Covid and Australia’s Medical Regulatory Shame
By Paul Collits
In a move of which Hitler’s Health Minister would have been proud, in March 2021, Australia’s medical regulatory bodies declared freedom of speech to be illegal for medical practitioners. As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Doctors, nurses and pharmacists who spread COVID anti-vaccination claims will face harsh penalties, including being stripped of their ability to practise, by the medical watchdog.
The national medical boards and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency (AHPRA) released a joint directive warning healthcare practitioners that they risk regulatory action if they spout false or deceptive misinformation to patients or on social media that could undermine the national vaccination program as the AstraZeneca vaccine rollout begins.
Just to emphasise the point, and with a boldness and arrogance unprecedented in the history of Australian professional institutions, AHPRA and the medical boards stated:
There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.
AHPRA
The move was carefully orchestrated and comprehensive. The joint statement was supported by every national health professional board, including the medical, nursing and midwifery, pharmacy, dental, chiropractic, Chinese medicine, paramedicine and osteopathy boards of Australia.
So, no cracks would be allowed to appear in the wall of propaganda and what we now know to be lies emanating from Canberra and all of the States and Territories.
The Sydney Morning Herald: Doctors, healthcare workers to be punished for anti-vax COVID claims
This occurred with much of Australia in lockdown (or threatened with it), with all kinds of draconian measures in place to keep Australians under house arrest and any dissidents silenced, and with the then silver bullet political solution – the reputed safe, effective and non-harmful vaccines – on the way.
For the political class, nothing was going to get in the way of that rollout.
Certainly not doctors and others expressing any kind of doubts about the vaccines’ efficacy and/or safety. We know now, of course (though this is never, ever admitted by the Covid class), that the jab is anything but safe or effective. Or even needed. But this was happening at the very height of the hysteria and at the time of peak pro-vaxx religious belief.
For those scratching their heads as to why so few people spoke up in opposition during the two years of Covid hysteria and mass formation, this story of corruption and censorship should provide a few clues.
The legacy media was clued in, with especially the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the rabidly pro-vaxx Murdoch media and the Channel Nine/Fairfax media conglomerate, chaired by former Commonwealth Treasurer Peter Costello, (who also happens to chair the Future Fund, which invests heavily in Big Pharma) joining the cacophony of Covid mania. The universities (especially medical research institutes) and individual tame academics were on board with the pro-vaxx message and the rubbishing of dissident voices.
At a time when the terms “misinformation”, “conspiracy theories” and “fact checking” were on everyone’s lips, the medical establishment was boldly proclaiming that any anti-vaccine messages were downright lies, dangerous, “spreading deceptive claims”, and, therefore, against the law! Such a set of claims is now simply risible. Without any sense of irony, the Boards claimed: "Practitioners have a responsibility to promote the health of the community through disease prevention and control."
Now the international evidence is overwhelming that we are living through a pandemic of the vaccinated. The Aussie regulator was hardly itself acting in ways that promoted the health of the community. It was acting on behalf of, and in cahoots with, vaccine manufacturers, manufacturers conveniently protected from prosecution for any harms caused by their clumsily produced and hastily approved products.
The current trends in deaths and hospitalisations from Omicron make a mockery of the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration’s claim in September 2021 that: "Vaccination against COVID-19 is the most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from infection."
Even if this statement was true then, it isn’t now. Indeed, the claim about vaccine efficacy at the time of the rollout was, at best, based on “hope” rather than science, as one of the USA’s top health bureaucrats, Deborah Birx, has recently admitted. Tellingly admitted.
Dr Deborah Birx Admits the Biden Admin's Vaccine Efficacy Claims Were Based on 'Hope' Not Science: Rumble.
Now, many studies show that over 90 per cent of hospitalisations and deaths are of the vaccinated and boostered.
This, too, from a nation and from a medical establishment – in this case the TGA – that banned (in September 2021) ivermectin and other anti-viral treatments that have saved thousands of lives among Covid sufferers elsewhere and could have here too.
Ivermectin is not approved for use in COVID-19 in Australia or in other developed countries, and its use by the general public for COVID-19 is currently strongly discouraged by the National COVID Clinical Evidence Taskforce, the World Health Organisation and the US Food and Drug Administration.
… there are a number of significant public health risks associated with taking ivermectin in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 infection rather than getting vaccinated.
This last is an astonishing claim. Worse, the current number of (under-) reported deaths in Australia associated with receiving the vaccine stands at 890 (at 3 July 2022). The banning of effective drugs to help treat Covid is, therefore a matter of lethal consequence. Much more than this. It is a clear and disgraceful case of criminal negligence for which the perpetrators should be sent to jail.
https://www.tga.gov.au/media-release/new-restrictions-prescribing-ivermectin-covid-19
At the heart of the arrogant and dictatorial behaviour on the part of the regulators, the utter bastardry involved, is the idea that the only trustworthy information about health issues comes from the mouth of government. This evil belief was most infamously proclaimed across The Ditch in New Zealand at a time when both Jacinda Ardern and New Zealand’s Covid Zero approach carried rather more weight than they do now: We will continue to be your single source of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.
Daily Wire @realDailyWireNew Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: "We will continue to be your single source of truth… Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth."
Frightening, Orwellian stuff. Moreover, it is always incautious to make rash claims about highly contested areas of science, to state, in effect, that “the science is in”.
One clueless Kiwi academic described Ardern’s early Covid strategy as “a masterclass in crisis leadership”.
Alas, some bold statements do not age well.
New Zealand and Ardern were not alone, of course, in proclaiming that the Government’s version of Covid was the only one to be believed. Such a view was at the heart of the Australian medical establishment’s own sanctimony and single-minded adherence to the Covid State’s ruling narrative.
The medical establishment has been at the heart of the Covid mania and the Covid theatre from the start, and still is. For example, here is Tom Woods:
Doctors' offices are among the last holdouts of the mask religion, and I've never seen more "sanitized pens" and "used pens" labels than in medical offices. The vast bulk of the profession, with the usual noble exceptions (like the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons), disgraced itself throughout the whole episode.
Here we come to the case of Dr Albert Louis (a pseudonym), who was, indeed, suspended from medical practice in Australia for posting alleged thought-crime statements on social media, not even using his or her own name.
"It's a very bizarre state of affairs when, as a doctor for over 30 years, I suddenly find myself completely isolated from people I know, and from humanity. In this situation, there seems to be no way to help with healing or caring or treating, because I have been expelled like a priest excommunicated from the church. I have been cancelled.
"This happened because I was not conforming to the religion of medicine. I said things that were against the perceived modus vivendi. I was immediately suspended and completely and utterly cut off, as if I were a dangerous, evil person.
This code of behavior was not something I had contradicted in public. I hadn't attacked or injured a patient. I had posted on Facebook statements which were inimical to the system, because I criticized issues about the system which were not good.
The case of this poor medico is, no doubt, far from the only one. The now infamous but, in truth, wonderful Dr William Bay just this week stormed into an Australian Medical Association conference in Sydney with a shouted message about vaccine harm. He was ejected by security and he himself believes that it could cost him his career. His action was witnessed by the chair of the Medical Board of Australia. Naturally, his statement was described as an “anti-vaxx tirade”. A more sympathetic source (on Bitchute) called it “truth-bombing”. He is likely at the least to be vilified by the medical establishment, if not suspended. This is how far we have come.
Far from the only one, indeed. Hot off the press is the formation of a new doctors’ group defending freedom of speech, in a far more networked and formal kind of pushback. The formation of the Australian Medical Professionals Society is a welcome development.
Ergo, their claims against dissident doctors who challenged the vaccines and so much else were fraudulent too.
Those who run medical professional bodies should look very carefully at their own truth-telling practices when ending the careers of those who, in good faith and with the best intentions, dare to question them. For example, it has been established that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided funding to Britain’s own medical regulatory body, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Naturally this insidious outrage has been kept hidden from the public. Or it was until a freedom of information request unearthed it.
The suggestion has been made that the MHRA isn’t the only one to have received Gates’ money. It may well be that other medical regulatory agencies around the world are ethically compromised, too.
Haven’t governments been fortunate to have had so many third parties to which they could comfortably offload Covid enforcement and the suppression of free speech? Whether the now retired Health Minister Greg Hunt, a former employee of the World Economic Forum, was working the phones behind the scenes to ensure the messaging and the narrative were enforced professionally, who knows? It is a plausible assumption. After all, Hunt has form (back in 2017) as far as desiring to punish doctors who “stoop” to the levels of the anti-vaxx movement:
The Victorian Health Department and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) are investigating claims that three GPs are assisting families opposed to vaccinations.
Mr Hunt said if the doctors are found guilty, he hoped the regulator would impose the toughest penalties possible and added there would be "no sympathy at all" from the Government.
"I am astonished that any people who've been through medical degrees … would deign to stoop to the level of supporting the anti-vaccination movement," he said.
The Minister said he hoped these were isolated cases but warned "if there are other doctors out there preaching anti-vaccination positions, then we will find them".
Vee vill find zem!
The case of Dr Louis and all the other professionals whose careers were crushed for being right warrants nothing less than a Royal Commission. A grovelling apology would be a start. Some compensation for lost income, perhaps. A public correction of the authorities’ early advice. Sadly, we all suspect that none of these things will happen. And if nothing does happen, what assurance do we have that this will not occur again and again?
Paul Collits is an Australian freelance writer and independent researcher. He publishes widely across a number of Australia’s leading publications and has been one of the country’s single most cogent commentators throughout the Covid era. He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines – politics, geography and planning and business studies. A collection of his writing published in A Sense of Place Magazine can be found here. You can follow him on Substack here.
