I sent a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese supporting Russell Broadbent’s request for him to address the concerning findings in a recent scientific report prepared by Canadian virologist Dr. David Speicher.
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Dr. Raphael Lataster is a former pharmacist and hospital administrator turned university researcher, focused on COVID misinformation due to his personal battle against the vaccine mandates.
Dr. Lataster’s interests are now centred around misinformation, disinformation and fake news, particularly in health and politics.
He runs Okay Then News – https://okaythennews.substack.com/ – a platform dedicated to counter-narrative news pieces and journal articles, aiming to provide truthful perspectives amid widespread misinformation and is the only Australian to testify before Congress regarding COVID.Dr. Lataster’s shift in focus to COVID-related misinformation was not a choice, but a necessity, as he seeks to clarify the truths surrounding health and political narratives.
Transcript
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Well, good day. Welcome to the Malcolm Roberts show. Our aims are to restore our country and our planet for humans to flourish. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts in Queensland, Australia.
Thank you for having me as your guest in your car, your kitchen, your shed, your lounge, your barbecue, or wherever you are right now, sitting, standing, driving, walking, running, laying, exercising, whatever you’re doing.
Today, we’re going to get down to some truths that may surprise, with a guest who researches misinformation and disinformation and fake news in health and politics. And I haven’t got time for many quips or overblown introduction because he’s only got 30 minutes with us, and he’ll tell you why he can only spend 30 minutes. It will explain much about why our country is where it is and their loss of sovereignty.
And if there’s time, hopefully we’ll get into what we need to do to restore our governance, our integrity, our leadership, our truth, respect and security. Always truth is reality. It’s the best place to live. Our show’s two themes are freedom, specifically freedom replacing control, the eternal human struggle between people, between groups, between nations. Our second theme is responsibility, specifically personal responsibility and integrity. History repeatedly proves that both freedom and responsibility are essential for human progress and people’s livelihoods.
Human history, when we look beyond the few villains and exploiters that get publicity, we see a wonderfully positive story. I am very, very pro-human. Now, I’m not suggesting we ignore the villains and the exploiters, nor the pain they wreak, yet look into them and look beyond them to understand the bigger picture in human evolution and progress.
I’m going to get straight into introducing our guest because Dr. Raphael Lataster was a pharmacist and a hospital administrator. He became a university researcher who focused on misinformation, mostly teaching at the University of Sydney, and largely because of his personal battle against COVID vaccine mandates. And he’s won. He has won.
He recently turned his attention to misinformation around COVID and COVID vaccines. Not because he particularly wanted to, but because he bloody well had to. Dr Lataster holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and occasionally lectures there and at other institutions, and his PhD may surprise you. It’s why they picked the wrong guy to take to the cleaners. His main academic research interests include misinformation, disinformation and fake news in health and politics.
Raphael has a Bachelor of Pharmacy, a Masters of Applied Science and several postgraduate research degrees in the arts. Initially focusing his academic efforts around misinformation in religion, he shifted focus to misinformation in politics and health. Wow, that’s plenty of fertile ground, particularly around COVID-19. He currently runs OK Then News, which highlights counter narrative news pieces and journal articles. In other words, the truth.
What’s your background, Raphael? Where were you born?
Dr Raphael Lataster: So, I’m Australian, born and bred, and I have a very diverse ethnic and racial background. I have European background, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, British, Scandinavian, but also non-European background as well, North African and South Asian, East Asian, Polynesian, Native American, so quite a bit in there.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: You’re what they call a mixed blood, a real mixed blood.
Dr Raphael Lataster: Yeah, mongrel.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: A mongrel, but mongrels are the fittest usually, and that’s why they shouldn’t have taken you on if they’d known what you could do to them.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: That’s right.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: So tell us, where were you born specifically? Whereabouts in Australia?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: So I was born in Sydney, New South Wales.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: How long were you in Sydney as a child?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: I was there for most of my early childhood. And then I went to Queensland. And that’s where I first, generally as a teenager, that’s where I first encountered Pauline Hanson and absolutely fell in love with what she was doing and One Nation. And, of course, that’s where I started supporting the Mighty Maroons as well. Up the Maroons.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: You’re not just doing that because we won up in the first series. You’re doing that because you’re a true Blue Maroon.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: That’s right.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: So we’ve only got 30 minutes. Have you got the clock on for your 30 minutes?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yeah, yeah.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay, so we’ll let you tell us when we need to end. Tell me, what were some of your formative years? What were some of the things that shaped who you are and why you had no choice but to stand up to these COVID mandates? Tell us what formed you? What made you tick?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Well, university. When I went to pharmacy school, basically, that gave to me the scientific process, scientific evidence, and started me on the path for logic, for logical reasoning, Bayesian reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, as well as just being part of the Western education system and having been influenced by Western liberalism, classical liberalism. But in terms of science, I was a pharmacist. I went to pharmacy school and we learned all sorts of uh science yeah science scientific facts scientific reasoning scientific method all of this biology chemistry physics and I ended up working and then I did some other things. I worked in finance for a while as well. And then I went back to university to do …
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: You worked in finance?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yeah, I was a financial advisor as well. And I ended up going back to university and doing degrees in the arts. And even though it was in the arts, it was basically scientific because it was analytical philosophy. Basically everything I did up until now in the academic world was analytic philosophy.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: So what is analytical philosophy?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: It’s basically the foundation of science. Science comes from philosophy. There’s that battle now between science and philosophy, how science is all great and philosophy is pointless and all that sort of thing. But science actually came out of philosophy. It’s natural philosophy. And I’m talking real philosophy. That’s analytic philosophy. So… no offense to all those people that endorse the continental philosophy, but that’s really quite pointless. Analytic philosophy is where it’s at. Analytic philosophy deals with things like logic and reasoning. And it’s the stuff that basically leads the science and justifies science because the scientists doing their work – how do they justify it? How do they justify how they interpret their results and so forth? That’s where you get the theoretical basis, which comes from philosophy and analytic philosophy. So basically I’ve spent many, many years not only learning science, how to do science, but also how to be logical, how to analyze arguments, how to look at methods and scrutinize them. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing the last few years with all the COVID stuff, with everything, including the vaccines.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Well, that’s wonderful. One day, perhaps we can have a longer conversation because there’s very little logic, there’s very little data used in politics. It’s quite disappointing, quite annoying, and it’s destroying our country. It’s destroying the West. But I’d like to know just one thing before we get onto your topic specifically. Just something you appreciate, anything at all.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Something that I appreciate. Well, it’s Western culture. It’s Western liberal values. I think that’s been key for our culture, for our civilization. If you look at the best, I mean, you’re not the person I’d have to convince of that, being the party you are, One Nation, being a nationalist party. But if you look at the countries in the world and sort of rank them based on the things that we generally like, I think our country is pretty high up there, us and a lot of European countries and the US. And there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason for that. I’m very appreciative of Western liberal values. And like yourself, I do think they’re under attack. And I think a lot of the things that’s happened, especially with COVID, has been working against that, has been working on dismantling what we’ve built over the past few hundred years. So I’m very much interested in joining the fight and defending our culture and our values.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: And I do have to say, I agree with you that Australia is perhaps at the forefront of that was about forty years ago, maybe fifty years ago, because we had Western civilization’s values. We also had that unique Australian lifestyle. Take it easy as it goes, as it comes and goes. But we’re not that anymore and we’re a long, long way from our potential. And that’s what I’d like to take people to, our potential, because Australia’s got enormous potential. But now that we’ve understood what you appreciate and we’ve understood a bit about your background, what’s your story with the COVID vaccine mandates? Tell us about what happened, please.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yeah, sure. I just wanted to add to this long introduction as well. Just to get it out there, my pronouns are Prosecute Fauci. All right. So, I’ll explain what happened with my fight against the vaccine mandates here in New South Wales. I was working for, I think, the biggest children’s hospital in the country, New South Wales Health, Westmead Children’s Hospital. And what happened? The vaccine mandates came in. So, I had to decide. I thought, I better not. I don’t want to risk it. I’ve got a family history of heart disease. I know these vaccines could potentially cause cardiovascular problems. um I don’t want to take the risk I want to know more about it and the hospital asked me to make my case they said make your case for why you shouldn’t be fired and I said oh brilliant because you know what I have an easy case to make I work from home at the moment I’m doing only administrative work from the hospital I work from her hundred percent of the time all the training all the meetings it’s all done digitally uh like what we’re doing right now so there’s no point there’s no point in forcing me and then firing me over not taking the vaccines so I made that case I used logic I used evidence and that started me on the on the path to doing research on this topic on covert on the vaccines and I made my case and all they did with it was say see you just don’t want to take the jab we’re going to fire you so that uh yeah that basically destroyed my life it destroyed me um psychologically and financially and that of course led to physical manifestations as well so it wasn’t I wasn’t in a good place um I’m still trying to put it all together and eventually I stumbled on thanks to someone like you sharing stuff like you do on social media I found out about Diane Dawkin’s win in The Guardian of all places. And Diane Dawkin won a workers’ compensation claim against New South Wales, or against the Education Department, actually, I believe it was. And I read the article, saw who the lawyer was, contacted the lawyer and said, yeah, let’s go. So there’s a bunch of cases now that’s happening here in New South Wales, Education Department.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Are you able to tell us who the lawyer was?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yes, it was Dave McCabe.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: And yeah, he’s been very helpful. And we won. So, we fought and we won. So I got an ongoing payment. Now what my win actually means, it’s important to clarify what it actually is, not make too much of it and not make too little of it either. I think it’s very significant. It’s been great for me, but it also sets great precedent our multiple victories now. What it is, it’s a recognition that people have been harmed by the vaccine mandates, people like myself, and that we deserve compensation for that, because they’ve caused harm, they’ve caused psychological injury, so forth, other manifestations as well. And so, I won the main case, then I won just recently a second action against them for back pain. For some reason, even when they promised to pay the back pay, they wouldn’t so we had to take him to court, or actually it’s the commission and we won that and we’re going to go for a few more bites of the cherry before finally seeing what we can do – maybe wrapping it all up, we’ll see how it goes. But yeah, it was a heck of a time. It still is. And as part of my case, I ended up doing a lot of research, which is why probably some handful of your readers and listeners may have heard my name because I’ve ended up getting some articles published in medical journals based on all stemming from the case I had to make, the case the hospital told me I had to make and then ended up you know, being legal action and me having to research for that as well.
So, it’s been quite a journey and there’s still quite a bit more to go. But the good thing is we actually won. It can be done. My lawyer now has several victories. So that’s for the education department and the health department. So, people out there who are struggling and who could use such help as well, consider doing something like I did. It was a really good way to go because unlike most legal actions, this was all free and there was no chance of a cost order. That’s one of the problems when you go for, when you try and sue somebody, when you try and get some justice in this country, it costs a lot of money. But this was a very, very good way to do it. Very, very efficient way to do it.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Thank you. That’s a very good explanation and pretty concise. So, I take from that, that there’ll be more legal actions.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yeah, we’re going for a few more bites of the cherry under workers’ compensation law. I would like to do more. I would like to look at civil cases, even criminal cases. But that, yeah, the cost involved in that would be prohibitive. I think we could only do that if we have a certain billionaire, a certain eccentric billionaire who seems to be on our side, joins the fight a bit more.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Have you made contact with him or his party?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: I’ve tried to. It’s quite difficult to get directly in touch with him. There’s people around him that seem to protect him from just random people contacting him, of course. And I’ve had a few people. say that they’d like me involved in in that party and so forth and then a few people apparently don’t want to so it’s been it’s been really hard to get in touch with him I’ve been trying but I think he’d be quite interested in some of the things we’re doing.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: I think he would be. So let’s talk about another very well-known person – Dr Robert Malone and what he did for you and what he did for the Senate in the United States.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yeah, so I ended up with having to make my case and then fight my legal case. I ended up doing research, as you said. I shifted focus to research on COVID and COVID vaccines. And some of the studies we’ve come up with are pretty significant. So Peter Doshi is one of the editors of the BMJ, one of the top journals in the world. He got an article …
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: British Medical Journal, BMJ.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: He got an article published in another journal and I followed up with an article and then he did another article and I followed up again. So we’ve got four articles. in this journal – Journal of Evaluation Clinical Practice – that actually show that the observational studies, for the observational studies and the clinical trials, the effectiveness and the safety of the vaccines are likely highly exaggerated. And one of the things they did that really contributes to that is playing around with the definition of vaccinated and unvaccinated. So, you know, that period where you’re not fully vaccinated, you’re only partially vaccinated. They’ve been ignoring COVID cases during that period. And they found, Doshi’s team found that that exaggeration could be something like forty eight percent of effectiveness. And then I piled on and said it’s actually more than that, because not only are those cases ignored, they’re often ascribed to the unvaccinated. which obviously I don’t like as an unvaccinated person. So I figured it out using the same sort of numbers that we’re looking more like sixty five percent exaggeration. And there’s a few other dodgy things as well. So it’s quite plausible that the vaccines never were effective to begin with. And that might explain why they go down in effectiveness to zero and beyond so quickly is because, well, maybe they were never effective to begin with. So that research, yeah, was deemed quite important. And Robert Malone was one of the people that looked at it and thought, yeah, this is really good. He invited me to America, which is good because my treating team, they suggested I go on an international trip anyway. So I thought, okay, let’s do it.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Your what team? Your treating team?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: My treating team, yeah my uh psychologists and things like that uh dealing with my psychological injury caused by the former employer and Dr Robert Malone was was impressed with all that he got me in front of the senate hearing as well held by senator Johnson ron Johnson so I presented there I was the only Aussies there representing the country and that went that went pretty well And then, yeah, now I’m back and I’ve been doing where I can. I’ve been doing bits of research again, try and bolster the case and helping with other people’s cases as well. And yeah, the research coming out is… is, I think, pretty significant. So, I mean, that stuff is already huge. Effectiveness and safety has been highly, highly exaggerated. Now we’ve got articles in the proper journals, in the medical journals saying that. And there’s other stuff as well. There’s a lot of great papers by all sorts of people. Some of the work I’ve been involved in is quite interesting as well. One is on negative effectiveness, and that’s going to be coming out very soon in an Aussie journal, an Aussie medical journal that goes out to doctors, to family doctors, GPs, So that’s gonna be quite important. And that talks about negative effectiveness. There’s quite a few studies, quite a few sets of government data that show not only are the vaccines losing effectiveness really quickly, like within months even, but they also turn negative. So that means it increases your chance of getting COVID and even dying from COVID. Now, obviously there’s no point to taking the vaccine if that’s what it does. And that’s not even talking about the other side effects, your myocarditis, blood clotting and so forth. Now there’s links to cancer. So very, very concerning development, negative effectiveness where The vaccinated apparently are suffering more from COVID than the unvaccinated and long COVID as well. That’s been part of this new series of articles in this Aussie journal. So more on that soon. That should be published very soon. And I’ve also got an article.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: When you say very soon, how soon do you think? Anytime this week?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Next month. Next month.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay. All right. Yeah.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: And there’s another journal article coming out on excess deaths in Europe. I’d like eventually to do one for Australia as well because we’ve noticed some really interesting things in Australia. But yeah, in Europe, I did some correlations with the data and it’s very clear. Vaccination is positively and significantly correlated with excess deaths. And it seems like the countries that didn’t vaccinate so much, like Romania and Bulgaria, they’re doing very well. They don’t have.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Yes. And, and just, you, you probably already know this Raphael, but, uh, in Queensland and I think in, in Western Australia, sorry, Queensland and Western Australia, but definitely Queensland. Um, and I think possibly South Australia to some extent, but in Queensland, the vaccines, the injections, I won’t use the term vaccine with these things. They’re experimental gene therapy-based treatments. So the COVID injections were introduced before COVID got to Queensland. We had a huge spike in deaths before the virus arrived. So they can only be attributable to the COVID injections. And then we had the COVID arrival in this state several months later. So, we’ve got a clear, clear signal. It meets quite a few of the criteria. Is it Bradford Hill criteria? So, yes, continue, please.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: A hundred percent. And I’ve got that one on European XSS coming out soon. I would love to, again, limited by what I can do, but I would love to do an article on Australia, particularly the smaller Australian states. So New South Wales, Victoria, there’s sort of an out to explain Australia. know the rise in excess deaths maybe it’s covered maybe it’s the lockdowns but when you look at the smaller population states even if we leave Queensland to the side and we start looking at WA, South Australia, Northern Territory what you said is exactly what’s happening you’ve got this excess deaths when the jabs came in but they didn’t really have covert until later and their lockdowns are basically non-existent I think in in western Australia the worst was a three or four day long weekend and that’s that’s about it We know what a lockdown is here in New South Wales and especially our cousins in Victoria. They know what a lockdown is. You could blame it on lockdowns, that people weren’t seeing their doctors as much and so forth, not picking up all the cancers and heart problems.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Not a sudden increase.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Smaller states. So I really want to do something focusing on those smaller population states because it’s quite clear the only rational explanation is that it’s got something to do with the vaccine. And if you look at what’s driving the excess deaths, like cardiovascular problems, well, we know that. The evidence keeps coming out more and more that the vaccines cause cardiovascular problems. And one thing is this stream of evidence coming out about myocarditis. I saw from one article, the myocarditis rate was one in a few thousand. So for every few thousand people that take the jab, you’re looking at one case of myocarditis. Well, UK data indicates that you need to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of young, healthy people to get a single prevented case of severe COVID, a severe hospitalization. So, when you’re comparing hundreds of thousands with a couple of thousand, and that’s just the one side effect, it looks like, at least for young, healthy people, it looks like the benefits absolutely do not outweigh the risks. The risks outweigh the benefits, and by a lot. And that’s just one side effect.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: And also, Raphael, from the little bit I know, you’ve done a lot more research in this specifically, the… The so-called benefits of the COVID injections last only for a short while, and then they turn negative quite often. But the adverse events or the adverse effects of the COVID injections last for a long, long, long time, if not the entire life, if it doesn’t kill you straight away.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: That’s the real scary thing is that the more time that elapses, the more adverse effects we’re finding and more adverse events, the more we’re finding. So, this is all limited. The figure I just gave you, which is already quite concerning, every few thousand people gets myocarditis, that is based on a limited timeframe, something like forty two days after the vaccine. What if we start looking at many months after? What if we look at a few years after? We’re just going to find more and more adverse events and adverse effects, but effectiveness was already gone within a couple of months. And as I pointed out, it’s quite plausible that there never was any effectiveness to begin with, or that even it was negatively effective from the very beginning. When you look at those articles that Doshi’s team published and I published in that journal, Journal of Evaluation Clinical Practice, you can get a summary of those articles on my site, okthenews.com. If you look at those articles, it’s quite plausible that the vaccine was never particularly effective from the very beginning. And that’s dealing, when you look in the clinical trials, that’s dealing with the very first, most deadly strains of COVID. So obviously, there’s fewer benefits to be had from the vaccines now that we’re dealing with a billionth generation of Omicron. So, the benefits keep going down and down and down, but the adverse effects apparently look to be going up.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Well, not only that, just as a brief sideline, Dr. Jayanthi Kunar Hassan from Melbourne, she was an anaesthetist and very good researcher, she’s delved into details into the COVID injection trials that Pfizer held. And she’s found hundreds of deaths amongst those trials just in the trial period and the trials weren’t completed properly because when they were killing so many people with the COVID injections, they quickly injected everyone so that there could be no comparison anymore. And then she also found a number of other anomalies in it. What were some of the others that the Covid injections some of the deaths of the people injected were not called in and not documented and there were more people who died from the covid injections than from the then from the virus in the in the control group so that’s quite startling but what’s even more startling not surprised though given Pfizer’s record is that they covered up these deaths they did not report them so imagine if the public had been told right up front The more people died if they were injected in the Pfizer trials than if they weren’t injected. More people died from the injected rather than the non-injected. How many people would have stood up and said, I’m not taking that? Far, far more. How many politicians would have said, we’re not going to inject it?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Even the stuff that was reported in the trials is super concerning. Even beyond that, if you just look at the clinical trials as written and you look at the analyses that Doshi’s team did and I did, there’s more deaths in the vaccinated groups. More deaths, more total deaths. It’s not statistically significant but imagine what you would do if you had a bigger population sample. But there were actually more deaths, and there was no statistically significant decrease in COVID deaths. And total deaths, there were actually more. One of the things driving those extra deaths was cardiovascular problems. and the researchers you know behind the mRNA vaccine clinical trials they said well it has nothing to do yeah there were those kind of deaths but that has nothing to the vaccine first of all you have no right to say that if you’re running a clinical trial then when there’s a discrepancy if you’ve run it well when there’s a discrepancy between the groups you attribute that to the to the product to the treatment So they had no right to say that. And also, we’ve got all this evidence coming out now that actually the vaccines do cause cardiovascular problems, blood clotting, myocarditis, pericarditis, strokes, haemorrhages, the lot. So, if you go back to the trials, if you go back to Peter Doshi’s original article and then the four in general, if Peter Doshi was listened to from the beginning, these probably wouldn’t have been approved because you’re looking at effectiveness of maybe twenty percent or less. And that doesn’t meet the fifty percent FDA requirement for approval. So yeah
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: the FDA well let’s take another step back I asked the therapeutic goods administration head at the time professor john scarett what testing they did in this guy oh we didn’t do any testing senator roberts we relied upon the fda at the time he said that and admitted that I think that was march twenty twenty three at the time he said that Raphael The Food and Drug Administration had previously said they did no testing and they relied upon Pfizer’s own test results. The TGA did not even look at the patient level clinical data from Pfizer, did not even look at it. I mean, this is the stuff and now we’re finding out that… Sorry?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Our regulators are relying on their regulators, their regulators are really just relying on Big Pharma. And arguably, they’re owned by Big Pharma.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Well, that’s correct. That’s a discussion for another day. So what will you do now? How much time do you have left? Three or four minutes?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yeah, yes.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Explain why you’ve got a time limit on you.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: So that’s because of my case, ongoing legal mumbo-jumbo, things like that. The damage they’ve caused to me, psychological injury that I’m working on treating as well. So all those places, limitations on exactly what I can do. But what I’m trying to do now is just focus on myself, working on getting better, fighting my cases, getting a few more wins on the board, helping other people. I get constant invitations to help people with their cases as well, providing evidence and so forth. I got invited by you guys as well, the Australian Senate, to provide evidence for the upcoming inquiry on excess deaths. So, I’m just trying to just fight my cases, get better, and bit by bit where I can, I’ll do this research and get it out there.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Excuse me just a minute, Raphael. Did you make a submission to that Inquiry into Excess Mortality in the Senate?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: I did indeed. You might not find it there yet because for some reason it’s not up there, but I did make a submission, yeah.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay, that’s good because you weren’t called as a witness and I’d like to find out why. So I’m going to ask that question.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: You can maybe do something about that and maybe get me in touch with the big man up in Queensland, our wealthy friend, and maybe we can get some more things happening because I think there’s a lot of room. I think if you have some people that are willing to do it, I think you need to really take advantage of that opportunity and do something if necessary. yeah we can get the right people together we can actually make some changes.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: so before you uh you’ve got a time limit of thirty minutes I think you said uh how many minutes have we got left
Dr. Raphael Lataster: oh we’ve got a couple minutes okay okay just tell me when you need to go I don’t want you to breaking any conditions of the court or anything like that
Dr. Raphael Lataster: yeah yeah
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: how do people connect with you how do they learn more about you Raphael doctor this is dr Raphael lataster l-a-t-a-s-t-e-r
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Yep. The best way is to contact me through, well, I’ve got my main outlet now where I share updates of my cases and little bits of research that I’ve done and some interesting research from other people. I share that on my page, okthenews.com. That’s a Substack page. And yeah, people can comment on there and get in touch through there. And I’m happy for people to get in touch about maybe some advice on how to approach fighting for justice. Maybe they have a case they think they can make and also to provide evidence for their own cases and things like that. I’m happy to do that where I can.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: So one of the things, we have a wonderful barrister in our team in the Senate office here who told us right from the start, just taking action in court, prosecuting people or departments because of breaches of law don’t cut it. You need to have some cost incurred that you need to be compensated for. So, you need to have something that’s cost you your health or cost you something, your income. In your case, it was potentially both. And also, the papers you’re talking about, the articles you’ve written, the papers that you’ve had officially published in peer-reviewed scientific journal, they’re available through your Substack as well, are they?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: That’s right, yeah. In fact, the first thing people should see if they go to okthenews.com is a pinned post which summarises some of the most relevant research, the stuff on the vaccines, yeah, going back to the clinical trials, probably having huge exaggerations on their effectiveness and safety. That’s right there on the front page.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay, let’s get the spelling right for okay. It’s not okay. It’s O-K-A-Y-T-H-E-N, Then News, N-E-W-S.com. O-K-A-Y-T-H-E-N-N-E-W-S.com. Correct?
Dr. Raphael Lataster: That’s it. Yep. So, yeah.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay. Let’s finish off before we say farewell and thank you. Let’s finish off with some of the things that you think need to be done as solutions for, for going into the future.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Solutions. Oh, I don’t know about solutions. I’m more the kind of person that points out all the problems. While sitting from my armchair. But solutions, I find that quite interesting, the idea of solutions, because I feel like we already had so many things in place that were really good. We’ve just been dismantling those and ignoring those. It’s about going back to the basics. When I went to pharmacy school, one of the things that seered into my brain, my tutor told me, and he’s the head of the department now, he’s done very well for himself, but my tutor back then in pharmacy school said, you can never say a drug is safe. Ever. All you can say is that at the moment, you don’t have the evidence that it’s unsafe. But you can never say it’s safe. And of course, the classic example back then was thalidomide. Back when I was working, it was rofococcib. And now just a few years ago, we’ve had fulcidine taken off the market. That was safe and effective for about seven years until it wasn’t, until it started killing people. So, yeah, it’s incredible that the things we already did and the things we already believed, they’ve sort of gone by the wayside. We need to go back. And maybe that’s the general problem in general with our culture and so forth. We already had all the great ideas and all the great processes. We just need to go back. and do what we were doing back then. But one thing I think we definitely need to do is get money out of the equation, big money, big pharma. We are relying on the drug companies and the pharmaceutical companies to run their own studies Right. For their products. And then the regulators in America, the regulators here, they’re all relying on that. Now, clearly, there’s a huge conflict of interest there, especially for something of massive public interest and public concern like the COVID vaccines that we were forced to take. Right. We’re relying on a profit driven, you know, for profit company. doing this so that’s one thing and the regulators are basically funded by the pharmaceutical companies even in Australia something like ninety five percent and I don’t care how many times someone says but bro it’s just the funding it’s just it’s just grants and application fees bro I don’t care it’s ninety five percent of the funding is coming from big pharma so the regulators are basically owned by Big Pharma. And you can go back further, who owns Big Pharma, it’s the same few people who own basically everything nowadays.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Yes, and not only that, we see Professor John Skerritt, who gave provisional approval when he was head of the TGA, Therapeutic Goods Administration, to Pfizer’s injections, to the Moderna injections, to the Astra Zeneca injections, which were withdrawn globally, I think to also Novavax, but… what he did eight months after he retired, he retired in April last year. And eight months within eight months, he was signed up as a member of the Board of Directors of Medicines Australia, which is big pharma’s lobbying group in this country.
Dr. Raphael Lataster: Anyway, that’s a good place to leave it. I think we’ll have to have another chat another time
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: Okay
Dr. Raphael Lataster: cover some some more of these issues but that’s yeah well.
SENATOR Malcolm Roberts: okay well you’ll have to sign up because sign off because of your time but hang on a minute because we need to upload your your material so I want to take this time we won’t get you to do any more talking first of all thank you so much Dr Raphael Lataster.
Malcolm Roberts: Thank you for your courage in telling the truth. Thank you for your battles in giving testimony in America and also here in Australia, your writing, your research. I agree with you that science is based on hard data and hard logic and people don’t understand that, but I really commend you for that.
Until our next show, this is Senator Malcolm Roberts, staunchly pro-human, fiercely proud of who we are as humans and a believer in the inherent goodness and care in human beings. I want to acknowledge the pain and then take a minute to appreciate the abundance and potential in and around all of us. All of us have pain at times, acknowledge that, but take a minute to appreciate the abundance and potential.
Please remember to listen to each other, love one another, and cherish one another. Until next time, thank you.
Last year I was successful in having the Senate inquire into the prospective terms of reference for a Royal Commission into the government response to COVID-19. The Inquiry was held in good faith by Senator Scarr and I thank everyone concerned for their work, which produced a 128 page report full of honesty, decency and common sense. After hearing and reading testimony from multiple highly qualified witnesses, every one of whom called for a Royal Commission.
The Committee recommended a Royal Commission be held and included a comprehensive Terms of Reference that would have uncovered the truth. Last week, the Government provided a response to the Inquiry Report, which stated that the Government does not support a Royal Commission, does not support working with the States to review COVID, does not support the proposed terms of reference and does not support you, the public, having further involvement in the inquiry process.
This is the same Labor Party that took one million dollars from the pharmaceutical industry in 2022/23, including large donations from Pfizer and Astra Zeneca.
Do we have the best government money can buy? You decide.
Transcript
I move:
That the Senate take note of the document.
I wish to comment on Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee report COVID-19 Royal Commission. Last year, I was successful in having the Senate inquire into the prospective terms of reference for a royal commission into the government response to COVID-19. The inquiry was held, and I thank Senator Paul Scarr for his even-handed treatment of the process and for producing with the secretariat at an excellent report—outstanding! After hearing and reading testimony from multiple highly qualified witnesses, every one of whom called for a royal commission, the committee did, in fact, recommend a royal commission be held. Their report was 128 pages of honesty, decency and common sense.
Last week, the government provided its response to the report—one-and-a-bit pages. Here’s what it says: ‘The government does not support a royal commission. The government does not support working with the state governments on an inquiry. The government does not support the proposed terms of reference. The government does not support any further public involvement in the inquiry process.’ How can we have an investigation when the government says it does not support working with the state governments, yet it’s got an inquiry underway right now that is not considering the state governments. Instead, the Albanese Labor government will continue with their cover-up inquiry, comprised of two bureaucrats and a university academic closely involved in the COVID response. Shame! The government is letting bureaucrats and academics investigate themselves. What a disgrace! It is betrayal. It’s inhuman.
During the last election campaign, the Prime Minister promised a royal commission or similar inquiry. A Senate select committee inquiry would fit that description. Then Senator Gallagher promised us a royal commission. No wonder the public distrust politicians, when two promises that were as clear as day were broken the minute the Labor Party came to power. It does raise this question, though: what was the motivation for the government to proceed with a cover-up instead of its promised judicial inquiry? Could it be the donations the Labor Party received from the pharmaceutical industry in the last election?
Here’s the list from the Australian Electoral Commission of donations made to the Australian Labor Party in 2022-23: AbbVie, the makers of leuprorelin, a puberty blocker, $14,000; Alexion Pharmaceuticals, $33,000; Amgen biopharmaceuticals, $27,500; Aspen Medical, $83,000; AstraZeneca, $33,000, and isn’t there a huge conflict of interest in refusing to investigate them; Bayer, $33,000; Bristol-Myers, $52,000; HA Tech pharmaceuticals, $54,000; and Johnson Johnson pharmaceuticals, $36,000. Kerching, kerching, kerching! The cash register at the Labor Party is ticking over. Here are more donations: Merck Sharpe Dohme, $66,000; Navitas, $33,000; Pfizer, $25,000—another cash register kerchinging. There was Roche, $66,000; Sanofi-Aventis, $42,000; Pharmacy Guild of Australia, who enjoyed years of profit dispensing high-paying COVID injections, $154,000; and Medicines Australia, the peak lobbying body for the pharmaceutical industry, which just gave the former head of the TGA, Professor Skerritt, a job as a director, donated $112,000 to the Labor Party campaign funds—kerching! Including smaller donations, the Labor Party raked in almost a million dollars from pharmaceutical companies and associated favours bought. It’s not just big pharma, either. Remember when you couldn’t get COVID at Bunnings, yet you could get it at your neighbourhood hardware store? Governments forced many hardware stores to stop business during lockdowns, and they went broke while Bunnings grew its market share. Then they set up vaccination stations in their car parks. I know many people thought that was odd, so let’s look at this list of donations. The owners of Bunnings, Wesfarmers, donated $110,000. For completeness, let me list One Nation’s pharma donations in 2022-23: none! There was not one donation from the pharmaceutical industry, the banking industry, the healthcare industry or the net-zero industry. Why? It’s because One Nation is not for sale.
I will now review what the government is covering up with their refusal to hold a COVID royal commission. This is based on expert witness testimony to the committee inquiry and on peer-reviewed papers and data analysis which have come out since the inquiry. Firstly, testimony before America’s congress proves SARS-CoV-2 was the product of gain-of-function research, with funding from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health, managed through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. The research started in the USA, and when President Obama banned gain-of-function research, it was moved to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. But the research continued secretly and illegally in North Carolina. We know that. In 2021, Australia’s CSIRO confirmed it assisted in the Wuhan research. We’re complicit.
Secondly, the official timeline for COVID is wrong. The University of Siena in Italy sequenced COVID on 10 October 2019. Unconfirmed reports persist of three lab technicians from Wuhan lab presenting with flu-like symptoms to a hospital in Wuhan in mid-September 2019. Those three were COVID patients ‘zero’. Wuhan has 90 direct overseas flights a day, including five a day into Italy and five a day into Australia, where symptomatic infections started showing up around the end of December 2019. This means that, in October 2019, when the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored the COVID-themed Event 201 war game that the World Economic Forum organised, COVID was alive in public. Note that the Nobel Prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier sequenced COVID in April 2020 and found: ‘It is not natural. It’s the work of professionals and of molecular biologists—a very meticulous work.’ Luc declared the virus was a combination of the original man-made SARS virus, parts of the HIV virus and a bat virus which was there to fool the body’s immune system into thinking it had never seen the virus before and as a result had no immune response to it.
The fact the virus escaped before it could be perfected has saved billions of lives. What they tried to do was evil personified. Here is an example. The RNA genome of SARS-CoV-2 consists of 30,000 nucleotides and 11 major coding genes. Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna took the 4,284 nucleotides constituting the spike protein. At positions K986P and V987P, they introduced mutations to stimulate increased production of human antibodies. Those spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2 are involved in receptor recognition, viral attachment and entry into the host cells. The last part is significant. Both COVID itself and the mutated vaccine material enter human cells. There’s certainty on this point. These COVID vaccines are gene therapies yet are not regulated as such. No safety testing was done on the long-term effect of introducing a mutated COVID DNA strand into the human genome.
Secondly, Oxford University investigated brain injury from COVID. It mapped the brains of 785 participants and waited for them to get COVID; 401 obliged, creating a control of 384. All were scanned a second time, and any brain function difference was attributed to COVID spike proteins. Oxford University found: ‘significant longitudinal effects, including a reduction in grey matter thickness and tissue contrast, changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally connected to the olfactory function and a reduction in global brain size in the SARS-CoV-2 cases. The participants who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 showed on average a greater cognitive decline between the two time points.’ The paper concluded these results may indicate degenerative spread of the disease through olfactory pathways through the nose. Doctors who advocated for nasal preparations were actually right. The nose turns out to be the key. One study found 471 bacterial agents in 171 face masks, many of which had high resistance to antibiotics. This was an important issue for the royal commission to understand. Thirdly, Yonker et al. from Massachusetts General Hospital tested young people presenting with chest pains and found free spike antigen was detected in the blood of adolescents and young adults who developed post-mRNA-vaccine myocarditis, linking the shots with heart disease in the young. Fourthly, we knew as early as November 2021 that spike protein could build up in the lungs, heart, kidney and liver, causing an inflammatory response, yet we kept injecting spike proteins into people, including children, over and over. Now they’re dying suddenly and doctors are baffled—the hell they’re baffled.
Fifthly, SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins, meaning most likely the shots as well, have serious effects on the vasculature of multiple organ systems, including the brain. Outcomes include fatal microclot formation and, in rare cases, encephalitis. Wait a minute. Isn’t New South Wales now urging parents to vaccinate their children against a sudden outbreak of encephalitis? COVID and COVID shots are the same man-made poison, yet we never tested the shots long enough to reveal that. Now people are dying and suffering life-altering disease while we continue to inject the public with boosters containing the very substance that is causing these deaths and injuries.
Today I’m announcing that, in the first week of December, I will be conducting the third of my full-day reviews of COVID, to be called ‘COVID in trial’. I promise to hound those responsible—
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Allman-Payne): Thank you, Senator Roberts. Do you wish to seek leave to continue your remarks?
Senator ROBERTS: Yes, I seek leave to continue my remarks.
Leave granted.
References
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2021/june/response‐to‐the‐australian‐25‐june‐2021
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8778320/
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020‐04/21/c_138995413.htm
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/prca.202300048
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586‐022‐04569‐5
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9883076/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/
The public hearing on Excess Mortality was profoundly poignant and unsettling in equal measure.
It has sparked further concerns and raised questions that require answering about excess deaths since the rollout of the COVID vaccination and why there is such a concerted effort to deflect closer scrutiny.
COVERSE and the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS)
It was good to speak with a group of professionals that are prepared to dig into COVID ‘vaccine’ mortality. My questions were about suppressed or disguised data. It’s been well established that the modelling during COVID was not done well – potentially to support the government program regardless what the data was actually showing.
There are numerous methods through which excess mortality can be hidden. We simply cannot trust the government data when it stands in such stark contrast to the widespread experiences of everyday Australians.
A study of excess mortality in Queensland in 2021 offered warning signals. There was a huge spike in deaths immediately after the COVID injection rollout began, even before the virus itself arrived in Queensland. Similar patterns was seen in Western Australia and other parts of Australia. This spike then came back to near normal levels once the “vaccine” rollout slowed down.
It is not acceptable that instead of seeking to understand the reasons behind these findings, our health authorities are attempting to discredit this data.
Australian Health Department
I asked the Department of Health to explain peaks of excess mortality in 2022.
Significant peaks observed were higher than expected, with the explanation being that it can be contributed to COVID itself, although there was still a peak outside the average.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revealed it’s possible to match COVID jabs with mortality, however Australia’s Health Department appear to be quite reluctant to do this. They commissioned a report from the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance to conduct an analysis comparing ‘similar populations with each other’ to give a “better sense of mortality”. Predictably, the outcome of this “critical research” is that COVID vaccines provided significant protection against mortality from COVID and extended this to all-cause mortality.
National Rural Health Alliance
The points raised by Susanne Tegen, Chief Executive of the National Rural Health Alliance, went to the heart of the struggles faced by rural and remote communities during the federal and state governments’ COVID response.
National Rural Health Alliance commented on limitations in mortality data. It strongly advocates for the creation of datasets demonstrating excess mortality in relation to remoteness.
The Alliance wrote in their submission that the absence of geographical data makes it impossible to fully understand the impacts of excess mortality on rural and remote consumers, and that “Tailored datasets and rural specific models of care are imperative to addressing ongoing healthcare inequities.”
Research should be prioritised to examine how pandemics and other disasters impact health systems in rural Australia.
Transcripts
COVERSE and the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society
Senator ROBERTS: Mrs Potter, I feel very ashamed of our country. As a result of lies, you’ve had your life altered completely and what we’ve given you instead of care is gaslighting. Thank you so much for your courage in being here. I also want to put on the record my appreciation to Senator Rennick for his previous two questions that Dr Neil answered and answered so capably. They were fine questions and excellent responses. Mr Faletic, you came before us at the terms of reference inquiry. I want to thank everyone for being here in person. Thank you for your commitment. You said in your opening statement, Mr Faletic, ‘newly disabled and chronically injured’, and there are thousands of them. You also mentioned in the terms of reference inquiry that doctors were coerced, so I don’t need to put questions to you. I would love to, but I’ve got some other questions. Dr Kunadhasan, you mentioned ‘peer reviewed paper unaffiliated by trial sponsors Pfizer’. Could we get that paper on notice, please?
Dr Kunadhasan: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: You also told us that more than 50 per cent of Australians took Pfizer. I’d like to learn more separately on notice. I’ll think of some questions for you with regard to your correspondence with Dr Lawler, because I read it in your submission and I’m stunned. I want to also acknowledge the courage of your stance. Dr Neil, on pharmacovigilance, if I could have a one-word answer at the moment because I want to get on to Dr Madry. Pharmacovigilance is not independent, is it, in this country?
Dr Neil: A one-word answer? I don’t believe it is sufficiently independent and the access is very difficult for the average doctor.
Senator ROBERTS: Could you send us the peer reviewed paper that you’ve published on notice, please?
Dr Neil: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Dr Madry, can you comment on the use of models used for predicting excess mortality, please?
Dr Madry: I want to thank Mrs Potter. You moved me. That’s part of the reason we do some of this work. There’s been an epidemic of bad modelling during this pandemic. Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published a paper about how bad the modelling was. When we do modelling we need to apply a range of models to look at best case and worst case scenarios. Models rely on assumptions. Those assumptions can be wrong. I know time is short, but a quick comment on the models that the government is relying on at the moment for predicting the numbers of excess. That model changed last year and predicted lower numbers. There are a number of fundamental issues with that model. It uses a time series modelling that one wouldn’t use in a modern analysis, fitting a sine wave, which doesn’t actually fit the sort of seasonal trends. A strange thing happened. The standard years were 2015 to 2019, and then there was a decision to reach back to 2013 and it turned out 2013 is a low year for mortality; 2019 is a high year. So, if you wanted to tip up the baseline and make the excess less, that’s what one would do. In our submission, we’ve provided a range for what it should be. The estimates at the moment are very much at the low end of the estimates. We need to look at the low end, the high end, and the real result should be somewhere in between. There’s another issue about subtracting all COVID deaths from and with. We know the convention shouldn’t be to count the deaths that are with someone who dies from cancer, for example, who tests positive with a PCR test. They shouldn’t be subtracted. We know influenza was down during those years. So, should we be subtracting all of those deaths? Because clearly some of the COVID deaths were deaths of frail elderly people who, sadly, would have died anyway. So, if we’re trying to come to what’s the clear non-COVID excess there are more professional ways to look at that. Modelling has been done poorly. That’s well established. I think independent groups like ours that can talk to what’s really happening have a better understanding and can try to fit ranges to those models. Especially when it’s a high-risk situation where people are dying and getting injured, we need to understand the best case and worst case scenarios.
Senator ROBERTS: What other data is needed to clarify what could be causing the non-COVID excess mortality?
Dr Madry: If you wanted to rule out COVID vaccinations as a possible cause of this excess, with these datasets that Senator Pratt was talking about where there’s a linkage between immunisation registers and mortality registers we understand that a linking of tables has been done by the Institute of Health and Welfare and the ABS. Basically the data that’s needed is the date of last vaccination and date of death on an individual record basis. We can go through that and find out if there trends that shouldn’t be there. They should be independent, but there could be trends. If we can get access to that, we can provide some insight.
Senator ROBERTS: Do you intend to apply for access to that data?
Dr Madry: Yes. Since we’ve heard more about this we do intend to apply for it.
Senator ROBERTS: You said you did an analysis of mortality in Queensland. What did you find?
Dr Madry: Queensland kept out COVID until right up to the end of 2021. So, with Queensland we had a 10- month window where we could look at mortality without the effects of COVID. Any deaths from COVID in Queensland were from cruise ships or out of the state. We purchased data from the ABS with narrow age ranges. What became clear was that in the older ranges, which is where we saw in the database of adverse event notifications a lot of the deaths occurring—ages above 60—we saw the trend of mortality start going up in the second quarter of 2021. That went up right until the end of the year. That was clearly a warning signal.
Senator CANAVAN: Have you looked at Western Australia, which had a similar experience? When I look at the ABS data, again, the deaths seem to start ticking up in late 2021, even before the WA border was open.
Dr Madry: Western Australia has a few more months, because they opened up in March, I understand. We’d have a full one-year window with Western Australia. The reason I picked Queensland was partly financial, because you have the largest state with the longest time. South Australia and Western Australia would be other ones that would be worth looking at.
Senator ROBERTS: Dr Neil, there are many ways excess mortality can be hidden. Classification of causes of death—can you answer yes or no to each one as to whether or not it’s possible to hide a death?
Dr Neil: Excess mortality typically just considers all-cause mortality. Then there’s a secondary sort of inquiry as to what the subcauses might be.
Senator ROBERTS: So with doctors placed under coercion, we could hide a death due to a COVID injection by classifying it as ‘not due to an injection’?
Dr Neil: There are two avenues to highlight a death as a doctor where as a doctor you might have the opinion that it’s a vaccine death. One would be by registering the death on the pharmacovigilance database, and 75 per cent of the deaths were registered by doctors. The other would be to write a death certificate—I believe that’s rarely done—in a way which would note a vaccine injury as a cause of death, but it is possible.
Senator ROBERTS: They can be statistically hidden or misclassified, correct.
Dr Madry: Correct. Misclassification is one of the biggest problems we have as analysts.
Senator ROBERTS: A barrister I talked to said you can hide evidence, and the best place to hide it is in plain sight.
Dr Madry: That’s a very wise statement.
Senator ROBERTS: Are these things being done?
Dr Madry: Is it being hidden? There are certainly strange things happening where the ICD cases with categorisation going into vague categorisations; it might have been very specific cardiac, respiratory. There are strange things going on. We can detect those things happening. As you said, from a forensic point of view, being able to see those sorts of things is insightful in itself. Even though it may make it harder to find the actual result we’re looking for, that’s important.
Senator ROBERTS: So, keeping on theme of hiding data, we can also have alternative narratives, such as long COVID instead of vaccine injuries? We can also have the use of labels to denigrate people, shut them up, condition an audience that it could be something else, propaganda to dissuade people’s perceptions? Do any of these things tie in with you?
Dr Neil: As a society, we’ve been concerned about the culture in medicine that tends towards censoring doctors from speaking about some of the key issues of pandemic management, including the vaccine. We believe that’s real, we believe we can document it, and it could well have had an effect on the information that’s able to come to light.
Australian Health Department
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again today. On that last question that Senator Rennick asked, Dr Gould, are you familiar with the Australian Bureau of Statistics submission?
Dr Gould: Yes. If you just give me a moment, I will fumble on my iPad to have that. What page, Senator?
Senator ROBERTS: It is on page 7 of their 14-page submission—top of the page, graph 1. Have you done any work on trying to understand and explain the first peak in March 2021 and the next peak in August 2022? Can you tell me the causes of those peaks? Take it on notice if you want.
Dr Gould: I’m not actually seeing a peak in March 2021.
Senator ROBERTS: You are not seeing the actual deaths?
Dr Gould: Yes, I’m looking at the same graph as you, I believe, with expected, actual and—
Senator ROBERTS: There is a peak well outside the upper range.
Dr Gould: Oh, yes, there is a small period—
Senator ROBERTS: It’s quite marked.
Dr Gould: The graph that you see, the expected mortality, is a modelled number. We have talked about this before. And, as with any modelled number, it has strengths and weaknesses, so that is acknowledged. There are a number of different ways—
Senator ROBERTS: This is a startling peak.
Dr Gould: Yes, so—
Senator ROBERTS: Is that all due to the model?
Dr Gould: The peak you are referring to is a peak because it goes above the confidence intervals of the model, so it is a function of the model and it is also a function of mortality.
Senator ROBERTS: It is way, way, way above.
Dr Gould: I’m concerned that we are looking at different graphs. I’m not seeing a large peak in 2021—
Senator ROBERTS: Graph No. 1. End of February, early March 20—sorry, 2022.
Dr Gould: Oh, 2022.
Senator ROBERTS: I’m sorry, you’re right. What is the explanation for the big peak there?
Dr Gould: You see a very significant peak with the actual number, so that is the dark red number, and that represents total mortality over that period. And it is higher than expected. Importantly, this graph also shows what it looks like without COVID, so that is the—dare I say, salmon coloured or pink coloured line—which is a much less dramatic peak, so that indicates how much COVID itself contributed to that large peak. That said, I would acknowledge that, without COVID, the light pink line is still outside of normal expectations. So that would be considered a period of excess mortality.
Senator ROBERTS: Have you done any work on explaining why that is the case? It is above the mean of the range and it’s above the upper limit.
Dr Gould: Again, the ABS reports look at different causes of death, and complementary analysis of the Actuaries Institute also looks at potential causes there. That includes ischaemic heart disease.
Senator ROBERTS: So we go to the ABS?
Dr Gould: The ABS is—
Senator ROBERTS: Okay, thank you. I want to follow up on a question from Senator Rennick that I did not hear that you answered, and that turned on something I asked earlier in the second session. The Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed in estimates last week that it is possible to match ABS deaths data against COVID status to see what the respective death rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated Australians are. Have you done that analysis? I did not hear you respond to Senator Rennick.
Dr Gould: Again, it is the same concept where I was talking about the time series analysis. We need to be really careful about producing—
Senator ROBERTS: Have you done it?
Dr Gould: I will get to that. Producing raw mortality counts by vaccination status is of very limited value. Obviously, the counts we would expect to be higher for vaccinated Australians because the vast majority of Australians were vaccinated. So we needed an appropriate denominator. So that work needs to be done. We also need to—
Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me, Dr Gould, you can still have comparison of people who have had one vaccine, two vaccines, three shots, four shots et cetera.
Dr Gould: Yes, and what I wanted to get to: you could do that with raw mortality rates, but, as we have discussed, age is a really important factor for mortality, so age standardisation is really important there. But there are other forms of work there that we need to do to ensure that we are comparing like populations with each other—so, effectively we are comparing statistical apples with each other. And that was the whole purpose of the research that we commissioned by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance—that they could do that challenging but really critical work so that they could give a better sense of the mortality outcomes for people—
Senator ROBERTS: What is the answer?
Dr Gould: The answer is that it is very clear that COVID vaccines provided significant protection against mortality from COVID. They also extended that research to all-cause mortality. As we have said, COVID was the last—
Senator ROBERTS: Could we get a copy of the report please?
Dr Gould: Absolutely. It is publicly available, and we would be happy to send you a link for that.
Senator ROBERTS: Where abouts?
Dr Gould: I can’t quote the exact web address, but it is—
Senator ROBERTS: When did you ask them to do that report?
Dr Gould: I believe the date is current to 2022. We could take on notice when we started conversations about the report.
Senator ROBERTS: If you could please. What is the death rate comparison amongst vaccinated and unvaccinated Australians? I know you said there are many qualifications but, filtering through the qualifications, what is the death rate?
Dr Gould: It is lower for vaccinated Australians as per that research.
Senator ROBERTS: Could we have those numbers please?
Dr Gould: The way that they describe it is actually in terms of the protection against death from the—
Senator ROBERTS: Not the death rates?
CHAIR: Just one moment please, Dr Gould. Senator Roberts, just the last five minutes you have been interrupting quite regularly while they are answering—
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Chair.
CHAIR: Could you maybe wait until they finish and then ask your next question.
Dr Gould: I think that research should answer a lot of your questions.
Senator ROBERTS: Has anyone ordered you not to analyse deaths, or excess mortality, or to do so in a certain way to hide anything?
Dr Gould: Absolutely not.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Thank you, Chair.
National Rural Health Alliance
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for being here, Ms Tegen. Your submission’s third paragraph includes this statement: The absence of geographical data makes it impossible to fully understand the impacts of excess mortality on rural and remote consumers. NRHA strongly advocates for the creation of datasets demonstrating excess mortality in relation to remoteness. We need to ensure that the committee notes this, Ms Tegen. Is this something that must be in this inquiry’s report?
Ms Tegen: Absolutely.
Senator ROBERTS: What about preparedness? You should have been aware that there was a preparedness plan for rural areas for a flu epidemic. Were people in rural areas aware of such a plan, and was it followed?
Ms Tegen: I am not sure whether they were all included in such a plan. If there is a federal plan, it needs to be taken to those rural communities. A classic example, again, is through the PRIM-HS model where, at a local level, they start looking at, ‘How do we manage a risk like this if it comes to our region?’ It’s no different from a fire plan or a flood plan that rural communities have. It’s really interesting. Why is it that the Defence Force and police forces are all funded to do this, to support their workforce to do this well? We need to do it in health. It needs to be done under a national health strategy, and there needs to be a compact between federal, state and local government, with the community.
Senator ROBERTS: I must commend the witness, Chair, for providing clear, concise and very strong advocacy. It’s refreshing. What discussions, meetings and planning occurred in the early stages of responding to COVID to guide your response in rural areas to COVID, once we were told there was supposedly a major virus on the loose?
Ms Tegen: The National Rural Health Alliance started a series of teleconferences and updates with not only its members but also its Friends of the Alliance, which are the grassroots people. In addition to that, we held meetings with the government to provide real-time feedback to those communities, and the clinicians. Again, clinicians on the ground were really stretched in rural areas because they already had workforce shortages. It needs to be revisited, taking into account the learnings of the populations and the response on the ground.
Senator ROBERTS: Your submission raises the topic of a shortage of health professionals in rural areas. You have said it repeatedly today. How did the shortage of health professionals in the bush make the impact of COVID worse, and what can be done about it?
Ms Tegen: It burned out a lot of the workforce. It made people feel that they weren’t supported, because as soon as we felt that COVID was finished and it was ‘business as usual’, they are still trying to recover from what happened over the last four or five years. They still feel that they are not supported. We are now focusing on the future workforce, yet we are not able to support or provide more bolstering for the current workforce. The communities are back to normal in terms of living their life. They’re working in an environment where there is a higher inflation rate.
Senator ROBERTS: It’s tough.
Ms Tegen: It’s tough. These communities are the most underfunded. If you’re looking at agriculture and primary industries, they are the only communities around the world that are not subsidised. Here we are, expecting them to deal with health issues, with global markets and with weather patterns. We don’t expect that from the city. Why do we expect it from the country? It is because it’s out of sight, out of mind.
Senator ROBERTS: One of the things I’m picking up, between the lines, is that you don’t see the imposing of systems and processes from the city on rural as being effective. You are calling for a national rural health strategy. You’ve also made the point that people need to be accountable for their own individual health.
Ms Tegen: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Isn’t that something that could be said about the whole country’s health?
Ms Tegen: Absolutely. By increasing the amount of data that is available, by increasing an understanding of health care, not only the healthcare system but also your own health, you are more likely to be able to deal with your own health issues because you have an increased health literacy level. I will make a comment about the death recently of a person that was raising the awareness in the population. That was Michael Mosley. Australians loved watching him. He increased their understanding of health care. Norman Swan is increasing the understanding of health care. His Coronacast was listened to by millions of people around Australia. Rural Australia still has a very high readership of and listening to the ABC, and those initiatives were really important to rural people. We need to make sure that they are not forgotten, and that we have a social contract to do something about this, rather than having reforms and inquiries, and nothing happening with them.
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