10,000 extra deaths and all we get are crickets from the Health Department.
Temporal association is a valid indicator of causation. Yet the Heath Department are adamant that vaccines aren’t the cause despite the rise in deaths jumping the first month after the vaccine rollout.
Has the Health Department performed autopsies on deceased to prove it wasn’t the vaccines? If not, then how can they rule it out.
If it’s a result of lockdowns from the prior year then why didn’t the deaths start to jump from September 2020 rather than May 21.
The Heath Department and TGA are covering up the cause of the increase in deaths because their mismanagement is the cause.
Community Affairs Legislation Committee – 26/10/2023
Estimates – HEALTH AND AGED CARE PORTFOLIO
Department of Health and Aged Care
Senator RENNICK: I’ll just touch on that point. Interestingly, the World Health Organization recommended that anyone diagnosed with COVID from a PCR test should be coded to U07.1, which is usually reserved for a laboratory confirmation. Do you think it was unorthodox for the World Health Organization to change the rules for COVID whereby people were being coded as a COVID death when the laboratory hadn’t actually confirmed whether or not it was a COVID death; they were just relying on a PCR test? As yet the TGA has refused to give me the actual primers to indicate how the COVID tests were determined?
Dr Gould: Professor Kelly might have some views on this, but the ABS go through their own coding process. When they assign a cause of death they independently go through medical clinical records. If there’s been a coroner’s report they’ll go through that as well.
Senator RENNICK: That’s what I’m saying. The procedures for following clinical records were changed by the World Health Organization for COVID to say that someone died as per a laboratory determination, that is, an autopsy, but they were actually only relying on a PCR test, which has a much larger margin of error.
Dr Gould: Professor Kelly might have further comments.
Prof. Kelly: I’ll leave the TGA to talk about PCR. There’s a number of streams to your question. Firstly, on the excess death element, you’re correct that in 2021 there was excess death particularly in relation to 2020. There’s a range of reasons that’s the case. It’s even in the places that, as you’ve said, there was no COVID. There was a change in behaviour right across Australia in terms of 2020. People were going out less. There was no flu during that year at all, pretty much. In some places that returned in later years. We are looking into that in some detail. But to say that’s related to vaccination—as you’ve said, we should be looking more closely at that, and we have. The study you talked about earlier that’s now been published does that. It very specifically looks at who has been vaccinated, using the exact numbers from the Australian Immunisation Register and matching that with ABS related deaths numbers. That is not just PCRs. ABS relies on a doctor writing a death certificate, which will take into account a range of matters. That’s the best data we have, and the best data we have shows there is no evidence of an increase in deaths related to vaccination from all causes. If you look at vaccination in relation to over 65s from COVID, they are 88 per cent protected. That’s from the same study in early ’22.
Senator RENNICK: That’s interesting. In your information report from nationalhealth.gov.au it actually states there are similar disease risk factors in vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals. It contradicts your own memos between your own organisations. The question I wanted to get to was that, given deaths decreased in 2020 as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and in 2021 both New South Wales and Victoria had extended lockdowns—New South Wales, as the largest state, had a three-month lockdown period—you would have expected to see a decrease in deaths, not an increase in deaths. If anything, deaths should have decreased in 2021 as a result of the extended lockdowns in New South Wales in particular, and they didn’t; it still increased.
CHAIR: Senator Rennick—
Senator RENNICK: My apologies, Chair.
CHAIR: you’ll need to pose that as a question. This isn’t an opportunity for—
Senator RENNICK: So why are you not taking that into account when you’re refusing to consider vaccines as a reason? You still haven’t given me a reason these figures increased, notwithstanding the fact there were more lockdowns in 2021 and 2020?
Prof. Kelly: The ABS figures, as you’ve quoted, look at a range of matters that are related to the death certificates that I talked about. They don’t look specifically at individuals or specific risk factors other than what is related in the death certificate. We have other sources of data which we’ve looked at. I come back to the best way of looking at vaccination and death. There are two ways, I’d say. One I’ve already discussed in terms of the NCS paper. The other is the extensive work that is done in relation to vaccine adverse event reporting through the TGA. I’ll leave the TGA to talk about that, and the outcome.
