Australia's Covid response caused significant harm, yet another report finds
Will the lessons be learned?
Five years on from the declaration of a global pandemic, I’m weary of Covid inquiries. They tend to go either of two ways. They either run through bureaucratic checkboxes and give everyone a medal for having locked down the fastest and vaccinated the most. Or, they spend months reviewing submissions and focus group transcripts to come to very obvious conclusions, like ‘closing schools for prolonged periods is damaging for kids’ or ‘people don’t trust public health authorities if you attempt to force everyone to take an over-hyped vaccine.’
A new report from the Australian Human Rights Commission examining the effects of the state and federal Covid response fits in the latter category, offering predictable insights like “human rights impacts were not always considered or protected,” and that many Australians felt they were “collateral damage” to government policies.
However, being the only Australian review to have taken extensive and nuanced consideration of human rights, it is worth a look for what it reveals about how the flamekeepers of human rights in this country think about emergency management, conflicting rights, and trade-offs.
Collateral Damage
The report, titled Collateral Damage, centres on the personal stories of more than 5,000 Australians following a national survey, community consultations, and stories shared through an online portal.
It is the first national review to spotlight the Covid experience of everyday Australians to such an extent, after the Commission received thousands of enquiries and complaints relating to the pandemic.
Overall, it contains some useful insights. Where government reviews have tended to assume that the right of the community to be protected from a virus automatically trumps the right, say, to bodily autonomy, the Commission makes no assumptions, discussing the human rights trade-offs of key policy decisions in detail, and in the context of Australia’s commitment to international covenants and treaties.
That said, the Commission found a high level of community support for privileging community well-being over individual rights. In the survey, 74% of participants agreed that the greater good of the community should always be considered before individual rights, and only 10% disagreed. When asked specifically whether the Covid vaccine should be mandatory for all except those with medical exemptions, a slimmer majority of 57% of participants agreed, and a sizeable proportion (29%) disagreed.
The report critiques the “disproportionate” nature of Australia’s Covid response, especially the inappropriateness of “blanket and inflexible policies that failed to consider local realities,” and the lack of compassion in the way that extreme measures, like travel bans, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns, were implemented.
The Commission found that two in five Australians felt they had been disadvantaged by the Covid situation, while one in five said they had benefited from it (another two in five were neutral). Victorians, who were subject to the world’s longest lockdowns and some of the most extreme pandemic measures ever seen, were the least likely to think the pandemic had been handled well.
Unsurprisingly, people in vulnerable and low socioeconomic circumstances, including First Nations people, suffered the most, while people who could easily work from home and suffered no financial losses were more likely to feel they had benefited.
“In our research, we heard devastating stories of severe economic hardship, families unable to say goodbye to loved ones, women trapped in violent households, and communities left isolated due to blanket policies that failed to consider local realities,” said Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay, who co-authored the report.
“These experiences should never be ignored or repeated.”
These experiences, like a pregnant woman who didn’t want to get the vaccine, but relented because she couldn’t afford to lose her job. At 17 weeks pregnant, she experienced a stillbirth and had to deliver her baby alone in the hospital while her husband was refused entry due to a positive Covid test.
These experiences, like a woman who was “isolated and stuck in a DV [domestic violence] relationship” during lockdowns.
These experiences, like the man who watched his father’s funeral “in a suit and tie in my kitchen over a streamed video link” due to movement restrictions.
These experiences, like the daughters who placed their mother into aged care right before lockdowns and had to watch her through a glass window as she descended into a state of despair from the isolation, pleading to be let out.
These experiences, like a man stranded in Japan for two years with his Australian-citizen daughter, separated from family and disrupting education plans because of federal and state restrictions on movement.
These experiences, like refugees on temporary visas whose places of work were closed during lockdowns, but who could not access financial support due to lack of citizenship, leaving them unable to support themselves and their families, but also unable to return home.
Notably absent from these experiences are the voices of the Covid vaccine-injured, which did not feature anywhere in the report, despite submissions having been made.
Vaccine injuries and mandates: a blind spot
In a short section on vaccine side-effects, the Commission says it received “many story submissions in which people spoke of injury, harm and anger arising because their fears of vaccine side-effects were dismissed and that their claims of vaccine injury were ignored or undermined.”
Nevertheless, it is “important to acknowledge that the TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] continue to advise that vaccination against COVID-19 is the most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from infection, and that the protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks.”
That may be the case for the majority (although the effectiveness of these shots is seriously questionable), but it’s not for the people who are injured, which is the entire point of these people’s stories.
The report references almost 139,654 adverse events following immunisation (AEFIs) reported to the TGA’s safety database as at 29 October 2023, contrasting this figure against 68,864,839 doses having been administered, as though the comparative rarity of reported AEFIs somehow diminishes the impact or significance of the injuries experienced.
There is no mention of the underreporting factor of surveillance systems like that used by the TGA, which suggests that the AEFIs experienced in the population may be 10-100 times greater than those recorded. There is no mention of the fact that approximately 22,000 of the reported AEFIs were classified by the TGA as ‘serious,’ and there is no mention of the 1,007 reported deaths at that point in time.
While the TGA likes to emphasise that AEFIs reported to its database, including deaths, may not be causally linked to the vaccines, the reverse is also true. Injuries and deaths may be causally linked to the vaccines, and there is no evidence to prove that this is not the case, as in almost all cases the TGA does not attempt to determine the causality of reported AEFIs or deaths associated with Covid vaccination, rather assigning a causality status of “possible.”
The Commission closes this section with a statement on the importance of adequate compensation for AEFIs, as though mandating a drug that causes life-altering injuries and death is acceptable as long as some money is handed out.
What the Commission is describing here is a death and injury lottery. You cannot work, travel, visit your loved ones, or access public venues and services unless you participate in the lottery. Your chances of injury or death are a point of contention, but rest assured that some of you, the unlucky ones, will pull a short straw.
If we were to discuss vaccine mandates in these terms, it would be a very different conversation.
Another issue raised by participants on the subject of vaccine mandates was the human right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without free consent (Article 7 of the ICCPR, to which Australia is a party). This is a non-derogable right, meaning that it cannot be infringed upon, not even in an emergency.
However, the Commission assures that the Covid vaccine rollout was not experimental, and therefore this concern is invalid.
“While COVID-19 vaccines were developed rapidly and were initially granted provisional approval, they were not a form of medical or scientific experimentation. The vaccines used in Australia were all approved by the TGA using the recognised assessment and approval processes,” states the report.
Ironically, this section is followed by another titled “lack of information,” in which participants describe not being able to find information relating to the effects of vaccination on their pregnancies or pre-existing conditions. This was because the vaccines had not been tested in these populations yet.
The Commission appears to have forgotten that the vaccines were rolled out during Phase 3 of the trials, i.e.: they were experimental by definition, at least until the trials ended in December 2022-June 2023, and arguably well past these dates due to the lack of medium to long-term safety data.
As would be expected of any drug being rolled out before the completion of trials (and fast-tracked at that), some side effects were not discovered until the shots had already been administered en masse, such as the potentially deadly risk of TTS with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Other side effects and post-vaccine conditions are still only being discovered now.
Presumably, that’s why Australia’s Health Minister at the time, Greg Hunt, said on national television that the world was engaged in “the largest global vaccination trial ever, and we will have enormous amounts of data.”1
The problem is that authorities and pharma companies want to have it both ways - and the Commission allows it. They want to say that the vaccines are safe but give pharma companies a liability shield in case they’re not. They want to say ‘we built the plane while flying it’ but also claim that the plane was already built and had passed all safety checks before leaving the tarmac.
It cannot be both ways, and we can’t have a proper discussion about human rights trade-offs without admitting that.
Considering the lack of information available about the vaccines, their experimental nature, and blanket mandates requiring vaccination for participation in the economy and public life, informed consent was simply not possible for most Australians during the Covid vaccine rollout.
Informed consent requires that the recipient of a vaccine has the legal capacity to consent, is acting voluntarily in the absence of coercion, and has been given enough information about the risks and benefits to make a choice.
The report goes some way in addressing the lack of opportunity for informed consent, featuring the voices of people who felt “forced,” “bullied," and “coerced” into getting vaccinated, and acknowledging that “some people felt that they were not actually given a meaningful choice.”
This was such a problem that the government had to publish directions to healthcare providers on how to handle people fronting up to their vaccination appointments saying that they didn’t consent, but they were being forced to get it to keep their job.
The report also discusses the short timeframes imposed on people to get vaccinated before consequences for refusal kicked in, and privacy concerns relating to the implementation of vaccine passports.
While the Commission emphasises that “it is preferable to encourage compliance rather than punish non-compliance” and that “vaccine hesitancy concerns should not be undermined or dismissed,” the door is left open for vaccine mandates to be implemented under a human rights framework in the future.
“Mandatory vaccinations should ideally be considered only after other, less invasive, strategies have been implemented,” states the report.
“Broad-based mandates run the risk of failing to consider individual circumstances and hence opens up the possibility of discrimination. More should be done to prevent feelings of coercion, as this erodes government trust and has ramifications for future emergency response.”
This reads a little la-la-land to me. People tend to experience feelings of coercion when they are being coerced. Mandates are coercive, and necessarily are incompatible with informed consent.
The Commission stopped short of acknowledging this hard truth, but any discussion of future mandates needs to start here to avoid spiraling off into doublespeak nonsense about voluntary mandatory vaccinations - people aren’t stupid, and are disinclined to trust authorities speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
Human rights as priority in emergency planning
The Commission recommends that all levels of government adopt an Emergency Response Framework, anchored by seven key principles:
Human rights as a priority, embedded in decision-making from the outset.
Meaningful consultation with all communities, especially vulnerable groups, as a one-size-fits-all approach is ineffective.
Proportionate responses that are constantly reviewed and adapted.
Balancing risk with compassion, ensuring timely and accessible exemptions.
Tailored communication, addressing diverse needs and combating misinformation.
Empowering and supporting local communities to help create more effective and considered plans.
Planning beyond the crisis to avoid abrupt withdrawal of critical supports.
If adopted, this framework would be an improvement on what we lived through over the past five years.
“This isn’t about who is to blame, but how we can do better. We cannot wait for the next crisis to learn these lessons,” Commissioner Finlay said.
“We must rebuild trust, strike a balance between individual freedoms and public health, and place human rights at the heart of emergency planning.”
However, the vaccine mandate blind spot remains, and trust will not be rebuilt without accountability and restoration of free and informed consent.
Until authorities and mandate-pushers face the music and reckon with the human impact of their policies, we are unlikely to see meaningful human rights considerations in the development of emergency policies - especially vaccination policies - in the future.
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The largest formal vaccination trial ever conducted was the Salk polio vaccine trial in 1954. It was a massive, double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving 1.8 million children, so it is improbable that Hunt was referring to the RCTs in this interview.
When it mattered the HRC were MIA. Too late to the party.
Disappointing, but unsurprisingly another bureaucratic whitewash. The judiciary and the bureaucracy are corrupt to the core. God only knows how these people sleep at night.