Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to speak about the vaccine rollout, and, in particular, the number of COVID cases we've had in the last nine months. Effectively, Australia opened up from its lockdowns in December last year. At that time we had a couple of hundred thousand cases. We're currently running at about 10.2 million cases in nine months. So my question to the head of the TGA, Professor Skerritt, is: how can he uphold the claim that the vaccines are 92 per cent effective in stopping transmission and infection? It's about time we had some honesty from the TGA and ATAGI about the effectiveness of the vaccine because mandates are still in place and people are still carrying injuries.

We are currently up to 136,000 reported injuries from the vaccine. Over 50 per cent of them come from the state health departments. These claims should not be dismissed out of hand, as they are by the TGA. It is incredibly reckless and impertinent for the TGA to claim of the 900 reported deaths that only 1,400 were from the vaccine and the other 900 people who have lodged these vaccine claims, of which 50 per cent are from state health departments and another 20 per cent are from doctors, that they, the TGA, would know more about the circumstances of the particular victim than the medical professionals who actually diagnosed the victims themselves. That is incredibly arrogant, in my view.

The last thing I want to talk about in terms of numbers and data is the actual number of deaths that occurred in Australia last year. This year we've seen a rise in deaths from last year of around 8,500 people. About 50 per cent of that is related to COVID deaths and about 50 per cent is non-COVID. The non-COVID deaths are running at an increase of about 1,000 a month. Last year, before the COVID outbreak really took off in the community, we had an increase in deaths from the year before. The number of deaths jumped from 14,000 in May 2020 to 15,000 in May 2021. In June, they jumped from 13,267 in 2020 to 14,844 in 2021. That's a jump of 1,600 people, almost 10 per cent. COVID wasn't in the community last May, June and July. There was an outbreak in New South Wales and Victoria at that time, and the lockdowns then proceeded.

Long story short: we end up with about 8,700 extra deaths last year. That all happened in the last eight months of the year, and it started to occur in the month after the vaccine rollout. Of that increase, only 400 are attributable to the increase in COVID deaths. There were 1,300 COVID deaths last year, an increase of 400 from 2021. The question is what caused the other thousand deaths a month after the vaccine rollout occurred. I'm not saying it was because of the vaccine rollout; it could have been a delayed reaction from the lockdowns the year before. We know that in 2020 we had 162½ thousand deaths and in 2019 we had 164½ thousand deaths. There was a drop of about 2,000 that could have occurred because of the lockdowns. Even so, that would still mean there was an increase of around 6,000 people that hasn't been accounted for. Given that the vaccine is still under provisional approval—and because it's provisionally approved—the black-triangle scheme applies. That means that any injury or anything that occurs in a short period after somebody gets a vaccine should always be assumed to be the vaccine until proven otherwise.

I am calling on the TGA to take these figures, whether it be the increase in actual deaths, the massive rate of reported injuries—yes, I know 23 million people got vaccinated, but the injury rate is 50 times higher than the normal rate of injuries from a vaccine. In 2019 about 13 million people got the flu vaccine, of whom only about 140 reported injuries. Of the 20 million people who got the COVID vaccine, we've now got 135,000 injuries. That's an increase of almost a thousand despite that fact that only 50 per cent extra people got vaccinated. They're very serious figures that should be looked at.

I also want to jump onto the actual biochemistry, which I didn't finish off last time. I refer to the paragraph on top of page 8 of the TGA's nonclinical report that can be found in their freedom of information log 2389-6 from 15 July 2021:

The expressed—

spike—

protein co-localised with an endoplasmic reticulum (ER) marker, suggesting the S protein is synthesised and processed within the ER for surface expression or secretion.

For those of you who don't know, you have a cell and a number of organelles in your cell. You have the ribosomes, which produce proteins, and a nucleus, which is where your genetic code is stored. You also have mitochondria, which help create oxygen in the cell, and then you have this thing called the endoplasmic reticulum. That surrounds the nucleus, and it's known as the warehouse, storage and transport part of the cell. That's where you package up proteins created by the ribosomes for export from the cell. Ribosomes can be linked to the endoplasmic reticulum. Any protein that is created by a ribosome bound to the endoplasmic reticulum is basically ready for export, unlike a free ribosome. Any protein created from a free ribosome within the cytoplasm of the cell actually stays within the cell.

What I want to know is: why have the TGA let this go through if the vaccine is creating a spike protein that can be secreted from the cell? The name of the game with a vaccine is to destroy the pathogen; it is not to create a pathogen that is being exported from the cell. I'm extremely concerned by this because there have been reports of clots and clotting as a result of the vaccine. We need to know whether or not that is because the cell is secreting a spike protein and then that spike protein isn't being broken down and it's congealing into a longer amyloid clot. They're questions that concern me a great deal.

I want to touch on a couple of questions I had from the TGA that they did finally answer after about eight months. I put some of these questions to them about eight months ago, and they took a very long time to answer. I asked whether or not the PCR test could distinguish between an active and an inactive virus. They came back to me and they said that the PCR test cannot differentiate between a live and a dead virus. To think that we've gone ahead and locked down an entire country, spent hundreds of billions of dollars, using a test that couldn't distinguish between a live and active virus and a dead virus is quite breathtaking, to say the least.

Yet again, it's indicative of how we don't apply quality assurance in this country. I was asked very early on by pathologists why we weren't doing proper blood testing. The traditional way to work out what's wrong with you is to get your bloods—everyone's familiar with that expression—yet somehow we managed to get away with using a test that was actually unreliable. Further questions need to be put to the TGA, and this needs to go further. Going forward, we cannot rely on tests that don't distinguish between a live and an inactive virus.

The last thing I'd like to touch on today is the reply that I got from the Department of Social Services and the Department of Health and Aged Care when I asked about the indemnity scheme and the number of people who had been paid out on that scheme. They said that the vaccine is very important, and they referred to the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages and how we no longer live with the bubonic plague. They said that this virus is like the bubonic plague. That's actually not true. That's actually very misleading.

The bubonic plague was a bacteria spread by fleas that bit you and infected your blood. The virus is a single-stranded RNA. A bacteria is a living organism—you're taught that in junior secondary school—whereas a virus is not considered a live organism at all. Bacteria don't mutate. DNA viruses don't mutate, because they're double stranded and they're hooked together, but RNA viruses do.

It's extremely misleading of the department of health to be comparing this pandemic with the pandemic that occurred in the Middle Ages, and many other pandemics, because it is a different type of pathogen. It concerns me that the department of health doesn't understand its pathogens. This is biology 101. Bacteria is different to double-stranded DNA. It's different to RNA. A number of bacterial viruses that we get vaccinated for are whooping cough, bubonic plague, tetanus, meningitis, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid and diphtheria. The DNA viruses are smallpox and chickenpox. Measles, mumps and rubella are single-stranded RNA. (Time expired)