Tyrannity
A reflection on the tyrannical insanity that was Australia's pandemic response
October 4, 2021, marked Melbourne’s 245th day spent in lockdown, officially earning it the title of the most locked down city in the world. The restrictions imposed on residents had loosened and tightened repeatedly since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, but at their worst they constituted a form of house arrest: Melburnians were confined to their homes, forbidden to leave unless engaging in activities deemed essential by the authorities. Public gatherings — with the exception of Black Lives Matter protests — were expressly banned, and anti-lockdown rallies were suppressed by force, with police on multiple occasions deploying pepper spray and rubber bullets against peaceful protestors who had gathered to demand a restoration of their freedoms. Fines were issued throughout the state for crimes such as breaching curfew, not wearing a mask, and resting on a park bench, often in regional and remote areas that were hundreds of kilometres away from a recorded Covid case. And the draconian policing wasn’t limited to the street — in one incident that attracted global attention, a pregnant woman was handcuffed and arrested in her own home, in front of her children, for daring to promote an anti-lockdown event on Facebook.
The woman’s arrest was criticised by human rights organisations, but it was firmly defended by the state premier, Daniel Andrews, who throughout the pandemic had consistently supported the police’s heavy-handed enforcement of the “public health orders”. On October 1, three days prior to Melbourne breaking the infamous lockdown record, Andrews once again expanded those orders by announcing that vaccination was to be made mandatory for all “authorised workers”, a category which included 113 occupational classes — in effect, the vast majority of the Victorian workforce. For these workers, it was a stern ultimatum: get vaccinated immediately, or lose your livelihood.
The Victorian government wasn’t alone in imposing sweeping vaccine mandates. Before the end of the month, two more jurisdictions — Western Australia and the Northern Territory — announced similarly far-reaching measures. They were followed in November by Queensland. Altogether, four out of Australia’s eight states and territories made vaccination compulsory for vast swathes of their workforce. The remaining jurisdictions also enforced mandates, though they were somewhat narrower in scope.
All of this was overseen by the federal government, which in coordination with the states and territories was promoting mass vaccination as the only way to bring an end to the lockdowns. The federal government’s strategy to move beyond the pandemic was entirely predicated on reaching certain nationwide vaccination targets. This strategy, labelled the National Plan, dictated that our freedom to work, socialise and travel would only be restored when 80% of the adult population was fully vaccinated. Australians were essentially told that to get our civil liberties back, we’d have to earn it.
For those of us who were reluctant to get vaccinated, this introduced a second element of coercion: not only did we stand to lose our job, but we were also now liable to be accused by our fellow citizens of selfishness — to be blamed for the harsh restrictions which we strongly opposed, and which we ourselves were being subjected to. Yet another element of coercion was added later, when domestic restrictions were eased for vaccinated people but not for the unvaccinated, relegating people such as this author to a second-class existence that, in some states at least, precluded access to a vast array of facilities, workplaces, and public and private venues.
One can imagine a situation in which these tyrannical policies might have been justified. If Covid-19 had been an especially nasty disease — a disease with a double-digit case fatality rate, or which was particularly harmful to children — a strong moral case could be made for the coercive measures described above. Similarly, they might have been defensible if the mandated vaccines had been extremely effective at preventing infection and transmission. But we now know that neither of those conditions were true: Covid-19 proved to be no more harmful than the flu for the overwhelming majority of the population, and ultimately the virus was able to spread from person to person with little regard for their vaccination status.
This is common knowledge now — but as the rest of this article will reveal, it should have been common knowledge back in October of 2021.
When the first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was administered in Australia on March 5, 2021, many of us dared to believe that we had reached the beginning of the end of the pandemic. The Pfizer rollout had commenced two weeks prior, and all available evidence suggested that both vaccines provided substantial protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Herd immunity — the idea that we could control the disease by immunising a large share of the population — seemed within reach.
By mid-year, that optimism was dampened. Delta had supplanted Alpha as the dominant variant globally, creating a fresh wave of infections that affected even those countries with relatively high vaccination coverage. Israel — which until then had been the international poster boy for mass vaccination — saw its daily case numbers once again beginning to rise, prompting speculation that the available vaccines were less effective against the new variant. This speculation was seemingly confirmed on July 31, when official data was released indicating that the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing infection had plunged to 39 percent for the average Israeli, a huge drop from the 95 percent efficacy observed in clinical trials. Moreover, the effectiveness for those vaccinated in January was estimated at just 16 percent, demonstrating that the level of protection waned rapidly over time.
Over the following weeks, similar evidence emerged from other countries. British scientists estimated that the combined effectiveness of the Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines had collapsed to 49 percent throughout the UK, in agreement with US studies which found that Pfizer’s protection had fallen to 47 percent after five months and 42 percent after six months. Another US study observed that Pfizer had failed to protect people from infection during a recent community outbreak; Indian scientists noted that more than a quarter of healthcare workers vaccinated with Oxford-AstraZeneca were subsequently infected within a two-month period; and in Qatar, Pfizer’s effectiveness was found to have plummeted by 15 weeks following the second dose, prompting the study’s authors to conclude: “These findings suggest that a large proportion of the vaccinated population could lose its protection against infection in the coming months, perhaps increasing the potential for new epidemic waves.”
It should be noted that none of these studies disputed that the vaccines were effective at preventing severe illness: protection against hospitalisation was consistently found to be higher than protection against infection, with minimal waning over time. So although fully vaccinated people were getting infected with alarming frequency, the vaccine was still proving useful insofar as it prevented people from getting severely sick. This was welcome news to those who were elderly or immunocompromised, to whom the disease posed by far the greatest threat.
Breakthrough cases — that is, infections of vaccinated people — were found to be not only milder, but often completely asymptomatic. This led to hopeful suggestions that breakthrough cases might be less transmissible. But by the end of September, this hope was also extinguished: evidence had emerged indicating that fully vaccinated people tended to carry a high viral load once infected (here, here, here, here and here), meaning they were capable of transmitting the virus to others. This finding was succinctly summarised by the authors of this study, who stated “vaccinated individuals can become re-infected and are just as dangerous to others as those who have not been vaccinated.” Their next remark was even more pertinent: “Therefore, the introduction of special passports that remove restrictions for vaccinated persons is questionable.”
This development coincided with the arrival of the Moderna vaccine in Australia. While there was some evidence to suggest that Moderna was more effective than Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca at preventing infection, this perceived advantage was offset by concerns about its safety. It had already been observed that recipients of the Moderna vaccine had a one-in-1,394 risk of developing a blood clot following their first dose, and a one-in-1,819 risk following their second. These rates were considerably higher than the corresponding rates for Pfizer and Oxford-AstraZeneca — a stunning finding, given that blood clotting had until then been almost exclusively associated with the latter. Despite this, the greatest risk of clotting was observed following Covid-19 diagnosis; regulators were therefore able to approve the Moderna product on the grounds that it provided a net benefit, safety concerns notwithstanding.
But these safety concerns were not limited to blood clotting, nor to the Moderna vaccine specifically. Two other cardiovascular conditions, myocarditis and pericarditis, had months earlier been linked to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but like the blood clots were considered to be the lesser evil when compared to Covid itself. This belief was challenged on September 9, however, following the publication of a study which found that for boys aged 12 to 17 who did not have any underlying medical conditions, the risk of suffering a cardiac adverse event after receiving an mRNA vaccine was many times greater than the risk of being hospitalised by Covid — and this was before adjusting for the fact that 40 percent of paediatric hospital admissions were likely incidental. The clear implication was that the risk-benefit analysis did not favour vaccinating children, especially boys. To this end, the authors recommended that governments “hold off on definitively recommending vaccination of low-risk children against Covid-19.”
This recommendation was not heeded by Australian regulators. At the time of writing, approximately four out of every five Australian children aged 12 and older have received multiple injections.
But it wasn’t just children who had little to fear from getting infected. In October, the same month that Daniel Andrews became the first Australian leader to mandate vaccination outside of high-risk workplaces, a report released by Public Health England estimated that the absolute risk of being hospitalised by Covid for unvaccinated adults aged 18 to 29 was one-in-15,625 over a four-week period. The increase in risk was roughly linear for every ten-year age bracket thereafter, before peaking sharply at one-in-828 for those aged 80 or older. But this data was not stratified by the underlying health status of the individual, a well-established predictor of disease severity — it was therefore reasonable to infer that the true risk of hospitalisation for fit and healthy adults was significantly smaller than even these figures suggested, especially for those in younger age groups.
Australians fitting this exact profile were nonetheless forced to take the vaccine under the mandatory vaccination policies imposed by state governments in the latter part of 2021 — forced to take an experimental vaccine, even though it didn’t prevent us from getting infected. Forced to take it, even though it didn’t prevent us from infecting others. Forced to take it regardless of whether we’d already been infected, even though previous infection had been shown time and time and time again to confer immunity that was equally as strong and durable. Forced to take it, even though 69,410 adverse events had already been reported in Australia alone.
Forced to take it.
The leaders who imposed these mandates will deny that we were forced. They’ll argue that nobody forced the needle into our arm, which is of course true.
What they did instead was far more sinister — they created a society in which those who did not comply with government policy were systematically treated like second-class citizens. Step by deliberate step, these state governments imposed a form of medical apartheid whereby non-compliant citizens were robbed of their freedom to work, travel and socialise. Failure to submit was not a crime technically, but it nonetheless carried a punishment that for most people was unbearably severe. For those with careers to preserve, mortgages to pay and kids to feed, there was no real choice. Acquiescence was their only option.
This program of systematic coercion was accompanied by a sustained campaign of propaganda and censorship. Government agencies worked with social media companies to ban and suppress the accounts of social media users who expressed views that ran contrary to the official narrative. Medical experts were told their licenses would be revoked if they voiced any degree of skepticism. Politicians and bureaucrats spoke endlessly about how unvaccinated people were overrepresented in the hospitalisation statistics, neglecting to mention that virtually every hospitalised patient was either elderly or immunocompromised. And when ordinary Australians attempted to assemble in public to exercise what little power they had left, they were on many occasions met with rubber bullets, pepper spray and violent arrest.
But the most disgraceful element of this campaign was not the curtailment of our rights and freedoms, nor the dystopian censorship of our speech, nor the militaristic policing of our movement — it was the psychological abuse inflicted on those who did not comply. For months on end, unvaccinated individuals were routinely derided by politicians, bureaucrats and taxpayer-funded journalists alike. The derision came in many forms: from condescending articles that painted the unvaccinated as moronic, selfish and immature, to vitriolic insinuations by elected officials that unvaccinated people were responsible for the deaths of others. The end result of this coordinated pile-on — some would say, the intended result — was to portray unvaccinated Australians as filthy vectors of disease who were a distinct liability to those around them. This false and divisive narrative was repeated week after week, on multiple fronts, until eventually it became widely accepted. It destroyed friendships and relationships, tore families apart, and took an enormous toll on the mental health of the people in the firing line — people whose only wrongdoing was to insist upon their right to bodily autonomy.
Unvaccinated individuals bore the brunt of the propaganda, but ultimately everyone was subjected to psychological abuse in the form of gaslighting. The authorities told us that the vaccines provided strong, lasting protection against severe illness — and in the next breath said that unless everyone was fully jabbed, we wouldn’t be safe. Then, when it became abundantly obvious in early 2022 that the vaccines were not preventing infection, the authorities denied that preventing infection had ever been their objective — while at the same time continuing to restrict the movement of unvaccinated individuals. They made the demonstrably false claim that the failure of the vaccines was due to the Omicron variant, but continued to treat as fully vaccinated everyone who had received their second dose months prior to Omicron’s emergence. They insisted with absolute confidence that the vaccines were safe, even though they were the first of their kind to ever be approved for human use and had been created many times faster than any other vaccine in human history. And when people finally took to the streets to protest this endless stream of manipulation and lies, the authorities dismissively described the movement as “fringe” and “radical”, even as the crowds swelled to tens of thousands of people.
And if you queried any of this, you were labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist.
This essay does not argue that the vaccines were useless. They undoubtedly kept a large number of vulnerable individuals out of hospital; this in turn reduced the strain on our nation’s healthcare systems, ensuring that they could continue to operate during peak demand. Had the virus run rampant two years earlier, when our population was entirely unvaccinated, it’s possible that the hospitals would not have been able to cope. In this sense, the vaccinations were an important component of our nation’s pandemic response.
But those at increased risk of severe illness did not need to be coerced into getting vaccinated — they did it voluntarily, because it was in their interest to do so. It therefore seems likely that most of the aforementioned benefit could have been achieved under a voluntary vaccination program, as was the case in many other countries around the world.
At this point, two questions come to mind. Firstly, how many young and healthy people did the authorities need to inject against their will in order to prevent a single hospital admission? And secondly, how many of those injected against their will consequently suffered one or more debilitating side-effects?
These questions have already been partially answered. At the beginning of this year, the UK government scaled back its mass vaccination program after learning that it was necessary to double-dose more than 20,000 young and healthy adults in order to avert a single non-severe hospitalisation. Or put another way: for every two million vaccine doses dispensed to people outside of the high-risk category, less than 50 hospital beds were spared.
And how many people suffered severe side-effects for every two million doses dispensed?
We were originally told that severe side-effects were exceedingly rare — but it now appears that this, too, was a lie. A reanalysis of the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data, published in a peer-reviewed journal in August 2022, discovered that one in 800 vaccinated participants suffered a serious adverse event. This staggering finding has since been affirmed by the former head of the Australian Medical Association, Professor Kerryn Phelps, who addressed the severe underreporting of adverse events in her submission to a parliamentary inquiry. She stated that “the incidence of serious adverse reactions per vaccinated person could be more than one-in-1,000,” and added that “an order of magnitude of under-reporting is not unreasonable to consider.” All of this is consistent with the 140,000 adverse events that have been officially reported in Australia to date — and with the alarming rise in excess mortality that has been observed all over the world since the Covid-19 vaccines were introduced.
It is therefore abundantly clear that, for the vast majority of people, the dangers of vaccination now far outweigh any potential benefits. If this was always the case, then the decision to make the vaccines mandatory can at best be described as the most egregious failure of public policy in the history of our nation — and at worst, an act worthy of criminal prosecution.
The people who made these decisions must be held accountable. Accountability does not necessarily mean punishment; when examined, those in the spotlight may produce information that exonerates them. But examine them we must. The alternative is to shrug our shoulders at the most widespread violation of civil liberties in living memory, and in so doing set a precedent that encourages yet graver violations in the future.
We cannot just accept that we were robbed of our rights and stripped of our autonomy by laws that were never voted on. We cannot simply forget that politicians commandeered our bodies in pursuit of an objective that we weren’t permitted to question. If we tolerate this assault on our dignity without so much as demanding an inquiry, we will have humiliated ourselves before the world. Australia, once known for the hardiness of its inhabitants, will come to be seen as a land of pushovers.
So we must push back. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to ensure that our fundamental rights can never again be confiscated on a whim. I therefore implore all who cherish our freedoms to join us in calling for a formal inquiry into Australia's response to the Covid-19 pandemic — and to do so emboldened by the knowledge that demanding accountability is not just our right, but, in the wake of all that has happened, our profound moral obligation.
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