AMPS Delegation to Australian Parliament

Inquiry into Australia's Excess Mortality

Last week I was in a delegation of the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS) that visited politicians in our national capital city, Canberra. A mini-inquiry was held in conjunction with the release of the book: “Too Many Dead - An Inquiry into Australia's Excess Mortality”. The book is now available to be downloaded here as a pdf. A hard copy version will be available soon and purchasing it will go towards supporting AMPS.

Links to pre-recorded presentations by the chapter authors are also found on the same web page. It includes videos from high profile international contributors including Norman Fenton, Kevin McKernan, Clare Craig and Jessica Rose. I’m looking forward myself to going through them all.

My presentation is a 50-minute version covering my pre-COVID Queensland mortality trends report. I hope it helps understand my report, for those interested, by talking through the various graphs.

During the visit I gained an insight into what lobbyists must do. You run from one parliamentary office to another, make representations, then on to the next appointment. You can see how difficult it must be for politicians. They are probably approached many times a day with people making such representations. Many of the causes I imagine are worthwhile, there are so many issues in our country at the moment.

You get a sense of the frustration from some of the politicians. Some are in a major political party, which is a machine, that doesn’t really care about specific issues. The most important thing for the party is to rule. Those individual politicians in that party get bombarded by the public as they are known as a sympathetic ear.

On the other hand, the smaller political parties, with only a few seats in parliament, are passionate about specific issues. It’s their reason for existence.

AMPS delegation with Senator Malcolm Roberts.

They have a different sense of frustration about whether they can actually do anything to effect change. It depends on getting collaboration from other small parties to sway a vote on a particular issue.

I have to say I was most impressed with the staff and advisors we met. Many of them were passionate about rectifying the harms that have been caused by the COVID response. At our inquiry one of the Chiefs of Staff expressed that they would continue to do everything they could. It was strangely a moving moment at the conclusion of the meeting.

Example of what politicians put up with

Senator Roberts put in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the TGA on batch testing. This is what he got!

A typical response to a TGA FOI request.

I’d hate to see the black toner bill at the TGA if they print these out as well. I looked up the FOI number on the post-it note in the photo above and yes there are only a few words not redacted. It’s unbelievable that this is what they provide. There should be an FOI request on toner cartridge expenses at the TGA.

The most important visits were probably to a few politicians from a major party, who as individuals are sitting on the fence. If they step out of line and speak out that something has gone wrong, they risk losing their pre-selection. In one office when we presented the book, they admitted that amongst their staff there had seemed to be a lot more deaths than usual in their circle of family, friends and acquaintances. I found this curious. People know something is strange. But being able to detect such trends from one’s own small circle is difficult.

What does a 10% increase in mortality in Australia mean to one’s own circle of family, friends and acquaintances? People can say old people die anyway. But if an 80-year-old dies, how do we know they wouldn’t have lived another 5 years?

That’s why we need national agencies with access to population data to monitor this carefully. I’ve noted before the ABS does its job as well as any other country in the world with regards to collecting data. Other agencies like the TGA have been deficient. And that is where we have been let down in Australia enormously.

AMPS Executive Team

From left standing in front of parliament house:

• Kara Thomas - AMPS Secretary

• Dr Christopher Neil - AMPS President

• Dr Duncan Syme - AMPS Vice President

• Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan - AMPS Treasurer

They are all medical practitioners who are not allowed to work for reasons ruled by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). This is a gross injustice. There is a positive though, in that it has brought together a group that will lead improvements in the medical profession longer term and ultimately better healthcare for Australians.

Another doctor we met was Dr Julie Sladden, a general practitioner from Tasmania, also not able to practice because of AHPRA. She is working as an advisor now to one of the politicians. She also writes for the Spectator.

On the Wednesday when we held the inquiry meeting, partners and friends were allowed to attend. My wife Lena was one of those and was waiting in the foyer of parliament house. Visitors have to be signed in by staff and Julie went down to check people in. A young lady had a medical episode and had collapsed in the foyer. Lena said Julie ran straight in to assist and the visitors had to go up with someone else. This is what a health carer does.

I’m sure if an AHPRA executive were there they would be scratching their heads as to what to do. In fact, they probably wouldn’t care.

We are very fortunate to have these AMPS doctors.

The Presentations

There were five of us giving talks at the inquiry and then at the public event. I provide a short summary below of the talks to guide you through what to watch. I believe there will also be the shorter versions released of the 15 minute talks we gave at the parliament and public events

Dr Phillip Altman: Phillip is an authority on clinical trials and regulatory affairs with more than 40 years of experience in designing, managing and reporting of clinical trials and in working with the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration in gaining new drug approvals. He established Australia’s first contract research organisations (CROs). Phillip provided an overview to the sessions. One main point he brought out is that in all his career he has never known of the safety of a drug to be measured by population level excess mortality. Usually if there are a few abnormal deaths in a trial it’s all over for the drug. Or back to the drawing board.

He also made the point that he knows from first-hand experience there are competent people within organisations like the TGA. The problems must be at the executive level in these organisations.

Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan: Jeyanthi is an anaesthetist from Victoria. We had met numerous times on zoom calls but it was great to finally meet in person. She volunteered early on to be on Naomi Wolf’s Daily Clout team trawling through the Pfizer documents that are being progressively being released under court order in the US. She has written in the Spectator about what they found regarding the counting of infections cases that led to the proclamation of 95% effectiveness. The conduct of the company during the trials was dodgy at best. Recent Pfizer document dumps have provided information on the adverse events and deaths in the clinical trial. This is similarly damning. The team she worked with have just had their work published in a peer reviewed journal. The paper was literally published on the day of the inquiry:

Forensic analysis of the 38 subject deaths in the 6-Month Interim Report of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trial

Jeyanthi and the Daily Clout team had full text descriptions in patient files that they could go through and review clinical details as doctors. Basically, what was done in the trial was to delay reporting of certain deaths in the trial so that they did not contribute to the information available at the time of the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA). If Pfizer had included certain deaths, it would have been known that there were 4 cardiac deaths in the vaccination group and one in the placebo group.

They found one death where the person died of “arteriosclerosis” three days after vaccination. They trawled through the records of that patient and there was no previous record of this as a pre-existing condition. Pfizer adjudicated that the death was nothing to do with vaccination.  

The work is a like the progressive uncovering of a crime. I’m waiting for the true crime podcast to come out.

Through all the work I’ve been doing I have gained a better understanding of the importance of the randomised placebo-controlled trial. Observational studies are so easy to manipulate, because the people in the different groups can have completely different characteristics. Authorities have made good use of this to push an agenda.

However, the randomised trials, where there are relatively small numbers of the outcome, like infection or death are also easy to manipulate especially when fraudulent actions are taken. There has only been one randomised placebo-controlled trial for each of the mRNA COVID vaccines and we know the results of these trials are tainted.

You must watch Jeyanthi’s presentation.

Dr Geoff Pain: Geoff is a Chemistry PhD and has a wealth of knowledge. Geoff has been writing on his substack about endotoxins as a byproduct of the manufacturing process. We know now that the process used for the product tested in the clinical trials was different to that used in mass production for the public. Endotoxins cause anaphylaxis and it is clear now that the rate of anaphylactic reactions occurring in the public product is much higher than was experienced in the trials. Geoff noted that the recent Nobel laureates, of mRNA fame, acknowledged that endotoxin assisted as an adjuvant in patents so they actually want endotoxin in the injections. The TGA tests for endotoxin and provides a pass/fail only. We don’t know what the pass level is!

It seems to me that this is a highly plausible mechanism for the excess deaths experienced in the elderly population. It would also seem to explain different rates of death for certain batches. Trials were never done on an elderly cohort.

I look forward to going through Geoff’s presentation again in slow time.

Clare Pain: Clare is a medical journalist. We found out recently she and her husband don’t live far away from us. Clare’s talk provided a good introduction to the topic of excess mortality. Our presentations went well together. She went through in detail reports from the ABS, providing different numbers for the excess. She pointed out that the updated model used to make estimates had an effect of minimising the excess over a certain time period. Her work reinforced my understanding of the model fitting process which I wrote about in my article here.

Canberra Public Event

In the evening of last Wednesday there was a public event. It was well attended, for a city in Australia that tends to be out of touch with the issues in the rest of Australia. Liberal party member of parliament, Russell Broadbent, gave a moving speech to open it up. We had friends who even made the trip from Sydney. It was also wonderful to meet a few readers afterwards.

One of the amazing things about these gatherings is the connections that are made. I have done my own work investigating adverse events in the TGA database, having to put in an FOI request to get information to allow me to join data available in other FOI’s. I met a few people who have focussed on this area of adverse events. They had submitted some of the other FOI’s I had made use of.

It’s amazing how people independently do their own research and then you put it all together we come up with new insights into the data.

One of the things I want to follow up on is to try to connect people working in this area. If you have been doing work yourself on Australian adverse events please let me know.

A Small Win

While we were in Canberra Senator Malcolm Roberts moved a motion to have: “Appropriate Terms of Reference for a COVID-19 Royal Commission that would allow all affected stakeholders to be heard”.

Currently in Australia only a bogus inquiry has been approved by the government, run by three “experts”. Amongst these experts are vocal proponents of the harsh lockdowns. The scope also does not include that of the State responses, which is where a lot of the harm was done.

On the Thursday we went and sat in the public gallery of the Senate. We just missed the vote on Senator Roberts’ motion. Apparently what happened was that certain members of parliament had left the chamber when the vote was on. That swayed the vote to be just in favour of the inquiry into the Terms of Reference. Our understanding is that this is a positive as it now makes it more difficult to not have the Royal Commission.

In other news, yesterday a motion by both Pfizer and Moderna to dismiss the case brought against them was heard in court. I have written about that case here regarding the failure of the companies to apply to the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator prior to seeking approval from the TGA.

I understand that it went well for the applicant. The judge will now consider the submissions from both sides.

Corridoors

The corridors of the Australian parliament house reminded me of the corridors in the Matrix movie. Which door to open?