WORLD FIRST: Australian local government calls for suspension of Covid mRNA vaccines
By Rebekah Barnett: Dystopian Down Under
In a surprise move, the local government of West Australian mining town Port Hedland has voted to call for the immediate suspension of the Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines pending an investigation into evidence of excessive levels of synthetic DNA in the shots.
Other councils are likely to follow, meanwhile federal authorities continue to deny any problems.
At a special meeting on Friday night, Port Hedland Councillors voted five votes to two to notify every one of Australia’s 537 local councils of the evidence of the DNA contamination in the vaccines and associated risks.
“We are gravely concerned about the potential health risks posed by synthetic DNA contamination, including the dangers of genomic integration, cancer, hereditary defects and immune system disruption,” the letter says.
The council will also send letters to every health practitioner within the Port Hedland area strongly urging them to share this information with patients contemplating receiving any Pfizer or Moderna Covid modifed-RNA (mod-RNA) vaccines.
The council will join federal MP Russell Broadbent in calling for the suspension of the mod-RNA Covid vaccines until an urgent and thorough investigation has been carried out into the DNA contamination matter, after independent testing of Australian vials of Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines detected residual synthetic DNA at levels up to 145 above the legal limit.
In several letters to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last month, the independent Member for Monash included warnings from leading scientists that “excessive synthetic foreign DNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles can integrate into human cells, potentially leading to genomic instability, cancers, immune system disruption, and adverse hereditary effects.”
Port Hedland Councillor Adrian McRae, who brought the motion, said on Friday that he hoped the vote “will be the ripple that creates a bigger wave across the country, and perhaps the world” on the issue of Covid vaccine safety.
The evidence
During the two-and-a-half-hour special meeting, councillors reviewed an analysis of Australian Moderna and Pfizer Covid vaccines by molecular virologist Dr David Speicher, which showed that levels of synthetic DNA in the vials “far exceeded” the allowable regulatory limit set by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
Councillors heard that the TGA has denied the validity of Dr Speicher’s findings. However, Moderna’s protocol for measuring DNA levels in its Covid vaccine, released in response to my Freedom of Information request to the TGA (FOI 5286), calls the TGA’s claim into question.1
First, most of the document was heavily redacted, in keeping with the TGA’s tendency to opt for secrecy over transparency when it comes to grave matters affecting the health of millions of Australians.
Second, the TGA-approved method for measuring residual DNA levels is unlikely to detect the bulk of the contamination, particularly small fragments.
As detailed further in a letter to be sent to the WA Health Department,
“Alarmingly, Moderna, through its own patent filings, had specifically warned about the inadequacy of such testing methods for detecting residual DNA, especially DNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs).
“Despite this warning, the TGA has relied on these insufficient methods, which grossly under-detect the true extent of contamination. Moderna’s patents also highlighted the risks of insertional mutagenesis and carcinogenesis, yet these serious risks remain inadequately addressed by the TGA’s current testing practices.”
The Highly Respected Professor of Oncology Angus Dalgeish
Councillors heard a recorded address from internationally lauded Professor of Oncology Angus Dalgleish, who warned of “the potential public health consequences” of the mod-RNA vaccines, including cancers, immune disorders and genomic integration.
Professor Dalgleish, who is the lead co-signatory on Broadbent’s most recent letter to the Prime Minister, said he had seen an upsurge in aggressive, fast-progressing cancers in his oncology practice amongst patients who had received Covid vaccine boosters, particularly colorectal and blood cancers.
“My own research has shown that the boosters suppress the T-cell response and switch the antibody response to tolerising. That means this is the perfect example where you have switched off the policing of foreign invaders, virus, etcetera, and cancer, allowing it to grow uncontrolled,” he said.
Having previously sat on the scientific board of mRNA technology company CureVac, Professor Dalgleish emphasised that he is well placed to understand and speak to the risks and benefits of the Covid mod-RNA vaccines, which he said are more properly called a gene therapy.
Professor Dalgleish said that Australian authorities’ failure to properly investigate the issue of high levels of DNA contamination in the Covid vaccines was a “critical gap” in the public health response, and he urged the Port Hedland Council to take the matter seriously and to advocate for immediate public health responses.
You can listen to Angus Dalgeish’s address through Dropbox on this link: Video (10:10 mins) available here c/o
And you can follow Julian Gillespie on his Substack page Jules on the Beach here: Julian Gillespie
Professor Dalgleish’s address was presented only to councillors in a closed part of the meeting, but approximately 50 members of the public assembled in the gallery during the rest of the meeting to hear from Port Hedland residents, who shared their support for the council’s action to raise the alarm over high levels of synthetic DNA in the Covid mod-RNA vaccines.
In a striking statement, local Aboriginal woman and funeral director Sharon Todd told the council that she had witnessed “an alarming increase” in untimely deaths of Aboriginal people which she observed worsening since the introduction of the Covid vaccines to Port Hedland in 2021 (before community spread of the virus).
“Anecdotally, the strange and aggressive cancers that we are now seeing in my profession is frightening to say the least,” said Todd.
“Among the Indigenous community across WA, I personally have had several family members who have died or been diagnosed with these aggressive cancers.”
McRae, a local businessman and son of a fourth-generation farmer and grazier family, brought some anecdotes of his own.
McRae said that his company, GBTK, had just finished the construction of a cold body storage facility, which was commissioned by another local Pilbara funeral director.
“They told me that in 2020 at the height of Covid they were doing on average one funeral a week. One.
“Since the injection rollout they are doing over one funeral a day. It’s almost a sevenfold increase.
“It’s frightening, and everyone in our government wants to tiptoe around the big fat elephant that sits right in the middle of the room.”
Video (1:13 mins) via @Humanperspective on X
Rates and rubbish
The motion to warn Australians of the DNA contamination in the mod-RNA shots was supported by Councillors Adrian McRae, Sven Arentz, Lorraine Butson, Camilo Blanco, and Deputy Mayor Ash Christensen.
Councillor Blanco, who formerly served as Port Hedland Mayor, said that although healthcare is not normally within the remit of local government, he considered the evidence presented to be “a real and undeniable threat to public health.”
Blanco reasoned that the lack of action from federal and state authorities on the DNA contamination issue necessitated intervention by the council to protect the well-being of the Port Hedland community.
“It’s clear to me… that there’s holes in the responses from government agencies here, and I want answers to clear this up,” said Blanco, adding that he took three doses of the Covid vaccines himself and is not an anti-vaxxer.
“I think this is a historic motion that is going to have far-reaching implications for the health and safety of every Australian.”
Councillor Lorraine Butson, who has worked as a nurse for over 47 years, said that within the last two years she had seen a significant rise in cancers, pericarditis, myocarditis and other medical issues related to the vaccines.
Prior to the vote, the council’s administration warned that sending out these letters would almost certainly compromise State and Federal Government relationships, resulting in extreme reputational and financial impact.
However, Councillor Arentz said that he felt supporting the motion was “the right thing to do,” a statement echoed by Deputy Mayor Ash Christensen.
Christensen said that he was a “simple human being” with a “not very great education,” but that the motion was in alignment with the principles of scientific debate.
“It goes without saying that this conversation will be had over, I’m assuming, decades when the truth does finally come out around the real health ramifications and the issues created by the injections that were brought forward,” he said.
Video (23:45 mins) via @Humanperspective on X
The motion was opposed by Mayor Peter Carter and Councillor Ambika Rebello. Rebello said that as healthcare is not in the remit of local government, it was inappropriate for the council to take a position on the issue.
“As local government, our roles relate to roads, rates, rubbish, recreation, local town planning and, to an extent, housing, childcare,” she said.
“A debate on health issues pertaining to the evils of gene therapy and vaccine is not the business of council.”
Rebello also suggested that McRae brought the motion to drum up publicity for a run at federal office, but McRae told me there’s “no chance” he will stand for office at the 2025 federal election.
In an interview on 6PR radio yesterday, Carter called the Council’s vote “disappointing” and reiterated that the council should stick to managing “rates and rubbish.“
“This is something that we shouldn’t be entertaining at all,” he told 6PR breakfast hosts Millsy and Karl. “Seriously, it’s not the role of local government.”
But in his closing statement on Friday night, McRae told those present, “Sure health is not in the remit of local government, but looking after our people most certainly is.”
Carter also told media that those attending the meeting in the gallery on Friday night do “not represent the whole community.”
But several councillors I spoke with yesterday took umbrage with Mayor Carter’s statement and said that the council’s vote represented the majority view within the community.
Comments under a post on the town’s official Facebook page about the Friday night vote are mostly positive, with commenters expressing approval of the council’s decision and some calling for their own councils to follow suit. The town has since turned comments off under the post.
Small town, big impact
Situated in Western Australia’s northwest Pilbara region, Port Hedland is a small town with outsize impact as Australia’s iron ore mining capital. As reported by Alison Bevege over the weekend,
“Port Hedland, 1600km north of Perth, is the economic engine of Australia, strategically vital due to its deep-water port for bulk mineral exports from the Pilbara.
“The port’s supply chain was estimated to be worth $103.7 billion or 4 percent of Australia’s entire national economy in 2022-23 and is expected to contribute about $156 billion in royalties and taxes to both the WA and Federal Governments over the next 10 years, according to the Port Hedland Industries Council.
“Port Hedland’s local government area has a population of about 16,000 people and a local economy valued at $3.7 billion in 2020-21.”
Port Hedland’s local government is also exceedingly colourful.
In 2020, then Mayor Camilo Blanco was ousted after the state Labor Government suspended the Council – just one year after Blanco moved to charge mining companies council rates, boosting the town’s revenue considerably.
Peter Carter succeeded Blanco as Mayor, only to make the news for trying to do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of deals without any funding behind him, and having to step down from a school board after he was seen being fed strawberries by a woman in a hotel room in Vietnam during a video meeting.
In 2022, the town again made headlines, this time for its plan to sue WA Premier Mark McGowan over his Covid vaccine mandates, which applied to more than 75% of the workforce. The mandates were deeply unpopular in the mining town, although the council later reversed its decision to challenge them in court.
Last year, Carter launched defamation proceedings against Blanco for statements he made in a council meeting. This year, Carter faced and survived a vote of no confidence.
Meanwhile, McRae became an internet ‘Pro Putin’ sensation for congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on his “transparent and comprehensive victory” after scrutineering the Russian election as one of only a few Australians invited to participate.
Port Hedland has also been hit hard by the Covid vaccine fallout. McRae said that five out of eight representatives on the previous Council believed that they were injured by the Covid vaccines, and workers in healthcare and other frontline professions have a plethora of injury anecdotes to tell. Such stories remain mostly undocumented by the local press.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Port Hedland is the first local government in Australia to make waves on the Covid vaccine DNA contamination issue, and it is unlikely to go unnoticed.
In fact, WA Premier Roger Cook responded yesterday, slamming the council for going “off the rails” for passing the motion on Friday.
“One, vaccines are not dangerous. They are important for saving lives and keeping the community safe,” Cook told the press.
“Two, the town of Port Hedland should stick to its knitting. It should stay focused on the services to the people in that community. It should lift its game.”
Cook occupied the role of Health Minister during WA’s jab rollout during 2021, when the majority of West Australians were coerced into getting double vaccinated.
With the Labor Government’s vaccine mandates, Cook achieved over 90% community vaccination coverage, along with an exponential increase of adverse event reporting associated with the Covid vaccines, at 24 times the rate of all other vaccines combined.
Media response
Media coverage of the Port Hedland Council vote has so far labelled the Covid vaccine DNA contamination and associated risks a “conspiracy theory” which has been “debunked by health authorities.”
Needless to say, aside from glib flip-offs, neither media outlets nor health authorities have provided any scientific evidence to disprove evidence of excessive synthetic DNA contamination detected mod-RNA vaccines from Australia, Germany, the US, and Canada.
Nor has any evidence of testing for contamination effects such as genomic integration or cancer formation been provided. The TGA required no testing for carcinogenicity and genotoxicity before approving the mod-RNA vaccines for use, and the only vaccine batch testing results released by the TGA were fully redacted.
As someone who has been involved in Port Hedland’s local government for years in both as Mayor and Councillor, Blanco said he’s seen media smear campaigns in action before.
“In my experience with government, the police, and other agencies that wield power — if you’ve got dissenters that oppose the position of interest groups, they actively go out there in the media and discredit the source of the information.
“They did it to me when I was Mayor. They did it to dissenting doctors who were demonised during Covid, and now they’re doing it to us on this,” he said.
Pressure builds to stop the shots
The Port Hedland Council joins a growing chorus of government officials and health experts calling for the mod-RNA shots to be stopped until the safety risks have been properly assessed.
In December last year, Florida Surgeon General Dr Joseph A. Ladapo called for a halt to the Covid mod-RNA vaccine program over the DNA contamination issue, noting the risks of genomic integration and cancer formation.
Dr Ladapo noted the lack of evidence for the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) claims that contaminant DNA poses no risk, and pointed to obfuscation on the part of the regulator about the presence of the SV40 enhancer sequence in the Pfizer DNA contamination, which scientists say increases the risk of the synthetic DNA entering the cell nucleus.
In Slovakia, the commissioner for a government investigation of the country’s Covid pandemic response, MP Peter Kotlar, has reportedly called for a total ban on the mod-RNA vaccines in his report to the government.
A bloc of parliamentarians from the European Union is lobbying to suspend the mod-RNA shots over safety concerns, including Christian Terhes (Romania), Christine Anderson (Austria), Ivan Vilibor Sincic (Croatia), Mislav Kolakusic (Croatia), and Francesca Donato (Italy).
Japan recalled three lots of Moderna Covid vaccines in 2021 after a different kind of contamination – stainless steel fragments – was discovered in the vials, with two men aged 30 and 38 dying after being injected with doses from contaminated batches.
In late 2021, countries including Germany, France, Finland, Iceland Sweden and Denmark halted use of the Moderna vaccine in young people due to concerns over cardiovascular risks.
India did not approve either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because regulators did not agree to the companies’ requests for indemnity from liability in the event of adverse effects.
And a number of African nations refused the Covid vaccines altogether. “We are not yet satisfied that those vaccines have been clinically proven safe,” Tanzania Health Minister Dorothy Gwajima told the press in 2021.
McRae said the Port Hedland Council is now liaising with CEO Carl Askew to ensure letters to local governments, health practitioners, and federal and state officials go out in a timely manner.
Blanco said he has fielded calls from more than 15 other local government councils since the motion was passed in Port Hedland on Friday night.
“I’ve been contacted by so many councils that are ready for this,” he said.
“They can’t just ignore this. We want genuine answers.”
From the by now legendary John Campbell, whose exemplary coverage of the unfolding Covid catastrophe has won him legions of fans.
Rebekah Barnett is one of the leaders of her generation of young journalists transforming the Australian media landscape outside the decaying halls of legacy media. You can follow her excellent work on her Substack page Dystopian Down Under HERE. She also regularly publishes at the Brownstone Institute HERE.
