Aussie politicians spreading anti-vax Covid misinformation
Parliamentarians fuelling anti-vaccine sentiment while on the public purse are threatening to undermine the public health response to Covid, experts say.
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Five senators crossed the floor last Monday to support One Nation’s Covid-19 Vaccination Status (Prevention of discrimination) Bill which aimed to force the Coalition to overrule state mandates on vaccines.
Liberals Gerard Rennick, Alex Antic and Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, and Nationals Matt Canavan and Sam McMahon all agreed with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson that the mandates were coercive. They then simultaneously vowed not to pass any other bills until they got their way.
“One Nation will continue to withhold its votes from all government legislation until (Prime Minister Scott Morrison) protects the rights of all Australians and removes state imposed vaccine mandates,” Hanson said.
The bill was voted down, but Tasmanian independent Senator Jacqui Lambie, echoing the frustrations of the majority, told One Nation to grow up.
“You are making a choice that you are more likely to get Covid and spread it to someone else. You don’t have a right to put vulnerable people’s lives at risk, you don’t have that right,” she said.
“This bill says the freedom of the unvaccinated is more important than the vaccinated.
“Being held accountable for your own actions isn’t called discrimination, it’s called being, you wouldn’t believe it, a goddamn bloody adult.”
But Lambie also claimed One Nation’s bill was about cashing in on the anti-vaccine movement.
“The problem is politicians like Senator Hanson and (One National) Senator (Malcolm) Roberts are using people’s fear to boost their own election campaigns, and they are using fear to make money, and that’s what this is about from One Nation. It’s all about cash, it’s all about power,” she said.
One Nation published Senator Lambie’s personal phone number in response, leading to a barrage of abuse and threats.
Another week in politicising the pandemic in pursuit of votes and preferences.
Chief among the super spreaders of misinformation is the member for Hughes Craig Kelly, ex Liberal, now a member of the United Australia Party. Along with the Nationals’ George Christiansen, who urged civil disobedience on the issue last week in parliament, he has a similar bill to go before the House of Representatives.
From being a guest speaker at anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown rallies featuring gallows, nooses and Nazis, Kelly, and financial backer Clive Palmer, have embarked on misinterpreting vaccine data in a scare campaign.
In September, just about everyone with a phone received an unsolicited text message from UAP linking adverse events data to the Covid vaccine.
Kelly used it to claim 448 people had died of the Covid vaccine. But it is simply not true.
The Database of Adverse Event Notifications is a first flag system designed to highlight any potential problems with medicines and medical devices.
Mr Kelly, who again fronted the Millions March Against Mandatory Vaccination march on Saturday in Sydney, told The Saturday Telegraph the TGA was under-reporting vaccine side effects in his opinion.
“The TGA are (sic) reporting just 0.21% adverse events after injection. This indicates that at best the TGA data capture is likely to be capturing less than 25% of the actual number of adverse events,” Mr Kelly said.
“Therefore it is arguable that the TGA are engaging in spreading misinformation by creating the false and dangerous impression that their method of collecting the data for adverse events is accurate and complete.”
He also said he had not have a Covid injection based on medical advice.
“I am not injected with any of the current Covid vaccines (although I may consider the Novovax injections if and when they are available) and I have done so on medical advice. I have listened to the advice given by our health bureaucrats, and I have sought a second, third and fourth opinion from what I consider medical experts with comparable if not far superior qualifications and frontline experience than the government health bureaucrats - and my decision is based upon their expert advice,” he said.
The Therapeutics Good Administration makes it clear “large scale vaccination means that some people will experience a new illness or die within a few days or weeks of vaccination. These events are often coincidental, rather than being caused by the vaccine”.
Professor Kristine Macartney from the National Centre for Immunisation and Research explains the database is intended to capture signals for unexpected events.
“Those events are not ascribed to the vaccine, they have just occurred after, so it is inaccurate and misleading to say these are events have occurred from the vaccine,” she said.
On average 170,000 Australians die each year, one in 10 from coronary heart disease which includes heart attacks. One in five die of stroke.
These deaths happen regardless of vaccination, but given the speed of the vaccine rollout, many have suffered these events within days or weeks of a Covid vaccine.
That does not mean the vaccine caused them.
And this is the misinformation being spread by Kelly and Hanson and others such as Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick whose Facebook is awash with cases of ‘vaccine harms’ which have not been causally linked, including a woman who had a Transient ischaemic attack (mini stroke) which doctors say is not related to the Covid vaccine.
“We all know people die every day and that will continue to occur and some will die the day of a vaccination and some the day or two after from causes that have nothing to do with the vaccine and could not have been prevented by the vaccine,” Prof Macartney said.
“The vaccine has rolled out quickly so we will see people who will have a new health condition but it doesn’t mean those conditions are caused by the vaccine.”
The TGA does examine all deaths recorded.
Since the beginning of the vaccine rollout to November 14, 2021, about 37.7 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered in Australia. The actual number of deaths attributed to Covid vaccines is nine, all from the Astra Zeneca vaccine.
“There have been eight deaths from thrombosis thrombocytopenia syndrome and one from immune thrombocytopenia and those deaths have been proven to be causally related,” Prof Macartney said.
And it was those cases that flagged the advice to limit the Astra Zeneca to the over 60s where the benefit outweighed the risk.
“There are very careful calculations done on what you would expect to see every day and in what age group the reporting of events are, then we look for unusual occurrence in the data,” Prof Maccartney said.
You would expect elected leaders to understand this amid a pandemic, but the lure of a scary story plays directly into the hands of anti vaxxers. They see the crowds, the discontent as votes.
Take federal member for Kennedy Bob Katter who claimed at a freedom rally in Cairns last Saturday that eight people in his electorate had either died, become crippled or faced serious medical complications after getting vaccinated.
“I just want to say that we’ve had eight cases, nine cases, into our office,” he said.
“Two, they got the immunisation, they died,” he said to a salivating audience.
In a subsequent interview with The Saturday Telegraph Katter, who is vaccinated for Covid, was less definitive.
“We’ve had eight cases into our office, I haven’t got staff to verify these cases and I have to look at my notes, there was one person who died, it may have been two, I can’t remember, there were two or three that appear to be crippled for life and another two with severe reactions.”
Did the people that died die of natural causes he was asked.
“I don’t know, I’m not a medical expert, I don’t know but I can’t sit on these cases, I’ve got a responsibility to disclose this,” Katter said.
Pushed for details, he was not forthcoming.
“Our officers have been advised of them, there must be a lot of these cases out there. I didn’t take the calls, these are people in the office,” he said.
World Health Organisation Covid adviser Professor Mary-Louise McLaws said there was a lot at risk from elected leaders undermining the pandemic response.
“Taking an opportunity to make political mileage out of something is unacceptable. The public stop having faith. There is nothing positive about anything these politicians are doing that will help save lives,” she said.
“When people hear groups like that on radio and television giving their opinions, they think they are bona fide. People are over it and wanting someone to acknowledge their pain and these people who are acknowledging their pain are not doing it in a very constructive way, they are being very destructive.
“A constructive way would be if they came together and said this is beyond politics, this is about the life and safety of Australian resident, we know it is painful but this is what we agree with,” Prof McLaws said.
“I think they are using it politically for vote counting and it is totally unacceptable and this is one of the most serious pandemics globally we have had since HIV.”
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