First Covid deaths were fully vaccinated, Queensland Government records show
When the border opened and Covid started to spread in highly-vaccinated Queensland, the first Covid death was double vaccinated. So were the majority of deaths thereafter.
In 2021, the Queensland Government closed the state’s borders and campaigned heavily to get everyone vaccinated. The state had managed to keep Covid cases to near zero since the start of the pandemic, but it couldn’t stay closed off forever.
The borders would reopen when 80 per cent of the community had been vaccinated, promised Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (pronounced pal-uh-shay). This would “stop the spread of this virus,” and “protect vulnerable Queenslanders.”
But when the state hit its 80 per cent target and the borders reopened in December 2021, the exact opposite happened.1 Cases exploded, and as the vaccines had evidently failed to prevent infection or transmission, the official messaging quickly pivoted to focus on vaccines providing protection against severe illness and death.
However, documents filed by Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerard in legal proceedings show that the first Covid deaths after the vaccination rollout were mostly double jabbed, indicating that it was known to the Government as early as January 2022 that the vaccines did not prevent deaths either.
This information has come to light as a result of a court case brought by Doctors Against Mandates to challenge Queensland Health’s Covid workplace mandates, for which Dr Gerard filed an affidavit which included a summary of Queensland case deaths. The summary details the first 183 Covid deaths recorded in the state from the start of the pandemic, from 13 March 2020 until 27 January 2022.2
While Queensland recorded seven deaths early in the pandemic, none of these were from community spread (five were from cruise ships and the other two caught Covid outside of the state).
It wasn’t until Queensland opened its borders in December 2021 after years of strict on-again-off-again lockdowns, quarantine and border closures that cases took off in the community, and the first locally acquired Covid infection leading to death was recorded - a double vaccinated man in his 80s.3
After a year of hyping the vaccine-as-magic-bullet myth, it was a potential PR nightmare for the Queensland Government that the first locally acquired Covid case death turned out to be someone who was fully vaccinated. Luckily for them, no media reported it.
Over the next month, the large majority of people who died with Covid were fully vaccinated. They were also mostly aged care residents in their 80s and 90s.
Of the 176 deaths from the border opening up until 27 January 2022, 115 were fully vaccinated (65 per cent). 13 were boosted (7 per cent), and 47 were unvaccinated (27 per cent). 14 were recorded as either partially vaccinated (one dose), or were of uncertain status.
One individual in his 90s died with five doses of vaccination recorded on his file.4
Of the unvaccinated cohort, it is quite likely that many were elderly aged care residents who were ineligible for vaccination because they were too frail to be vaccinated. However, any ineligible people, elderly or otherwise, were not included in the official vaccination statistics, which only reported vaccination coverage in the eligible population, not the whole population. Therefore, the true number of unvaccinated Queenslanders is unknown.5 All we know for sure is that the proportion of unvaccinated Queenslanders is under reported due to the omission of ineligible people.
Regardless, the vaccines clearly weren’t working to prevent transmission, infection or death. And clearly, the elderly were by far the cohort at greatest risk. In the eleven cases where comorbidities were documented, every one had underlying health conditions (the remainder are recorded as TBC).6
The case death records in Dr Gerrard’s affidavit show that the Queensland Department of Health knew this. A sane and compassionate government would acknowledge that their policies were not even coming close to achieving the desired outcome and adjust their messaging and strategy to respond to the situation on the ground.
Instead, the Queensland Government doubled down, maintaining proof of vaccination restrictions for most venues until April 2022, and retaining work mandates well into the year - some are still in place. Palaszczuk, who is not a medical doctor, continued to push boosters to young people, despite the fact that Australia’s vaccine advisory body did not recommend it.
The media acted as wingman for government interests, dutifully reporting on the most terrifying cases, mainly a handful of deaths in younger people, and usually without any insight into their comorbidities or other contributing factors.
It’s hard to say why the Queensland Government did not come clean about the failure of its Covid policies without mindreading, but from a political standpoint, it would have been political suicide to admit the truth.
They’d just spent a full year confidently telling Queenslanders that vaccines were going to save the state. Palaszczuk had dangled civil rights as a ‘reward’ for getting jabbed and enforced proof of vaccination restrictions and work mandates to ‘keep Queenslanders safe.’ She had told Queenslanders that, “the virus hunts down the unvaccinated.” Later that year, the Palaszczuk Government would sign a lucrative partnership with mRNA vaccine manufacturer Sanofi.
It simply would not stand to admit that the vaccines and associated policies hadn’t worked. There was too much at stake - reputation, reelection, business opportunities.
Sadly, the failure of the Queensland Government to take stock of its own Covid policies and communicate the truth of the matter may have resulted in the early deaths of thousands of Queenslanders.
Last week I reported on an in-depth analysis of Queensland mortality data, by Andrew Madry, which identified that all-cause mortality started trending upwards with the Covid vaccine rollout, nine months before the borders opened and the first locally acquired Covid deaths started to occur. Madry demonstrates algorithmic techniques that he believes could have detected this trend change in real time, enabling the Government to identify that something was going wrong and adjust course.
I asked Queensland Health what methods they used to measure the impacts of its pandemic policies, and if they could refer me to any relevant studies. They declined to provide comment.
It is a chilling prospect that a government could hold evidence that its policies are not working, and are potentially causing the deaths of its own citizenry, and not take action to prevent further harm.
Learn more about Doctors Against Mandates and their ongoing fight for medical ethics, here.
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Note these figures do not include people 16 and over who were deemed not eligible for vaccination, either because they have an exemption, or they are too old and frail, or otherwise. We don’t know how big the ‘ineligible’ cohort is.
Supreme Court Proceeding numbered 367/22 in the matter of Ishiyama & others -v- Aitken & others. Documents 46 – 53 constitute the Affidavit of J Gerrard (in 8 volumes). The documents referred to in this post are Volume 6, pp.1553-1557. They are publicly available from the Brisbane Supreme and District Court for a fee of $81.35 per volume. I have chosen not to publish them in unredacted form in this public post so as to protect the privacy of those concerned. However, if you would like to obtain a copy for private viewing, please feel free to email me at mail@rebekahbarnett.com.au(.) A redacted copy of the relevant pages is attached below.
The quarantine and border rules were so strict that news stories from this time frequently recounted families unable to get past borders or through quarantine, while their loved ones died alone, and in an especially shocking case, a woman who lost her baby because border rules did not allow her to go to the nearest hospital.
The documents note that this may have been due to an administrative error, such as a duplicated entry.
If someone wants to do the maths by finding the best population estimate for Queensland at the end of 2021 and deducting the total number of Queenslanders vaccinated in each age group per the Australian Government vaccination stats from the same period, please leave your workings in the comments! Extra points if you can isolate the proportion of the population 80+ that had not received any dose of vaccination.
Note that if we were talking about vaccine-related deaths here, the presence of comorbidities would in most (if not all) cases disqualify the death from being attributed to the vaccine.
If I ran a wellness clinic using safe and effective treatments like this, with this type of kill ratio...id have been in jail for over a year. Why are these people still in positions of authority?
The problem with Australians is not that half of them are descended of convicts; the problem with Australians is that half of them are descended of prison officers.
Clive James