Rita Panahi: Time for the Covid vaccine zealots to apologise

Not long ago if you said anything about Covid vaccine injuries, you would be called a conspiracy theorist. Now, Dan Andrews and Scott Morrison are among a long list of politicians who should apologise.

A long list of politicians and bureaucrats, including former premier Dan Andrews and former PM Scott Morrison, need to start apologising for how wrong they were about the safety and effectiveness of Covid jabs after AstraZeneca withdrew its vaccine globally, admitting it could cause dangerous side effects including in rare cases fatal blood clots.

Not long ago if you said anything about Covid vaccine injuries or questioned the efficacy of the jabs, you’d be called a conspiracy theorist, falsely labelled an anti-vaxxer and likely banned from social media.

Dan Andrews and former PM Scott Morrison need to start apologising for how wrong they were about the safety and effectiveness of Covid jabs. Picture: Getty Images

If you opposed coronavirus mandates or questioned the wisdom of coercing young, healthy people to get a Covid “vaccine” – that is in many critical ways different to a traditional vaccine – they didn’t need, then you were attacked as a dangerous spreader of disinformation even if you were a leading expert in the field such as Stanford University Professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya.

Among those who were cancelled by social media and defamed by the mainstream media was former NY Times reporter Alex Berenson. His big crime was saying Covid jabs wouldn’t, as promised, stop infection.

This tweet, which saw him permanently banned from Twitter (now X) for violations of “Covid-19 misinformation rules”, was posted in August 2021: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficiency and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

AstraZeneca withdrew its vaccine globally, admitting it could cause dangerous side effects including in rare cases fatal blood clots. Picture: AFP

He was 100 per cent right.

In Victoria we enforced policies that coerced healthy kids as young as 13, who had no reason to fear a Covid infection, to be double-jabbed or banned from shops, sports and almost every facet of life other than school.

The few of us who objected to this insane overreach in 2021 were maligned as reckless, dangerous and worse. To ensure bureaucrats and politicians don’t repeat the mistakes of the Covid era we need a Royal Commission into the country’s Covid response.

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist