I was surprised and overjoyed to hear that the Australian Federal Police will be dropping their vaccine mandate, which has been in place for more than three years. The facts about COVID vaccines are becoming increasingly clear and hard to ignore.
I only wish they had recognised these facts earlier, sparing their dedicated employees, who want nothing more than to do their jobs properly and with care, the unnecessary hell they faced.
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.
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.
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.
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/
For years, I’ve been trying to get the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) to admit responsibility for allowing vaccine mandates on pilots, and the risk of injury that comes with that. I’ve been shocked at how evasive, argumentative and secretive CASA has been over this simple issue, that there is a risk of injury from vaccines, therefore making them mandatory introduces a level of risk into the cockpit.
CASA has lied, refused to answer questions they could have answered, and hidden witnesses from inquiry. As you can see from this session, there is a protection racket in place for this failure of an agency and Australian pilots are suffering hugely as a result.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again. Could I have Dr Manderson to the desk, please. Dr Manderson, I asked you previously about the risk of myocarditis because you claimed to pilots that there was a higher chance of getting myocarditis from COVID than from the vaccine. I provided you with a systematic review that refutes that. It’s entitled, ‘COVID-19—associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review’. It was published in the Clinical Microbiology and Infection journal on 23 March 2022. I asked you to provide me with the evidence you had to base your previous statement about myocarditis on. That was in SQ23-004809. You undertook to provide the evidence that you had, but in the answer you simply referred to the TGA, not to evidence you had assessed to make the comment you made. I’d like to ask: did you write the answer to SQ23-004809 or did CASA officials?
Ms Spence: I think we provided a follow-up answer to that and we advised that the response was provided consistent with the requirements of the standing orders around responding to Senate estimates questions.
Senator ROBERTS: Who did you provide that to?
Ms Spence: That was the answer to 00268 from committee question No. 254.
Senator ROBERTS: Who wrote the first response?
Ms Spence: The question was directed to the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority provided that response. That’s consistent with the guidelines for officials.
Senator ROBERTS: So who wrote the response?
Ms Spence: I approved the response.
Senator ROBERTS: Is that the guideline to responses that the government has just put out?
Ms Spence: No. These date back to February 2015. I can table that response if that would be helpful for you.
Senator ROBERTS: Yes, please. In the interests of time, we won’t go through it now. One of the studies provided by the TGA in what you reference was from Anders Husby et al. It’s entitled ‘Clinical outcomes of myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination in four Nordic countries: population based cohort study’. Do you still stand behind that evidence to say that the incidence of myocarditis is lower?
Dr Manderson: Yes, I do.
Senator ROBERTS: When you actually read that study, it says nine of the 109 patients were readmitted to hospital with myocarditis after COVID, while 62 of 530 were readmitted with myocarditis after receiving the vaccination. That’s eight per cent for COVID myocarditis and 12 per cent for the COVID vaccine myocarditis. Fifty per cent more people were readmitted to the hospital with myocarditis after getting the jab than after getting COVID. The evidence you cited doesn’t appear to support your statement that there’s a higher chance of myocarditis from COVID than from the vaccine. Can you explain your contradiction?
Mr Marcelja: I’d like to make an important point before Dr Manderson answers that question. We have tried to explain to the committee on a number of occasions that CASA’s role, when it comes to vaccinations, is purely related to aviation safety. I can tell you again today that there is no link to aviation safety from the matters that you’re talking about. So, while Dr Manderson can express her medical view about the questions you’ve asked, they actually have no bearing on CASA’s role and CASA’s remit when it comes to vaccinating the population.
Senator ROBERTS: They have enormous bearing on Dr Manderson’s integrity.
Ms Spence: I find that commentary quite disappointing coming from a Senator, but we’ll allow—
Senator Carol Brown: The questions do appear to be out of order. Senator ROBERTS’s questions do not seem to be for CASA. They’re not part of CASA’s core duties. So they really need to be asked in another committee. He’s asking about— Senator McKENZIE interjecting—
ACTING CHAIR: Let the minister finish.
Senator Carol Brown: I’m asking the chair to rule whether Senator ROBERTS’s questions are in order for CASA.
Senator ROBERTS: Chair, I would point out that we have received hundreds of calls from pilots. We’ve received emails and letters. We’ve had person-to-person conversations. Pilots from both Qantas and Virgin are absolutely terrified by what the injections are doing to some of their pilots. This is a fundamental thing, and it goes back to Mr Marcelja some time ago and also to Dr Manderson.
ACTING CHAIR: Do you want to make a quick comment, Senator McKENZIE?
Senator McKENZIE: Yes, I do. Nothing the minister has mentioned goes to the standing orders and whether anything that Senator ROBERTS has asked is in breach of the standing orders. Therefore he has the right in this committee to ask public officials, who earn a lot of money—more than most of the people around this table—to answer the questions on behalf of the constituency that he represents in this place. I would expect that the officials are very experienced and are very patient and will be able to respond to Senator ROBERTS’s questions.
ACTING CHAIR: We will keep going with the line of questioning. I was also going to say that, if there are any particular areas that you, as experienced officials, feel are better answered by another agency or another department, please flag that with us here. I don’t think it’s our role to tell senators what they can and can’t ask, but we’re going to leave it to your judgement too. I think the minister’s concern is that maybe some of these questions may be more appropriate in another committee throughout this fortnight of estimates. Anyway, let’s continue. Senator ROBERTS, you have the call.
Senator ROBERTS: Regardless of what’s in that study, is it your academic opinion, Dr Manderson, that a collaborative systematic review can be completely nullified by a single population based cohort study?
Dr Manderson: A single population based cohort study is one piece of evidence within many thousands of pieces of evidence that have been published around COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis related to that. It would be scientifically and academically incorrect to rely on a single study or even a single piece of information within a single study to be selectively reported and base an entire policy decision or clinical opinion on that cherry-picked small piece of information. It’s a really fundamental part of research and critical analysis that you understand the breadth and the depth of clinical information that’s reported in the literature, how the reporting is done and even the fundamentals of analysis of individual articles relating to things like sources of bias and sources of statistical significance and relevance in that sort of thing. So a single study should never be relied on and a single piece of data within a single study should never be relied on. It is the breadth of information from a range of clinical literature as well as its interpretation and application—it’s called the concept of generalisability and applicability—to a population, as it applies to a group, when you’re forming an opinion, using that information, as to how it applies to your cohort.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. I understand all the terms you use, believe it or not. You didn’t answer my question. You went around it with a lot of terms. Is it your academic opinion that a collaborative systematic review can be completely nullified by a single population based cohort study? Which would you put more credence in?
Dr Manderson: A collaborative systematic review—sometimes we call those meta-analyses—is given more weight in terms of evidentiary power, I suppose, than a single study. The more data points you get from the more studies that are published and analysed, the more reliable the evidence will be.
Senator ROBERTS: So you don’t think a systematic review, which I provided, trumps a cohort study in the hierarchy of research?
Dr Manderson: A systematic review is as good as the review process and the way in which it’s done. So there are important academic guidelines on the way systematic reviews should be done. That goes to the inclusion criteria for the articles that they refer to, the way they analyse the data within the articles that they’ve referenced and that they’ve selected to include, and the way that they have controlled for selection bias in choosing those articles. So there are systematic reviews that are—
Senator ROBERTS: Single article-to-article comparison: which is more valid and carries more weight?
Dr Manderson: Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. A poorly conducted systematic review is not as good as a well conducted cohort study.
Senator ROBERTS: Given equal quality, which one carries more weight?
Dr Manderson: If they’re both conducted with great quality and equivalent quality, then a meta-analysis and systematic review of multiple data points is better than a single analysis—if they are done with the same level of quality.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. I’ll move to my next question. None of the studies you referenced from the TGA were actually published at the time you made your statement to pilots about the risk of myocarditis. Did you actually have any evidence at the time you made the statement to pilots in February 2022? That’s what I asked. What evidence did you have? Nothing in your question on notice was available at that time—nothing. So what did you rely on?
Dr Manderson: By 2022, there had been tens of thousands of research articles published into COVID vaccines and the relationship between those and any adverse cardiac events. In particular, there were very large studies coming out of the countries that adopted COVID vaccination quite early. In particular, Hong Kong and Israel published a lot of data. That research was published in globally—
Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me, Dr Manderson—
ACTING CHAIR: Senator ROBERTS, sorry, but we should allow the witness to conclude her answer.
Senator ROBERTS: She’s not answering the question.
ACTING CHAIR: It doesn’t matter.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Keep going.
ACTING CHAIR: Just hear her out, and then you’ll have an opportunity to ask her another question.
Dr Manderson: That evidence was published in globally highly regarded journals: the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal cardiology edition, the Lancet and the publications from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the CDC. Those source articles formed the basis of the advice that was provided to medical practitioners in Australia by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the advice from the chief health officer of Australia and the public health authorities of each state. In 2022, all of that information was available, and all of that information leading up to when I did that webinar was what I based that on.
Senator ROBERTS: Your diversion is classically known as an appeal to authority. You put so many appeals to authority, and that’s very, very clever, but I asked you a question—’at the time you made the statement to pilots’. That’s what I asked. You gave me a reference that was not available at the time you made that statement. I asked you just now: what evidence did you have, specifically, when you made that statement to pilots? Secondly, nothing in your question on notice was available at that time. Why?
ACTING CHAIR: I think Ms Spence wanted to add something before too. Ms Spence?
Ms Spence: Again, it goes to the direction that we’re going in with the conversation. I totally respect the importance of you being able to ask the questions, but I would like to put it on the record that every other country, every other national aviation authority, took the same approach that Australia did. We did not work in isolation in this space. I hear you’re talking about the information and discussion that Dr Manderson had with the pilots, but I’m struggling to understand what specific issue there is around the actions that CASA took during COVID, which, to me, would seem to be a far more important issue to get to the heart of. If you thought we’d done something wrong, something different or something unacceptable, I’d like to have that conversation, rather than a very detailed academic conversation around which of the thousand articles that were available at the time Dr Manderson relied on.
Senator CANAVAN: Chair, I would like to stress Senator McKENZIE’s point here. The witness is fine to raise a point of order, but any claim not to have to answer a question has to be grounded in the standing orders, precedents and practices of this Senate. Nothing you spoke about then, Ms Spence, did that. Otherwise, we’re just giving opportunities for people to cover themselves to avoid answering questions. I think Senator ROBERTS questions are perfectly fine. They’re about public statements made by witnesses, and that is definitely able to be asked about at Senate estimates inquiries.
ACTING CHAIR: Not to summarise, but I’m mindful of time, and I don’t want to spend too much time on this. I think the point Ms Spence was trying to make was that they’re happy to keep answering questions from Senator ROBERTS. I don’t think that’s in dispute. I think she was just trying to see if there was more available time, with the time we have, to help Senator ROBERTS answer his other questions. Can we just keep continuing? I don’t know where we left to. Senator ROBERTS, do you have another question for the witnesses before us?
Senator ROBERTS: Yes, I do. I have lots of questions. Ms Spence, you, Mr Marcelja and, I think, Dr Manderson have all said that the ultimate responsibility for aircraft safety in this country is with you three. With the COVID injections—that’s where this all started—it’s with you too. Specifically, Mr Marcelja, you told me in one of the Senate estimates responses that Dr Manderson is the chief medical expert. That’s where I’m going. Is that clear?
Ms Spence: Is there a question there, Senator?
Senator ROBERTS: I’m responding to your comment. Was I clear?
Ms Spence: I’m sorry. I still really don’t understand the direction that you’re going in. I’m happy to keep answering questions.
Senator ROBERTS: You don’t understand safety? Alright. Well, let’s continue. Ms Spence, I asked CASA in November 2023 to do a search of the medical record system in question SQ23-004943 for key conditions, and you told me that was not possible. That’s not true. CASA can do a free tech search of your medical records system for key terms, and report the amount of times a word appears. In fact you did exactly that in a February 2023 question on notice SQ23-003267, where you told me: During 2022 … there were 27 instances where pericarditis or myocarditis was mentioned in the clinical notes for a medical certificate assessment. Have you misled the committee on whether CASA can do a search for the terms I’ve asked for in the November question, given that you actually did that in February?
Mr Marcelja: If I recall, I answered that question. And what I told you, and I stand by today, is that our medical record system is not designed to capture those specific conditions and diseases in a way that reporting would be meaningful. While we could search the free text comments of our medical record system for those terms, those terms can appear in free text because a patient mentions them in a consultation because they believe they might have it, because of an actual diagnosis. We stand by the evidence we gave, which is that our medical record system doesn’t capture information on those specific diseases in a way that can be reported meaningfully. If you’d like to give me the reference of your question, I can reiterate the answer that we gave.
Senator ROBERTS: It is possible to do a search in your database for the words I’ve asked for in SQ23- 004943, like you did in SQ23-003267? I understand your comments. And you can provide an answer for how many times they are mentioned in the clinical notes from medical certificate assessments in 2022 and 2023. I’d like you to take it on notice and to provide it.
Ms Spence: If we do that it won’t be meaningful. Again, we’ll take it on notice, but what Mr Marcelja was saying was that any reference would be picked up, but it doesn’t mean that it’s actually related to that particular condition.
Mr Marcelja: I’ve got 4943 in front of me, and at the end of that question we say: Providing the information requested would require a … collation of free-text information from tens of thousands of records and would be an unreasonable diversion of resources.
Senator ROBERTS: Has CASA been provided with the guidebook circulated by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet giving advice on how to answer questions on notice?
Ms Spence: Not that I’m aware of. It’s certainly not been drawn to my attention. I did hear the questioning yesterday, but I haven’t seen the circular that was referred to.
Senator ROBERTS: If we go back to my first question of Mr Marcelja, I asked on what authority did Qantas and Virgin inject their pilots with an untested gene therapy based treatment that had not been approved by the TGA and that had not had testing done by the TGA or by the FDA in America. You said you relied upon experts. I said, ‘Which experts?’ You said, ‘Experts.’ I said, ‘Which experts?’ You said, ‘Experts.’ And when I said, ‘Which experts?’ for the fourth time, I think it was, you said, ‘International experts.’ Dr Manderson, which experts’ advice did CASA rely upon for turning an eye away from the mandated injections of healthy pilots with the COVID injections?
Mr Marcelja: I’d like to correct the statement you’ve made, because what I recall—and if you tell me the date I’ve the Hansard in front of me—telling you we had no role in intervening in the Australian government’s public health response to COVID. We did not intervene to prevent the vaccination of pilots, just like we do not intervene in the prevention of any other administration of any medicine or any vaccination. So if a pilot was to have an adverse reaction to a vaccination, the aviation safety response to that is that that pilot excludes themselves from flying. So that’s what our procedures are based on. We have no role in intervening in public health responses, mandating or not mandating the administration of vaccinations or any medicine, for that matter.
Senator ROBERTS: The Prime Minister at the time, Scott Morrison, said every night for about a fortnight, ‘There are no vaccine mandates in this country.’ That was a lie. But what I’m asking you is not whether or not you’re going to interfere in a vaccine mandate. What I’m asking you is: what were your reassurances that these vaccines—these injections—would not be unsafe to pilots? Did you do any high-altitude testing? What are the results of that?
Ms Spence: Senator—
Senator ROBERTS: I’m asking Mr Marcelja.
Ms Spence: Being responsible for the organisation, we treated the COVID vaccinations the same way that we treat all vaccinations. We do not do our own independent testing. What we do ensure is that the system works such that if there was an adverse reaction the pilot would not fly. I’ll be very clear here: as we’ve said at, I think, the last five hearings, there has not been, internationally, any evidence of any pilot being incapacitated as a result of a COVID vaccination while on duty.
Senator ROBERTS: There are 1,000. I was told by a lawyer working with Southwest Airlines in America that 1,000 pilots have not been able to pass their medical since getting their COVID shots.
Ms Spence: That’s not what I said.
Senator ROBERTS: There are lots of them.
Ms Spence: What I said was that there has not been a single example of a pilot being incapacitated on duty as a result of a COVID vaccination.
ACTING CHAIR: Senator, do you have more questions? I need to move the call around.
Senator ROBERTS: I do have some more questions, but if you move it round and come back to me that’s fine.
At the last estimates in May, I asked CASA which experts they had consulted for their advice. After some delay, CASA admitted they had relied solely on information from the Chief Medical Officer, without conducting any independent research. They stated their sources were limited to the TGA and FDA and that the only data used came from Pfizer, which has since admitted to numerous fatalities.
Ms. Spence said she was aware AstraZeneca had been withdrawn and that Novavax had also been withdrawn. However, she noted that there had been no reported adverse events in the cockpit.
I raised concerns about CASA’s varying health test requirements for pilots of large commercial aircraft versus small private planes and pointed out that these differing standards posed a risk in shared airspace.
ACTING CHAIR: Thank you to your legal officer. Senator Roberts?
Senator ROBERTS: Mr Marcelja could not tell me the specific names of the experts upon which CASA relied for turning a blind eye to Qantas and Virgin on mandates, which weren’t government mandates. Dr Manderson, can you tell me specifically which medical experts you relied upon for allowing Qantas and Virgin to mandate the vaccines? Who gave you the advice? Dr Manderson: The chief health officer of Australia at the time would be one important name.
Senator ROBERTS: Did you actually get his advice?
Ms Spence: I think we have gone through this previously. I appreciate—
Senator ROBERTS: That was with Mr Marcelja—
Ms Spence: But I think what we—
Senator ROBERTS: and he wouldn’t tell me the names of the chief medical officer—
Ms Spence: Sorry, Senator. Do you want me to finish?
Senator ROBERTS: Do you want me to allow you to keep interrupting?
ACTING CHAIR: Senator Roberts, come on. You know that’s against standing orders.
Senator ROBERTS: There’s been a lot of protection of—
ACTING CHAIR: No. Allow Ms Spence to conclude her answer to your first question.
Senator ROBERTS: She’s not answering my question; Dr Manderson is.
ACTING CHAIR: I thought I heard Ms Spence, but—
Senator ROBERTS: She interrupted.
ACTING CHAIR: I’ll allow CASA to answer your question. CASA?
Ms Spence: All I was going to say is that we’ve tried to explain before that we don’t get individual advice on specific issues; we rely on the advice of the health experts, and, in this case—as Dr Manderson has said—the chief health officer of Australia was basically a key source. But the TGA was also providing advice. I think we have actually put that in response to questions or in some of the Hansard previously.
Senator ROBERTS: The reason I’m frying up is that Mr Marcelja said that it was the experts, and he wouldn’t name them, and the experts wouldn’t name them. And then we went to international experts, to I gave up. Your answer is the Chief Medical Officer—not the chief health officer. I presume you’re talking about the federal Chief Medical Officer.
Ms Spence: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s important. The Chief Health Officer is—
Mr Marcelja: Senator, perhaps you could refer me to your question specifically so that I’ve got in front of me what you’re talking about. What date was that? I’ve got the Hansard in front of me.
Senator ROBERTS: I can’t remember the date.
Mr Marcelja: You can’t remember it. My recollection of the conversation was that you were asking me on what basis we were taking the actions we were taking, and I told you that we were taking no actions to intervene in the Australian government’s response. The advice, as Dr Manderson pointed out, about Australia’s response was not being led by us; it was being led by health authorities. So we did not intervene and override the advice of Australia’s Chief Medical Officer or other health experts.
Senator ROBERTS: You have told me that the buck ends here for aviation safety. You did not do any testing at high-altitude pressures, correct?
Ms Spence: No.
Senator ROBERTS: You just assumed Pfizer, the Chief Medical Officer and the TGA knew that the pressure would be okay at high altitude?
Mr Marcelja: As I tried to explain a moment ago, what we’re interested in from a vaccination or medication perspective is: is it likely that you will get into a cockpit, have a sudden, incapacitating event and be unable to fly the plane? That’s our primary concern. For all vaccinations, including the vaccinations that were being—
Senator ROBERTS: In the cockpit at altitude.
Mr Marcelja: at altitude—our primary concern was whether that medication, the vaccination, would cause that event to happen. There is no evidence in Australia or anywhere around the world. We’ve checked with our regulatory authorities and colleagues in the US and Europe. There is no evidence of that event occurring anywhere in the world over the last several years. I think we were on pretty sound footing not to intervene and prevent a particular cohort of the population from being vaccinated when that’s not our role.
Senator ROBERTS: Let me ask you a few more questions around that. I want you to remember at all times in your answers to me that, when it comes to safety, the buck stops with you, CASA. There is no high-altitude testing done that you’re aware of. Are you aware that the TGA, when I asked them what tests they did in Australia on the vaccines, said they did no tests and relied on the FDA? Are you aware of that?
Mr Marcelja: I reiterate what I said. They are not matters for us. We look at it from an aviation safety lens. Dr Manderson has been involved in international panels looking at aviation safety on a number of different topics. I’m sure she can step you through that. There is no evidence whatsoever over several years now of there being an aviation safety risk. That’s our concern. Whether the vaccine has other effects or issues—
Senator ROBERTS: You relied upon the TGA. That was one of the people you relied on.
Ms Spence: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: The TGA admits it did no testing and that it relied upon the FDA. The FDA, prior to the TGA’s announcement, admitted that it did no testing and relied on—wait for it—Pfizer.
Mr Marcelja: Are you suggesting—
Senator ROBERTS: Now we find out Pfizer in their trials had hundreds of fatalities.
Ms Spence: I don’t know how many times we can say this, but we treated the COVID vaccinations the same way we treat all vaccinations, and we don’t do individual, independent testing. But—
Senator ROBERTS: Let me continue, then. Are you aware of AstraZeneca being withdrawn?
Ms Spence: Yes, but I think—
Senator ROBERTS: Are you aware—
Ms Spence: Senator, sorry. I don’t think it’s quite as clear cut as saying it’s been withdrawn. They’re no longer using it. It wasn’t around inefficacy at the time, but now they’re no longer producing it. Yes, we are aware.
Senator ROBERTS: Do blood clots say anything to you. What about Novavax? We understand that has been withdrawn just recently.
Ms Spence: I wasn’t aware of that one.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Excess deaths, 13 per cent, in line with the COVID injections—before COVID outbreaks in Queensland and Western Australia—what would make you investigate whether or not pilots are suffering from COVID injection adverse events? Because you don’t do testing on pilots; you rely upon pilots to turn themselves in. What would make you investigate it?
Ms Spence: The only thing that would make us investigate is if there was an adverse reaction in the cockpit which could be directly attributed to a COVID vaccination.
Senator ROBERTS: What if I told you that pilots are telling us that they know of mates who have had adverse events but they won’t speak up for fear of losing their job?
Ms Spence: I would encourage them to report through the confidential reporting arrangements that I mentioned, both with us and with the ATSB, because we are not getting those reports, and there are mechanisms for them to do that.
Senator ROBERTS: With pilots losing their jobs, I wonder.
Ms Spence: As I said, they’re confidential, so they don’t need to report who they work for—but just giving us the information, if that is actually occurring, would be incredibly beneficial.
Senator ROBERTS: Given that CASA use Austroads fitness to drive as a guideline for recertification for TIA or stroke in class 5 medicals, on what are the class 1 and 2 medical recertification guidelines based, and do they differ from class 5 guidelines? If so, how and why?
Ms Spence: The standards for class 1 and 2, which is the commercial pilot and the private pilot medical certificates, are based on the International Civil Aviation Organization medical standards for certification for pilots—for commercial and private. They are quite different to the domestic Australian class 5 medical certificate, which is not an ICAO certificate and doesn’t need to comply with those medical standards. So class 1 and class 2 reference the international pilot standards.
Senator ROBERTS: And class 5—you make up the standards?
Ms Spence: Class 5 medical standard was developed through really extensive consultation through technical working groups with both doctors and pilots, with operational input from pilots in particular. It also went through a really strong risk assessment process within CASA to determine what those standards should be, mapped against the risk treatments for the operational restrictions with the class 5.
Senator ROBERTS: But my question was: CASA developed those standards? I’m not interested in the process. CASA developed those standards?
Ms Spence: Yes, CASA developed those standards.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. CASA allow airlines to push pilots to the limit as a routine practice. This is facilitated by a concession given to the airlines masquerading as ‘fatigue risk management’. CASA have allowed airlines to use this system as a shield when continuing to roster pilots to fly unreasonably long hours. Do class 5 medical holders and class 1 and 2 medical holders operate in the same airspace?
ACTING CHAIR: What are you quoting? I think the witnesses would like to see the source of that quote.
Senator ROBERTS: I’m not quoting from anything here. My research assistant—
ACTING CHAIR: I thought you were.
Senator ROBERTS: No, I’m not quoting.
ACTING CHAIR: Okay.
Senator ROBERTS: I’m just quoting the fatigue risk management title.
Mr Marcelja: So, for the record, we don’t agree with the statement you just said.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Do class 5 medical holders and class 1 and 2 medical holders operate in the same airspace?
Ms Spence: Yes, they do.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Is a class 5 medical holder a single pilot operation?
Dr Manderson: Yes, it is.
Mr Marcelja: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. You had some doubts, Dr Manderson?
ACTING CHAIR: I think they answered the question.
Dr Manderson: Sorry, only because I felt it was self-evident that—but, yes, it is.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Thank you. So, if a class 5 medical holder with a recent history of stroke or TIA after four weeks of grounding is back in an aeroplane at the holding point at an airport and has a relapse, his or her aircraft taxis out in front of the landing heavy jet fully laden. Class 1 and 2 medical holders can operate with multicrew and autopilots as well as current pilots repositioning as passengers in the cabin on numerous flights. Class 5 pilots have no back-up. Is that correct so far?
Ms Spence: Senator, I—
Mr Marcelja: Perhaps you could repeat the question. I’m not sure what the question was in that.
Senator ROBERTS: We’ve got a heavy laden jet coming in to land with class 1 and 2 medical holders, with other back-ups on their position, and we’ve got a class 5 just about to go in front of the path and they have a relapse.
Ms Spence: It feels like you’re describing—without being derogatory—a weekend warrior landing in the same place as a large commercial air transport operator, and I’m just trying to—
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Let’s continue then. We’ll get on to your weekend warriors. What value does CASA place on the designated medical examiner’s ability to diagnose and recertify pilots? And what situations require CASA to intervene with their diagnosis?
Dr Manderson: So the designated aviation medical examiners are absolutely fundamental to us being able to make safe decisions about issuing medical certificates. They are the doctors that perform the examination and interact with the pilots and air traffic controllers at every medical certificate renewal application. We trust their assessment as clinicians as to whether or not there is any medically significant or safety relevant medical condition present in that pilot or air traffic controller applicant. We take their clinical information and their advice when we decide whether or not to issue a medical certificate.
Senator ROBERTS: Why then is CASA advocating self-certification for class 5 medicals—as I understand it?
Mr Marcelja: We are not advocating. What we’re presenting are options for different types of operations. So a pilot that chooses to operate with a single passenger in a light aircraft can choose a class 5 certificate or they can choose any other certificate. So we’re not advocating any particular medical. We’re creating options and different pathways for different pilots in different circumstances, and those circumstances are adjusted based on risk and the level of medical certification.
Ms Spence: This is a matter that has been under debate for a number of years, around CASA being a proportionate regulator. Under the class 5 medical, we put restrictions on the way you can operate, therefore you can operate within those constraints and then we will review to see how that’s working over time. We’re monitoring it closely to make sure that we’re auditing people’s self-declarations and the like. So I think people do expect us to be a proportionate risk-based regulator, and I think the class 5 medical is an example of how we can do that.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s what I’m exploring here. I’m trying to understand. I’m not a pilot. Considering CASA AvMed can override opinions of consulting physicians and specialists during the medical renewal process, how could the view of a CASA AvMed doctor come to its own diagnosis of an individual pilot in the absence of face-to-face consultation and overrule the opinions of independent specialists and consultants? Is that possible?
Dr Manderson: The aero-medical decision-making process is more than and different to the clinical decisionmaking process. The medical assessment process that we’re required to follow by the Civil Aviation Safety Regulations and the ICAO standards and recommended practices is that we take all of the advice that is available from all of the clinicians—including their expert opinions, the investigations and reports that are available, the medical examination from the DAME—and we apply that information against the medical standard for medical certification. The key difference is that the medical specialists who are seeing the patient and the patient pilot or controller are performing an assessment of the medical status of that person as a clinician for diagnosis and management, not for aero-medical risk assessment and not for medical certification processes. So it’s quite a different role and a different process. We consider their advice, but their advice is about the condition and its disease and severity, not about its safety relevance for medical certification.
ACTING CHAIR: Senator Roberts, we need to break for dinner. Are you close to finishing?
Senator ROBERTS: We might put these on next Senate estimates.
ACTING CHAIR: We are going to release CASA now. Thank you very much.
As a Scientist and former vet school Dean, Professor Rose became concerned that critical information about SARs-CoV2 virus and COVID-19 vaccines was not being reported by mainstream media.
We discussed how the world and particularly Australia changed with the arrival of COVID and how the population seems to have forgotten the drastic restrictions that were put on our freedoms. We also discussed what, if any, lessons were learned.
Reuben received a notice from YouTube that he had “breached community guidelines” and the link to his channel can no longer be accessed.
You can search for more of Reuben’s work here: https://reubenrose.substack.com/ | Sons of Issachar Newsletter | www.inancientpaths.com
There’s a long tail to the COVID response that’s affecting a lot of things. There are many changes to the way we work — working from home for example — and the way in which we interact with employees that are a direct impact of the changes made during COVID. The Australian Industry (AI) Group clearly showed in their submission the anxiety levels and the mental health impact on their members and the everyday Australians who work for them. The mixed messaging, the lack of consistent and clear communication made a challenging situation almost impossible to tolerate.
The AI Group made this statement: If we don’t come to grips with the consequences of the sometimes damaging and divisive actions of states to lock down everything from buildings and suburbs to entire states, we ignore the impacts across the community. Their testimony on the disruption to state borders, not just in border communities but to national businesses, makes clear that it was extraordinary. State and territory border closures were so disruptive they should only ever be used as a last resort. Many businesses were impacted also by localised communications and differing ‘rules’ between states which caused chaos.
The Albanese Government’s limited COVID inquiry excludes state governments from its scope. The AI Group feels this is a big exclusion given the fact that state and territory governments were responsible for implementing a lot of the measures which were contradictory and often capricious. The AI Group supports a Royal Commission into COVID with broad terms of reference.
Senator Roberts: Ms McGrath, thank you for your submission and also for appearing in person. It’s so much better to have people here in person, when possible. Your submission states:
If we don’t come to grips with the consequences of the sometimes damaging and divisive actions of states to lock down everything from buildings and suburbs to entire states, we ignore the impacts across the community.
What are some of the damaging outcomes that support your call for lockdowns to be included as a term of reference?
Ms McGrath: That was the element that really had the most impact on our members. Our members, of course, are people and, as was the rest of Australian society, they were dealing with the challenges of the pandemic and worrying about their own health. I think we’ve clearly shown in the submission the anxiety levels and the mental health impact on our members and their workforces. The complexity of the shutdowns, the mixed messaging and the lack of consistent and clear communication made a challenging situation almost impossible to bear.
Senator Roberts: Basically, what you’re saying is that there are enormous economic impacts that possibly could have been avoided—and I think many of them could have been. Those economic impacts led to anxiety and increased mental health problems, as well as economic impacts on employers. Also, you mentioned contradictions. Something that has been said repeatedly across the whole community by individuals and businesses is that each state had different science.
Ms McGrath: They did. That’s why I referenced the bushfire response. If we think about the language that we use around bushfires, such as ‘prepare to leave’, and even just how we classify, from mild to catastrophic, the nature of a bushfire, we had none of that nomenclature when it came to the COVID pandemic. It meant that whoever was in front of the camera often used terms loosely, such as ‘essential workers’ or ‘authorised workers’. These all had different terms; often they were used interchangeably. It created great confusion amongst our members, who were trying to manage a very stressed workforce.
Senator Roberts: I will mention that we have here the Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza, which was released in August 2019. This is a thick document, so it was comprehensively done, yet it was tossed out of the window and wasn’t even referred to. I think that led to some of the contradictions. Would you like to comment on that?
Ms McGrath: I’m not aware of that document; I’m sorry.
Senator Roberts: Let’s move on to another question. The High Court’s decision on the Western Australian border closures, the section 92 judgement, was instrumental in perpetuating border closures and certainly relied on health advice that closures were justified by the health dangers of COVID. Are you familiar with that decision?
Ms McGrath: Not particularly, but I am aware of the impact of the state border closures.
Senator Roberts: Basically, it says that border closures are within a state’s constitutional powers, providing that the state’s response is proportionate to the threat. The High Court decided that, based on the medical authorities’ advice, COVID was a serious threat, yet the health authorities at the time knew it was not. In fact, they gave me, in writing, their conclusion that showed that COVID was of low to moderate severity. If you think about the vulnerable that are a very small subset and you remove that, COVID was less severe than many past flus. Those health dangers have now been proven to be overstated, as I said, which really shows that the High Court made an interpretation of section 92 that was, in hindsight, not only not supported by the facts but also contrary to the facts; the High Court was misled. I note that your submission goes to the section 92 judgement, but it doesn’t offer a better way of doing closures. Can you expand on your thoughts around state border closures, please?
Ms McGrath: As I said in my opening statement, they really should be of last resort. The disruption to state borders, not just in border communities but to national businesses, was extraordinary. The communication often was very localised. Victoria would talk about what was happening in Victoria, not understanding that there perhaps were companies in Queensland that had trucks that needed to come to Victoria; therefore, the message was never conveyed directly to them. The role that the Ai Group played in COVID was to try to gather all these instructions and directives, translate them into easily accessible language and make sure that all our members had access to them, regardless of where they were located.
Senator Roberts: Do you consider that the responses to COVID were excessively politically motivated? Maybe that was intentional or maybe it was in ignorance. Some states ran focus groups to determine what the people thought was necessary, and yet we, the people, aren’t health authorities. It seemed to be driven by political purposes or political ends in some states, and that might have contributed to the contradictions.
Ms McGrath: I’m not in a position to comment on that. I think there are many reasons for the contradictions. One is that the people making the directives were very stressed in their own right and so perhaps were not cognitively prepared for that sort of communication. As I’ve said, everyone was making very many decisions on the run.
Senator Roberts: Your submission notes that JobKeeper benefits were paid to some companies that didn’t need the money; they made excessive profits during COVID and then refused to pay the money back. Is the answer clawbacks to recoup JobKeeper money or is the answer much tougher criteria for JobKeeper, including targeting small and medium businesses over large businesses?
Ms McGrath: When it comes to JobKeeper, as we said, carefully calibrated support is best. The challenge with JobKeeper is that it was made very quickly and was quite broad based. When it comes to public policy, as you would know, that sometimes has unfortunate consequences.
Senator Roberts: Your submission mentions mandatory COVID vaccination policies, yet it doesn’t say what about them should be investigated. Where does Ai stand on mandatory injections?
Ms McGrath: We don’t have a position on mandatory injections; our position is to support members adhering to whatever regulation applies to them. What we found challenging was, again, a mix of communication styles and a mix of messages that came out, which caused a lot of stress in understanding what their obligations were.
Senator Roberts: Just as a statement, your submission talks about the need for local manufacturing of personal protective equipment and related equipment to remove the need for stockpiling materials that degrade over time. One Nation fully supports that; we cannot be reliant on foreign countries for such products. Has Ai come up with any policy with regard to ensuring that we have the security of our own manufacturing?
Ms McGrath: Not particularly. We work with ICN in each state and with a number of different local manufacturers in sovereign manufacturing.
Senator Roberts: One of the responses to COVID from the previous government was to hand out a lot of money. We were warning at the time that this would lead to inflation and, sure enough, it has. We’re still living with the consequences of the COVID response; would you agree?
Ms McGrath: There’s a long tail to COVID that’s affecting a lot of things.
Senator Roberts: A long tail to COVID or to the COVID response?
Ms McGrath: I’m sorry; to the COVID response. There are all sorts of things—as you say, inflation, which is happening globally, but also work from home policies—and changes to the way that we work and the way that we interact with employees that are a direct impact of many of the rules that came through COVID.
Senator Roberts: On the second page of your submission you state: The existing Commonwealth Government COVID-19 Response Inquiry does include in its terms of reference a review of the responsibilities of state and territory governments and national governance mechanisms, such as National Cabinet. However, it includes the specific exclusion from the scope of the inquiry of ‘actions taken unilaterally by state and territory governments’. Given the fact that the state and territory governments were responsible for implementing a lot of the measures that were contradictory and often capricious, that would seem to be a very big exclusion.
Ms McGrath: We agree.
Chair: Senator Roberts.
Senator Roberts: The COVID injections or vaccines raise many questions. The TGA admitted to me in Senate Estimates that it did not test them here in this country but relied on the FDA in America. The FDA in America had already admitted previously that it didn’t test them but relied on Pfizer; and Pfizer’s trials were shut down early because of the number of deaths that they had. So, when you haven’t got something consistent, it puts people under a lot of pressure, not only employees but also employers. That puts you in a difficult position, because not all supermarkets forced their employees to get injected; I think IGA didn’t. But I can imagine a Coles or Woolies employee thinking, ‘I can’t go in the back door to the supermarket, because I’m an employee and must get injected; but I can go in the front door any time I want to and stay for as long as I like as a customer.’ How do you make sense of that?
Ms McGrath: As I’ve illustrated, there are many complexities, particularly in communication and rules, that really added to the stress of the whole situation, and employers and employees were all coping with the same challenges.
Senator Roberts: And customers.
Ms McGrath: And customers.
Senator Roberts: And sometimes they were in all three roles. Your final comment on page 6 of the January submission says, ‘A root and branch review is required to ensure that governments work cohesively and respond holistically during the next inevitable pandemic, and Ai Group supports any moves towards consideration of appointing a COVID Royal Commission.’ A ‘root and branch review’ is pretty serious stuff; it would be very detailed and comprehensive and would cover everything.
Ms McGrath: Yes.
Senator Roberts: Is that because it was so variable and there were so many contradictions and inconsistencies that it just didn’t make sense to many people?
Ms McGrath: Yes, it didn’t make sense. Sometimes, there would be a minister or health officer making an announcement and we’d wait for the actual orders, and they would not be consistent with what had been announced. We would have to try to find a way to convey that to the government and ask them which directive we should listen to, and then they would try to reverse it. But it was just incredible, I think.
Senator Roberts: I can empathise with you. I remember watching Yvette D’Ath, the Queensland state health minister, laying out the law in January 2022 or 2023, saying, ‘People in cars must wear masks.’ Someone asked, ‘What about if the driver is by himself?’ and she hummed and said, ‘Yes’. There was no science behind that: sitting alone in a car, with windows up, wearing a mask. These things were not driven by science.
Chair: Is that a question, Senator Roberts?
Senator Roberts: It is a statement, backing up Ai Group’s concerns.
Many Australians have lost trust in governments at both state and federal levels, and we’ve lost trust in health authorities. Last parliament the Select Committee on COVID-19 stated ‘a royal commission be established to examine Australia’s response to the COVID-19’. That was two years ago. During his election campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised the Australian people a COVID Royal Commission. He and Minister Gallagher, who chaired the committee, have both broken their promises.
The Government has clearly chosen to cover-up for the failure of our health authorities to apply human rights to our COVID measures. A genuine party of the worker would be protecting workers against the billionaires who profited from COVID.
The Albanese government must restore trust and commit to a royal commission now. The royal commission could easily commence as soon as the current Senate’s inquiry into appropriate terms of reference defines those terms — an inquiry One Nation secured. I promised to hound those responsible down and I will keep that promise.
Today the Queensland Supreme Court ruled vaccine mandates for Queensland’s emergency services workers to be unlawful. What a victory for the Australian people! It’s a victory that reaffirms the need for a full royal commission into Australia’s response to COVID. Everyday Australians have lost trust in governments at both state and federal levels, and we’ve lost trust in health authorities. Recommendation 17 of the report of the Select Committee on COVID-19 stated ‘a royal commission be established to examine Australia’s response to the COVID-19’. That was two years ago.
During his election campaign Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised the Australian people to hold a COVID royal commission. He and Minister Gallagher, who chaired the committee, have both broken their promises. Appearing to have something to hide looks terrible for the government. It is terrible for the government. The public realise that our Prime Minister and his administration cannot be trusted to keep their word.
Today’s Queensland Supreme Court ruling is encouraging for everyday Australians who’ve lost their source of income. Businesses were forced to lay off their staff unless they complied with the draconian policies, and many industries are still suffering the consequences of having to fire unvaccinated staff. Our nurses, teachers, police, firefighters and paramedics, along with other Australians, deserve to know where things went wrong and why the government turned against them. One simple green tick was the difference in being able to attend school, go to work, move around, socialise and exercise—one green tick that took our rights to freedom, life, privacy and movement.
The Prime Minister must now realise that, if he takes these things from the people, trust goes with them. The Albanese government must restore trust and commit to a royal commission now, to commence as soon as the current inquiry into appropriate terms of reference defines those terms.
The Queensland Supreme Court said there was an abuse of process and that they did not consider the loss of human rights fundamental to Australian democracy.
I was disappointed in the Minister’s response to my questions about the implications of the QLD Supreme Court judgement on the COVID ‘vaccine’ mandates. I expected more clarity and less deflection from the Minister. These decisions were made by the Liberal, Labor and Greens parties, there can be no avoiding the fallout form their actions across the COVID period.
While the ruling was made on the basis of the human rights act in QLD, identical provisions are in place in Victoria and the ACT, suggesting the decision is not just a QLD issue. The government is arrogantly ignoring the reality of the situation and failing to read the room when it comes to this topic.
People have had enough of high-handed, out of touch government. One Nation is calling for the Royal Commission into our COVID response to be announced right now!
I take note of Senator Gallagher’s answer to my question on the Queensland Supreme Court’s decision. The court found measures relating to COVID were mandated on a number of Queensland workers without adequate consideration of their human rights as required under the Queensland Human Rights Act. Identical human rights provisions apply in Victoria and the ACT. So certainly there is the probability of the same or similar decisions being made in other jurisdictions.
I’d hoped the government would be fully aware of the implications of this decision. I was disappointed. The minister deflected and failed to address the substance of the question, so here are some more reasons the minister should get clarity on this issue. An employee who is fired as the outcome from a vaccine mandate can sue the employer, which may be the government, for wrongful dismissal. An employee who took a vaccine to keep their job as a result of a vaccine mandate, who is now vaccine injured, can sue for damages. Class-action lawsuits will result from this decision. The Commonwealth will be as much in the firing line as Victoria and Queensland.
It’s not just mandates. Evidence has been presented over the last few months that closing schools and denying children education has caused a permanent drop in children’s educational potential and medical health—permanent harm. Last week, a landmark study of 99 million people including Australians found the injections caused an increase in blood clots, brain injuries and heart disease of up to 600 per cent. These injuries are legally actionable. Whether it’s over mandates, vaccine injuries, education or business closures, victims will be joining class-action lawsuits sooner rather than later.
All levels of government in Australia made terrible mistakes during COVID. Only a royal commission has the powers and the resources to decide what mistakes were made and how the victims of those mistakes can be fairly compensated. This will be expensive, yet failure to act through a royal commission will create a running sore on public administration for a generation. Only an objective royal commission will restore trust in governments and in the healthcare sector.
We’re told in the media that ‘vaccine’ mandates are over, yet my office hears from many Australians who are refused employment or threatened with being sacked from their jobs unless they take two, sometimes three jabs. What is the current guidance on mandates in the health sector? Department of Health has no particular view and says it can be the employer’s individual decision — there is no national policy or vaccine mandate in place. The Minister has not heard of anyone, including nurses, being sacked recently.
The terms of reference inquiry for a potential COVID Royal Commission involved witnesses who gave this testimony. Despite an alarming shortage of nurses and other healthcare workers, skilled and willing staff are being rejected for their decision based on informed consent. We hear from many healthcare workers and others from across Australia who are still faced with the ‘no jab, no job’ discrimination to this day.
This looks very much like the rule of “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” is being applied by the Minister and the health department. Until they take responsibility and offer a position around employers’ choices over applying mandates there will continue to be a ‘free for all’ on the use of coercion and discrimination to the detriment of individuals and our health care services.
Senator ROBERTS: Turning to vaccine mandates—COVID injections—while the media are being fed a line that vaccine mandates are over, my electorate office is getting reports from health workers who are being refused re-employment for not having two COVID injections. What is the health department’s current guidance on vaccine mandates for employment in the health sector?
Prof. Singer : Apologies, Senator. Could you—
Senator ROBERTS: Do you want me to repeat the question?
Prof. Singer : Yes, please.
Senator ROBERTS: While the media are being fed a line that vaccine mandates are over, my electorate office is getting reports from health workers who are being refused re-employment—some have even been sacked in the last two weeks—for not having two COVID injections. What’s the health department’s current guidance on vaccine mandates for employment in the health sector?
Prof. Singer : I’ll just need to look that up. I believe that there may be some in relation to aged care, but we don’t have any particular view on mandates generally. Obviously, they are individual agreements between employers and employees. There is no national mandate as such, to my knowledge.
Senator ROBERTS: Does it bother you, Minister, that there are some state health departments, including Queensland, where nurses are being sacked for not having their two injections and for choosing to go on their informed consent?
Senator McCarthy: I’m unaware of that. Of course, it would be a concern that they can raise in each jurisdiction. But, as the Acting Chief Medical Officer has said, there is no national policy in place on that.
Senator ROBERTS: Let’s move to good manufacturing practice. I have just two questions left. At the last estimates, I tried to get to the bottom of whether every batch of Pfizer COVID injections was made using good manufacturing processes. If they were not, that may explain the huge variance in adverse events between batches. If they were made with good manufacturing processes, there is another cause we really need to understand for the huge number of excess deaths. In your answer on notice, you did not answer the question, but you gave me a list of entries in your manufacturing information database. This is a little confusing, because your answer does not allow me to check good manufacturing process certificates off against batch numbers. What your data tells me is that all of these good manufacturing process certificates were issued as a result of a desktop audit rather than an in-person inspection, which means you took the manufacturers’ word for it based on whatever it was they sent you. Is that correct?
Prof. Lawler : Thank you for the question. I would just highlight that we’ve received these questions regarding the batch testing of vaccines and the associated release a number of times before, and we’ve answered these questions—most recently, I think, SQ23-002145. Those answers are clearly on the record.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s not the one I have. Secondly, there are 44 good manufacturing process certificates for all COVID vaccines, yet there are 410 batches listed in your COVID vaccine batch release assessment. Some of those are duplications and some, admittedly, are for AstraZeneca, but the number seems off. Can you please give me on notice a full list of Pfizer batch numbers and the corresponding good manufacturing process—or is it true that good manufacturing process was only used from the bivalent vaccines onwards?
Prof. Lawler : Thank you for the question. I’m happy to either take that on notice or to return to that under outcome 1.8 when my—
Senator ROBERTS: Perhaps you could take it on notice.
Prof. Lawler : Absolutely.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you.
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