In January last year Anthony Albanese promised that if he became Prime Minster he would establish “a royal commission or some form of inquiry” into the coronavirus pandemic.
More than a year since the election we are still waiting even though the need for an inquiry today is even greater. This week the Senate tied a vote on a question to establish a Royal Commission into the coronavirus. Only Labor and Greens Senators opposed the establishment of one.
A Labor Senator explained its party’s opposition by claiming that Australia is “still experiencing COVID-19. This is not over.” I am not sure what country this Labor Senator is living in but things feel pretty much what they were like before the pandemic. People are travelling, there are no lockdowns or quarantine and only a few wear masks.
We will always be living COVID-19 to some degree. So if an inquiry cannot be held now, when will the time be right?
But in one way that the Labor Senator is right. We are still living with one aspect of the pandemic. People are dying in Australia at record numbers. Last year, 25,000 more Australians died compared to the historical average. Deaths were 15 per cent higher than expected.
Less than half of these “excess deaths” came from COVID-19. There is not good explanation for the other half.
We should have an inquiry because thousands of Australians are dying without a good explanation about why. Some people blame the delayed impacts of lockdowns, some people blame the vaccine. But no one really knows.
We now know that the coronavirus vaccines do create serious side effects for some. One of the vaccines that was heavily promoted at the beginning of the rollout, AstraZeneca, had its approval pulled. The mRNA vaccines have been associated with heart related issues, especially in young males.
Last week, the Senate held hearings into my legislation that would end remaining vaccine mandates. Pfizer and Moderna, the manufacturers of the mRNA vaccines, appeared. Neither could even explain why some people are experiencing debilitating heart problems following a vaccine.
If the pharmaceutical companies do not even now why some people die after taking their drug, why is the Australian Government still promoting their use, and often in ads that make no mention of these side effects?
If nothing else we should have a full inquiry, urgently, into why this is happening and if there is anything that can be done to bring our fatality rate back to the long-term averages.
To give Pfizer and Moderna their due they were at least clear that they had done no research on whether their vaccine could stop transmission of the virus before it was released. However, they did not have a good answer for why then they had made claims that their vaccine could stop transmission. Nor why they had allowed governments to continue to claim that getting the vaccine would “stop the spread” when there was no credible evidence for that claim.
It would seem that these companies were happy to sit back and make enormous profits from the imposition of vaccine mandates, while not bothering to look at whether their products would work as intended.
We do not need an inquiry to conclude about the worthlessness of vaccine mandates. Yet still I hear from fire fighters, nurses and others who are not allowed to work because of these ridiculous impositions. Vaccine mandates never worked and they definitely do not work now.
We should not need an inquiry to learn that lesson from the pandemic but there are many other lessons to learn and an inquiry should be held now to learn them as quickly as possible.
