analysis, maybe even enough to completely invert the reported outcomes.

During the pandemic, most state governments using data from the AIR put hospital patients with unknown vaccination status into the zero dose/unvaccinated category for reporting purposes.

This resulted in headlines to the effect that a third or a quarter of people in hospital were unvaccinated, giving the impression that the unvaccinated were vastly overrepresented in hospitalisation and death statistics, and feeding into the public shaming of the unvaccinated as a burden on the healthcare system.

This was pure misinformation (or disinformation if you believe the reporting error was deliberate).

Simply by looking at the fortnightly Covid surveillance reports of the only state that published Covid data with the zero dose and unknown categories separated out from each other, NSW, it was easy to ascertain a few salient facts:

1. On any given week, those with unknown vaccination status accounted for around one in four of those hospitalised with Covid (unknowns were a much smaller group in the death data).

2. Initially (i.e.: in the first several months of reporting), the unvaccinated fared worse in Covid hospitalisation outcomes and fairly equal in deaths to the vaccinated.

3. As the rollout progressed, the unvaccinated fared much better compared to their representation in the population, with ZERO unvaccinated Covid hospitalisations in some weeks.

4. Conversely, those who had received more boosters fared considerably worse, being overrepresented in Covid hospitalisations, ICU admissions, and deaths most reporting weeks.

Thanks to X user @LCHF_Matt uploading the fortnightly NSW reports into this live chart, the public was able to visualise these outcomes. What we see is that the unvaccinated are underrepresented on a per capita basis in hospitalisations, ICU admissions, and deaths, while the more shots a person has, the more likely they are to be hospitalised, admitted to ICU, or die with Covid.4

Evidently, bucketing unknowns in with the unvaccinated grossly skewed the reported outcomes from other states, giving the false impression that the unvaccinated were flooding hospitals when in reality, after an initial round of infections, they were mostly doing much better than the boosted.

Moreover, excluding an undetermined number of 'opt-outs’ from the data messes with the denominators for Covid outcomes.

Services Australia, which manages the AIR opt-outs, advised by email that 230,490 people have opted out of third-party information sharing as at 27 May 2025, a number equating to just under 1% of the Australian population.

If we could guarantee that the unknown opt-out subjects were evenly distributed across age and vaccination status, this would not be a problem, but we have no way of knowing the distribution of these opt-outs.

Unknowns: Skewing the data

Readers might counter - but if your vaccination status is unknown in the AIR, doesn’t that mean you’re not vaccinated? Wouldn’t those who have been vaccinated have their doses recorded?

Surprisingly, no, based on the only information publicly available:

• According to NSW Health surveillance reports at the time (example), anyone whose details were not an “exact match” to their AIR record was allocated ‘unknown’ status. Reasons for lack of an exact match could include: vaccination overseas; having an interstate address or having just moved house; having a misspelled name on hospital forms; a recent name change (e.g.: marriage); and unvaccinated people who have no record of vaccination in the AIR. As already mentioned, you can also opt out of allowing third parties to access your vaccination records in the AIR, which means that healthcare providers (like a hospital) won’t be able to ascertain your vaccination status. It is unclear whether these opt-outs were allocated to the unknown category in NSW Health reporting, or if they were excluded.

• In one week, cross-referencing of NSW data confirmed that all cases in the unknown category were double or triple vaccinated.

• In the latter quarter of 2021, NSW Health reported that most unknowns would have had at least one dose: “Cases between October and mid-December with an unknown status are likely to have received at least one dose, but their record could not be matched with AIR.” Read more about these details, with screenshots, at the bottom of this post.

We don’t know how many in the AIHW’s data set were of unknown vaccination status, since under its methodology, the AIHW had no way of identifying this group, aside from excluding the opt-outs.

What we can take from the AIHW report: Not a lot

In light of these basic miscategorisation errors, what can the new AIHW report actually show us about Covid outcomes in the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated? Not a lot.

These errors alone could account for the fact that the AIHW’s analysis produced the total opposite outcomes to NSW Health data.

Still, even if the AIHW had avoided these errors, the analysis would be of little use value. The AIHW assessed only hospitalisations and deaths due to and with Covid - loose definitions requiring a Covid diagnosis up to 14 days prior to, or two days after admission for hospitalisations (capturing stays of overnight or longer to exclude same-day discharges indicative of mild disease), and coding indicating that Covid was an underlying or contributing factor for deaths.

However, the appropriate way to assess vaccine outcomes at population level is to analyse all-cause mortality and hospitalisations, as this is the only way to capture non-specific effects of vaccination.

If, for example, Covid vaccines are associated with a 3.7-fold increase in cardiac events, as was the case in the Pfizer trial, then the vaccine cannot be said to improve health outcomes overall in the vaccinated population - the opposite is true. An analysis focusing only on Covid-related hospitalisations and deaths will fail to capture this full picture.

Australian data scientist Andrew Madry has detailed further problems with the AIHW report on his Substack, Datawise.

A house of cards

The AIHW Covid data analysis is just the latest in a parade of reports and modelling studies that are too flawed to tell us anything, yet are reliably used to prop up the Covid vaccine efficacy house of cards.

To be clear, the AIHW has not made a claim for Covid vaccine effectiveness based on its analysis. Per the report,

“It is important to note that simple descriptive analyses of COVID-19 vaccination in people with COVID-19 conducted in this report cannot be used to infer effectiveness of vaccination for a range of reasons.”

However, it is highly probable that this analysis will be proffered by government departments, academia, and professional bodies as evidence of vaccine effectiveness anyway.

In public and media communications, these institutions regularly quote flawed studies or data that, upon further inspection, do not support their claims of ‘evidence’ of Covid vaccine efficacy.

In Australia, a Monash University (NSW) modelling study of the Delta and Omicron waves claiming to show that the Covid vaccination campaign saved approximately 20,000 lives in NSW alone is frequently wheeled out by the Actuaries Institute and government departments as evidence of the effectiveness of Australia’s Covid vaccine rollout.

However, this study made a similar miscategorisation error to the AIHW analysis, categorising anyone vaccinated as having ‘no effective dose’ until 21 days after administration of a shot.

Substacker Alison Bevege documents other problems with this study, not least that the authors confused case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR), thereby grossly overestimating the deadliness of the Covid waves in their modelling.

Another widely-touted study based on South Australia Health data claimed without qualification that the unvaccinated were five times more likely to die from Covid. But upon inspection, the only deaths under the age of 60 were in the vaccinated, and most of the deaths occurred in those aged 80 and older (i.e.: around or above Australia’s average life expectancy of 81 and 85 for men and women, respectively).

On the world stage, a modelling study published in the Lancet claiming to show that Covid vaccines saved nearly 20 million lives in the first year of the rollout has been methodically debunked by researcher Raphael Lataster (on Substack as Okay Then News) in a metacritique published in the Journal of Independent Medicine, yet this will almost certainly not stop authorities and media from continuing to boldly make this unsupported claim.

In email communications, an Australian state health department recently referred me to another AIHW report as evidence that Covid vaccines could not have contributed to excess deaths because the report showed that Australia had a comparatively low excess death rate compared to other countries for 2020-2022.

Indeed, Australia had negative excess deaths in 2020, when our federal and state governments shut us off from the rest of the world, put most of the population under house arrest, and trashed our economy. Madry attributes the lower 2020 figure also to a higher influenza burden the year prior, in 2019.

However, using 2020 data - when there were no vaccines - as evidence that vaccines do not cause excess deaths, is patently absurd. Furthermore, once the vaccines were introduced, the increase in Australia’s excess mortality rate became such an undeniable phenomenon that the Senate conducted an inquiry into the matter.

Show us the data

Perhaps there is data that can show how effective the Covid vaccine rollout was in Australia (and beyond).

To prove this, all authorities need to do is publish hospitalisation and all-cause mortality data stratified by age, vaccination status, and comorbidities. This data should be made available at record level, de-identified.

No Australian state or federal authority has ever done this, leaving many to wonder - why not?

The AIHW data is available for download, but as it is incomplete, aggregated, and incorrectly categorised as discussed in this article, it is of little use in the form in which it has been presented. Researchers may apply to access the data to perform their own analyses, but projects and any pending publication of works must be approved by the AIHW and “relevant data custodians,” per a response received from an email enquiry to the AIHW. We can probably guess what kinds of projects will and won’t be approved.

In Queensland (QLD), the government is set to destroy a globally significant Covid vaccine study biobank that could presumably further support health authorities’ claims of vaccine effectiveness. Yet the QLD Government prefers to destroy the biospecimens and permanently archive the data than to keep the study going and publish the amazing results for the world to see.

And so, Australians are left at square one.

Authorities say the Covid vaccines were very effective, but refuse to produce the data to prove it. If belief requires blind faith, that’s not science - that’s a cult.

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Related reading

Yet, studies do exist suggesting an association, so how do we square this?

Very few have honestly tried to answer this question, and even if you wanted to, where would you begin?

This article by is a great place to start: ‘Mapping the entire field of autism causation studies in one article.’

uTobian

Mapping the entire field of autism causation studies in one article

(Editor’s note: This article is too long for many email systems so please click the headline to read the full article on the Substack site…

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a year ago · 634 likes · 150 comments · Toby Rogers

Toby has a PhD in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Brownstone Institute fellow, and his research focuses on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry.

I had the pleasure of meeting Toby at several Brownstone events last year, and heard him speak on the topic of autism several times. My assessment of his work is that it is rigorous, and that he arrives at strongly stated opinions through a process of genuine open-minded inquiry. My assessment of his character is that he is principled, concerned with what is true, and motivated by sincere compassion for families touched by autism.

Summary

Covering more than 850 studies on autism causation in the US, the article groups studies into the main categories addressing different causation theories, explaining strengths, weaknesses, and key findings.

What is missing is the kind of research that would need to be conducted to rule out a causal association between vaccines and autism. This would include:

• RCTs for individual vaccines with a proper inert placebo group (Only two vaccines on the US childhood schedule were tested in a placebo-controlled trial; only one of these for a period of more than six months. See here for the full list.);

• Studies investigating the cumulative effects of multiple shots given over time;

• Studies investigating interactions between vaccines/vaccine components and other factors such as genetics or environmental toxins;

• Studies investigating what kind of conditions and predispositions make people more susceptible to vaccine injury, if any; and,

• Large studies comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated cohorts.

While the ‘settled science’ crowd tends to focus on a group of studies claiming to prove no association between MMR vaccines or thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism, there is a dearth of research of the type that would be required to actually prove no association or causation between vaccines and autism.

Genetics is not the main driver of the surge in autism prevalence - there is no such thing as a genetic epidemic, and US $2 billion of government funding invested into finding the genetic cause of autism has thus far failed to produce any major breakthroughs.

Given that the majority (possibly up to 88%) of autism cases are characterised by autistic regression, acute toxic exposure is a leading hypothesis for autism causation. Anecdotally, a multitude of parents say this regression follows a vaccination appointment; these testimonies should inform the generation of questions and hypotheses for empirical research.

Epigenetics studies provide valuable insights into environmental factors/toxicants that should be studied further, but the utility of their findings is limited due to failure to control for vaccination as a confounding variable.

There are a handful of good vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies that suggest causation between vaccination and autism, chronic illnesses, neurodevelopmental disabilities, and ADHD.

All summarised in one infographic:

You don’t have to take Toby’s interpretation of the studies on faith - he’s linked many of them, so you can use this article as a launch pad for your own further reading.

This article builds on Toby’s earlier work in his doctoral thesis on the political economy of autism, summarised and downloadable in full here:

uTobian

The Political Economy of Autism

Increase in Autism Prevalence in the U.S. 1970 to 2022…

Read more

5 years ago · 737 likes · 251 comments · Toby Rogers

It’s a lengthy read but worth it. Some standout factoids that surprised me from this reading:

• No diagnostic biomarkers for ASD validated as yet - incredible, given the focus on finding a genetic cause;

• I was not previously aware that so many toxins had already been linked to ASD;

• The unreliability of peer reviewed literature - I knew this was a problem but didn’t realise so many high profile academics and editors had written about it;

• I was surprised at how cheap it is to buy off institutions like the CDC, FDA, and NIH;

• The relative lack of chemicals regulation by the EPA - shocking;

• “No safe dose” and “timing makes the poison” both new concepts to me, but seem obvious after having been explained;

• Causation can be multi-factorial and not necessarily simultaneous with a single toxic exposure; and,

• Strong evidence for an association between SSRI use in pregnancy and autism.

Personally, it never occurred to me to read any books or studies on autism causation, and especially not in relation to vaccines until entire populations were coerced into taking novel therapeutics in the absence of appropriate scientific evidence (and informed consent) during Covid.

I’d never heard of anti-vaxxers and I was unaware that vaccines could have serious side effects.

However, once you realise that ‘safe and effective’ is not the guarantee you thought it was, this prompts follow up enquiries.

In the past several years I’ve read many studies and books on vaccines, the diseases they are supposed to prevent, and their safety and effectiveness, but I feel as though I’m still catching up on a lifetime of education.

As I keep researching, I will keep sharing resources that I find helpful, and summarising my learnings with projects like the recent webinar I facilitated on measles, with accompanying notes in collaboration with .

Let me know in the comments what resources you’ve found helpful in coming to better understand this topic...

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After three years of negotiations, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Pandemic Agreement to strengthen global pandemic preparedness and response was finally adopted by member states on Tuesday at the 78th World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva.

The adoption by consensus followed Monday’s approval of the international Treaty by vote (124 in favour, 0 objections, 11 abstentions).

The United States (US), having announced its intended withdrawal from the WHO, was absent from the proceedings.

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “the world is safer today” due to the adoption of the Agreement, which he characterised as “a victory for public health, science and multilateral action.”

“It will ensure we, collectively, can better protect the world from future pandemic threats.

“It is also a recognition by the international community that our citizens, societies and economies must not be left vulnerable to again suffer losses like those endured during COVID-19.”

While the adoption of the Pandemic Agreement moves things forward, implementation will not be realised for at least a year or more, as member states are yet to finalise a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex, which can be adopted at the next WHA in May 2026 at the earliest.

Once the PABS has been adopted, the binding Agreement must be ratified by 60 member states to come into full effect.

The controversial Agreement is one of two interoperable WHO pandemic reforms which promise to boost global collaboration, but which have been criticised for posing a threat to national sovereignty and directing vast resources away from more pressing global health needs.

Ironically, though Covid was the nominal impetus for driving this Agreement forward, no part of the text mentions or safeguards against government-funded gain-of-function research, which is widely recognised - including by intelligence agencies in the UK, Germany and the US - to be the most likely cause of the pandemic the world just lived through.

An earlier draft clause addressing gain-of-function research, “including accidental laboratory leakages of disease-causing agents” did not make it into the final version of the Agreement.

Instead, the Agreement (interchangeably called the Pandemic Treaty) focuses heavily on building systems to constantly surveil for and detect emerging pathogens to enable swift global coordination, including the development and distribution of medical countermeasures to ensure equity (i.e.: access to pharmaceutical products).

"If we'd been faster last time with the vaccines, we would have saved over eight million lives. That's a huge, huge benefit," said chair of the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) Jane Halton on ABC today, weighing in on the “breakthrough” Treaty.

Yet, “We have not had a major outbreak in over 100 years that is in the category of natural outbreaks that the pandemic agenda is designed for,” public health physician and former WHO medical officer Dr David Bell told me earlier this year, referring to the pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu.

Through his work with the multidisciplinary REPPARE group convened by the University of Leeds, Dr Bell’s recent work highlights the exaggerated presentation of pandemic risk by the WHO, which is not supported by the available evidence.

This has not perturbed member states from pledging their commitment to the Treaty and its complementary International Health Regulations (IHRs) amendments (2024), the latter of which will come into effect if member states do not formally reject them by July of this year.

This commitment includes an increase of 20% in member state contributions towards the WHO’s 2026-2027 budget of US $4.2 billion ($2.1 billion per year).

The development of the Pandemic Agreement alone has already cost an estimated US $201 million, with annual costs post-implementation estimated to run at approximately $32 billion. This is just shy of the estimated $37 billion per year that it would cost to eliminate world hunger by 2030.

While most world governments are ramping up their rhetorical and financial support for the pandemic preparedness industry led by the WHO, there are pockets of resistance.

Argentina has joined the US in announcing its intention to withdraw from the WHO, and 11 countries, including Slovakia, Italy, and Poland, abstained from the vote to approve the Pandemic Agreement.

While Australian officials have thrown their full weight behind the adoption of the Treaty, a growing movement of nearly two million concerned citizens is coalescing in opposition under the banner of the Aligned Council of Australia.

Last year, a group of Australian politicians pressed the Prime Minister to reject the reforms on the basis that they posed “a significant threat to Australia’s autonomy and independence on the global stage,” a threat that the WHO flatly denies, although this denial is a matter of semantics.

The Treaty itself does not afford the WHO or the Director-General the authority to “direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe the national and/or domestic law,” or to compel countries to implement measures such as travel bans or vaccine mandates, however the complementary IHRs do.

This is why it’s important to understand that the pandemic reforms are intended to operate in conjunction with each other.

As stated in Article 24.2 of the newly adopted Pandemic Agreement, “The Parties recognize that the WHO Pandemic Agreement and International Health Regulations (2005) [soon to be updated to IHR amendments 2024] and other relevant international agreements should be interpreted so as to be compatible."

Meanwhile, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. took the opportunity this week to affirm the US’s decision to leave the WHO.

“Like many legacy institutions, the WHO has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics,” Kennedy wrote on X.

“Global cooperation on health is still critically important to [President Trump] and myself, but it isn’t working very well under the WHO as the failures of the COVID era demonstrate.

“I urge the world's health ministers and the WHO to take our withdrawal from the organization as a wake-up call.”

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