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With powers abused, rights violated, the truth silenced and accountability dodged, there has never been a greater need for a Royal Commission in Australian history than the Covid debacle.

Australians are still paying a high price for their leaders’ overreaction to Covid-19.

During the Covid era, in pursuit of the misguided goal of ‘Covid Zero’, Australian governments, elected officials and unelected bureaucrats engaged in breathtaking human rights violations, unconscionable censorship of Australian citizens, a flagrant disregard for medical ethics, an appalling waste of taxpayer resources, and ‘expert’-informed policymaking that proved wrong time and time again.

Our leaders oversaw a breakdown in the rule of law; confiscated decision-making processes that belonged solely to this nation’s citizens; and consolidated and centralised executive powers never granted to them by the people of Australia.

Australia’s founders and early lawmakers made provision for just such fiascos through Section 61 of the Constitution and the Royal Commissions Act 1902.

The Covid inquiry announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which leaves State and Territory governments free from accountability, is at best a poor substitute for a Royal Commission. At worst, it will be used to vindicate the bureaucracy for “doing its best”, apportion blame to people no longer in office, and affirm Australia’s bungled pandemic response as substantially correct and the “new normal” for future scenarios.

Only a Royal Commission that probes the response of Federal, State and Territory governments — with its coercive powers to summon witnesses, require them to answer questions under oath, and produce documents and other evidence — will provide the answers and accountability that the people of Australia need and deserve.

A Royal Commission alone can ensure that leaders are held accountable for their missteps, and that Australia’s various governments, departments and agencies never repeat the same failures and injustices again.

Consider 10 reasons Australia desperately needs a Royal Commission into the Covid debacle.

1. The Truth About Covid’s Origins Was Hidden

Australians were originally told that the Covid-19 virus (otherwise known as SARS-CoV-2) arose naturally, having jumped from bats to humans in the wet markets of Wuhan.

But as the virus spread around the world, so did whispers of a strange coincidence: the city at the epicentre of the pandemic was also home to China’s leading coronavirus lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. During a press conference in April 2020, US President Donald Trump said that, after viewing the evidence, he was confident the virus originated in that lab.

Immediately, the legacy media declared Trump guilty of spreading conspiracy theories, and declared that anything other than a natural origins explanation was ‘misinformation’, ‘bunk’ and ‘fringe’. In turn, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms began censoring any users who promoted the lab leak theory.

The taxpayer-funded ABC was particularly vicious, publishing multiple articles smearing the lab leak theory as a Trump-inspired hoax. In May 2020, Media Watch spent almost two full programs trying to discredit Sharri Markson, one of the few Australian reporters probing the lab leak theory, all on the taxpayer’s dime.

To justify their smears and censorship, the media relied on an article published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 titled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’, which declared that the pathogen was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”.

However, a US congressional investigation later found that the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper was authored under highly dubious pretences. Contradicting their published claims, the authors had secretly and repeatedly admitted their suspicions that the virus did indeed come from the Wuhan lab.

But the ‘Proximal Origin’ scandal goes even deeper. The same investigation found the paper had been secretly commissioned by Dr Anthony Fauci, then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Fauci’s covert involvement in the paper represented a significant conflict of interest, since his agency, the NAIAD, was also funnelling millions of American taxpayer dollars to fund risky coronavirus bat research at the same lab in Wuhan plagued by the lab leak rumours.

In private, Fauci had been alerted by Professor Kristian Anderson that some of the features of the virus look “possibly engineered”, and “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. Immediately, Fauci and then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins organised a conference call with a dozen virologists, including Andersen. On that call, Fauci and Collins commissioned a team led by Anderson to author a paper “trying to disprove any type of lab theory”. The team agreed, and within days, they made a 180-degree reversal on their prior assessment of the virus, which they published in ‘Proximal Origin’.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited the very paper he had secretly commissioned as “evidence” the lab leak theory was implausible — in effect, quoting himself — all the while pretending he had nothing to do with the article.

Several months later, Professor Anderson’s lab in California was awarded a US$8.9 million research grant by Fauci’s agency, the NIAID. Anderson has since claimed he was hasty in assuming the virus was engineered, and that the findings in ‘Proximal Origin’ were the result of “more extensive analyses”. In truth, Anderson wrote that paper with his colleagues in a matter of days — immediately after the conference call with Fauci, and just prior to receiving millions in grant money from Fauci’s agency.

Another publication media outlets relied on to discredit the lab leak theory was an open letter published in The Lancet in March 2020, signed by 27 scientists, who claimed to “overwhelmingly conclude” the pandemic had a natural origin. The signatories, three of them Australians scientists, likewise condemned the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” that created “fear, rumours, and prejudice” and jeopardised “the fight against this virus”.

Dishonestly, those 27 scientists failed to mention that the man who pushed for the letter’s publication was Peter Daszak, a close associate of Fauci’s, whose organisation had undertaken the gain-of-function research in Wuhan funded by Fauci’s agency. The Lancet was eventually forced to add an addendum to the letter declaring this previously hidden conflict of interest.

Peter Daszak was also part of the 10-member delegation sent to Wuhan by the World Health Organization to probe the origins of the virus. The US did not originally recommend Daszak as one of its three delegates, yet Daszak ended up being sent, despite his blatant conflicts of interest. Daszak’s team ultimately concluded that the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely”, though it only dedicated three pages of its 400-page report to the hypothesis and only spent three hours at the Wuhan lab.

Besides all the dishonesty and corruption, there is compelling scientific evidence that SARS-CoV-2 itself has features that are unlikely to arise naturally and that are consistent with human manipulation.

According to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, all U.S. intelligence agencies “continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection”. Today, the lab leak hypothesis is favoured by both the FBI and the US Department of Energy as the best explanation for Covid-19’s origins.

After years of dishonesty and gaslighting from scientists and public officials worldwide, Australians deserve to know if the virus was manmade — and therefore if all the chaos that followed was avoidable from the outset.

2. Australians Speaking the Truth Were Censored

During the Covid era, departments and agencies of the Australian Government weaponised the medical regulatory system to achieve certain desired political outcomes, and waged a scurrilous campaign of censorship against Australian citizens.

The Department of Home Affairs, whose purview includes border security and counter-terrorism but not public health, wilfully violated the free speech of thousands of Australians. An FOI request by Senator Alex Antic revealed that the DHA referred more than 4,200 Covid-related social media posts to Big Tech platforms for removal. While some of these posts contained irrational or unverified statements, also blacklisted were many legitimate claims made by Australian citizens.

Among them were posts correctly stating that Covid-19 injections do not stop infection or transmission of the virus, that masks and lockdowns were ineffective, and that the virus likely leaked from the lab in Wuhan. Content posted by Australian medical professionals was also censored, along with calls for peaceful protest against government abuses, and most cynically of all, testimonies of Australians injured by Covid-19 injections. Even memes that poked fun at politicians were suppressed.

Separate to these events, AHPRA and the National Boards imposed gag orders on Australian medical practitioners, suppressing debate on any evidence-based science that went against the state-imposed narrative on Covid-19.

Echoing Soviet Russia or Communist China, even today, Australian doctors still risk investigation for carrying out one of their most basic functions — namely, providing patients with individualised medical care that puts the patient’s welfare above government-imposed obligations. They can even face disciplinary action for posting in private on social media.

Some medical practitioners whose registration was cancelled by AHPRA have since been reinstated. However, in certain cases they have been forced to agree not to criticise official Covid-19 policies in order to maintain their registration. How such a state of affairs could ever have been allowed in once-free Australia is chilling and demands immediate reversal.

The TGA has likewise been exposed, via an FOI request by Dr Melissa McCann, for allegedly censoring the truth about the injection-induced deaths of numerous Australians, including two children. Dr McCann lodged the request after seeing an unexpectedly high number of patients coming through her clinic experiencing adverse events after injection.

The fact that so few journalists want to report on the Department of Home Affairs #AustralianTwitterFiles affair is further proof that the bureaucratic, political and media class often operate as a censorship industrial complex.

Watch as I discuss with Chris Kenny on Sky News. pic.twitter.com/x5yWNSsSfO

— Senator Alex Antic (@SenatorAntic) July 25, 2023

3. Lockdowns Were A Catastrophic Failure

Australia’s pandemic emergency response plans, CDPLAN (2016) and AHMPPI (2019) contain no mention of large-scale lockdowns. Despite this, beginning in March 2020, Australian governments embarked on a course of unscientific, cruel and demoralising lockdowns which they refused to abandon for the better part of two years.

Australia’s lockdowns resulted in astonishing educational losses for schoolchildren, whether seen in their cognitive development, nutrition and physical health, social skills, or emotional wellbeing. Lockdowns caused an epidemic of isolation and loneliness that directly harmed the mental health of hundreds of thousands of Australians, and pushed many into joblessness, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.

Lockdowns are responsible for the destruction of countless small businesses, a spike in obesity rates, a drop in life expectancy, and a level of social divisiveness not seen in Australia for decades. The economic cost of lockdowns was not only devastating and immediate, but persists today in the form of rampant inflation, a persistently high cash rate, and an enduring cost-of-living crisis.

An independent review published in October 2022 found Australia’s response to Covid-19 to be excessive, particularly in regard to school closures, lockdowns and border closures. A separate cost-benefit analysis conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs found that 37 times more life-years were lost than were saved as a result of lockdowns, and that thus far, Australia’s Covid-19 response has cost almost $1 trillion. Another cost-benefit analysis, authored by UNSW economist Gigi Foster, found that the costs of Australia’s lockdowns have been at least 68 times greater than any benefits they delivered.

Thus far, no leader has been held accountable for these disastrous policies.

4. Too Many Indigenous People Suffered

Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu is an elder from the Northern Territory community of Lajamanu and an honorary professor in Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. During an interview with Dr Lance Alan Box in July 2023, Wanta described the coercive tactics used to compel vaccination among his Warlpiri people.

“Many doctors came. They knew that if they could get my father, the senior elder, to get the needle, then everyone else would get the needle too,” he explained. “The place was like it was invaded by an army made up of doctors and police.”

People were compelled to line up for vaccination, reminiscent of a prisoner-of-war scenario, Wanta recounts. He has accused the government of using deception and cruelty in the guise of public health measures.

“The community was frightened by evil ways that were disguised as a health thing.”

According to Wanta, the consequences for his community have been tragic, including deaths and widespread health issues among the vaccinated population.

“Now people from lots of communities are suffering heart disease, miscarriage, stroke, and cancer,” he says. “Some of the men who were close to me are now dead,” he added. “My best mate and my brother passed away after getting the jab.”

“We expect more of them to die later on.”

Gloria Watkins, a Noongar woman from Western Australia, has shared similar experiences with the Daily Declaration.

“My husband had to get the jab or we would have lost our home,” she recounts. It was a situation that caused immense family conflict due to Gloria’s opposition to the coercive mandates.

She observed other family members suffering strokes, heart attacks and paralysis following their injections.

“Before the injections, they were all perfectly fit and healthy; now they are paralysed and have speech problems,” she says. “I pray something is done about this; our governments have a lot to answer for.”

The Daily Declaration has heard from two other witnesses to such abuses.

Stephen Lewin, a Christian pastor from Central Australia, has written to us about the coercion, bribes, and threats used to push Indigenous people in Central Australia to take the Covid-19 injection.

“I witnessed cash and other incentives given, along with threats of not being provided with medicine, not seeing relatives, losing care of children, not being able to purchase food from shops, and loss of work,” he explains.

Surprise pop-up clinics, lockdowns, and restrictions on access to essential resources like fuel were among the many tactics he saw wielded against Indigenous Australians.

Leith Phillips is a former sergeant with the Northern Territory Police Force who has also told us about the coercion, lack of informed medical consent and other abuses faced by Indigenous Australians during the injection rollout.

“We possess video evidence of Aboriginal people in Alice Springs being injected, given paracetamol for pain, advised to ring an ambulance if they felt ill, and being provided with telephone and food vouchers as ‘payment’ to take the injection,” he explains.

Mr Phillips told us of one Aboriginal lady who “was pressured by child services to have her children injected otherwise she might not get them back”.

“It is our testimony that Indigenous Australians were robbed of their right to informed medical consent throughout the Covid-19 injection rollout scheme,” he states.

For all that has been said in recent years about giving Indigenous people a voice, Australia’s political and media class have shown very little curiosity about these sobering, first-hand accounts. It’s time they received the scrutiny they deserve.

5. Colossal Sums of Taxpayer Treasure Were Wasted

The Federal Government has never explained to the Australian people why it signed contracts to purchase almost ten doses of injection per citizen — far more than required under the Government’s or the suppliers’ own logic.

To date, the Federal Government has spent at least $18 billion on Covid injections and other treatments, approximately half of which have been binned.

Of the first 255 million vaccine doses purchased, only 60 million were used, with more than half set to expire and be dumped, to the estimated value of approximately $3 billion.

At a time when record numbers of people are financially struggling, Australians deserve to know why so much of their treasure — approximately $1,200 from the pocket of every tax-paying Australian — was transferred to powerful pharmaceutical corporations, when the majority of those products were never needed and were therefore destined for disposal from the outset.

Politicians locked down the country during #Covid, mandated experimental vaccines and assumed dictatorial power over our health and freedoms.
People died, families and businesses were destroyed, kids’ education was decimated.
Governments racked up eye-watering debts while telling… pic.twitter.com/bYKFFs9I71

— ADH TV (@adhtvaus) October 19, 2023

6. Power Was Far Too Centralised

The formation of the ‘National Cabinet’, which combined the executive branches of Federal, State and Territory governments, was a flagrant abrogation of the rule of law, a mockery of the Westminster system, and a betrayal of Australia’s Constitution. It was an arrangement that gravely undermined the public’s trust.

Never should democratic governments consolidate and centralise their powers in such a fashion, much less conceal their decision-making from the people who elected them. The cabinet’s formation allowed for the many abuses that followed, including the sidelining of emergency laws already in place, the secrecy surrounding their decision-making processes, and the collusion of Federal, State and Territory leaders in imposing reckless and damaging ‘Covid Zero’ policies on their constituents.

Australians deserve an explanation as to how this arrangement was ever legally justified. And with the Covid era over, the National Cabinet’s minutes and communications should be released to the public unredacted.

Australia’s border closures warrant particular scrutiny.

The Australian Government refused to allow its citizens to leave the country for two years, and also refused its citizens passage back into the country for many months on end. (It did, however, make many generous exceptions for the rich, elite and powerful). In both of these actions, the Commonwealth stood in flagrant violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In pandemic emergencies, a travel embargo for a period of several days or even weeks is defensible. But not months, certainly not years, and absolutely not for a virus with a survival rate approaching 100% for the vast majority of people.

Australian citizenship means nothing if citizens are barred from their own country or held prisoner by their government. The Federal Government likewise did nothing to prevent the States and Territories breaching Section 92 of Australia’s Constitution when they imposed months-long internal border closures.

This is your legacy Dan Andrews… pic.twitter.com/23s2BX8q4H

— MilkBarTV (@TheMilkBarTV) September 26, 2023

7. The Risks of Covid-19 Were Vastly Overstated

In March 2020, with precious little data, the World Health Organization (WHO) made the alarming claim that 3.4% of people who contracted Covid-19 had died.

The following month, it became clear the WHO’s estimate was vastly overstated, and that age and comorbidities were significant risk factors for severe disease and death from Covid-19. An analysis of over 60 studies released in January 2021 showed that across 51 locations, the median Covid-19 Infection Fatality Rate was in fact 0.27%.

Age-stratified studies continued to affirm that the vast majority of the world’s population was almost certain to survive Covid-19. In October 2022, an analysis was published that covered 38 countries, revealing an IFR of just 0.095% for people aged 0-69, before injection treatments. In other words, 94% of the global population or nearly 7.3 billion people had a 99.965% chance of surviving Covid-19, even before any health interventions.

Despite all this data, the Australian Government continued to act as though the WHO’s earliest inaccurate estimate still held true, and absolutely refused to take age differentials into account when enacting its policies. Instead of focussing protection on the approximately 12% of Australians at higher risk of severe disease or death from Covid-19, governments insisted on a years-long campaign of lockdowns, border closures and injection mandates that inflicted immeasurable harm on the 88% who were almost certain to survive the virus either way.

Without explanation, Australian governments went to extreme measures to prevent Covid-19 deaths — even to the point of throwing human rights to the wind and squandering untold public resources — while effectively ignoring deaths by all other causes, including deaths caused by their own interventions.

Australians are entitled to know why their leaders engaged in such abject disproportionality, deeming the deaths of certain Australians more important than others.

“The excess deaths in Australia continue to equate to about two jumbo jet crashes each week, and every week, since 2021.”

“The formidable document which @AMPS_RedUnion put together ‘Too Many Dead’ addressing the excess deaths which only started to occur in Australia just after… pic.twitter.com/YZbIwuPEAC

— ADH TV (@adhtvaus) February 20, 2024

8. Injection Mandates Were a Betrayal of Medical Ethics

Informed consent is a bedrock principle of modern medicine and a legal and ethical requirement for administering any vaccine. The Australian Immunisation Handbook explicitly states that vaccines “must be given voluntarily in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation”.

These facts notwithstanding, Australian governments imposed heavy-handed injection mandates on their populations, explicitly using tactics of pressure, coercion and manipulation by depriving Australians of their freedom to work, travel, use public and private amenities, and be with loved ones at important moments such as births, deaths and funerals, unless they submitted to a novel medical treatment.

Moreover, the Australian public was not made aware they were being cajoled into injecting a product that had undergone no long-term testing, nor were they sufficiently informed of the risks involved. When the injection rollout began, no claim could be made with confidence about the product’s long-term safety. As such, a moral and scientific argument for its use could only be made for those at high risk of severe illness or death from Covid-19.

Yet mandates were imposed on young and old alike, including those with no comorbidities and a vanishingly small risk of severe illness or death. Australia’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program put at risk young and healthy lives in an attempt to save old and unhealthy ones. Throughout the program, policymakers and spokespeople did not so much as acknowledge they were putting Australian lives at risk, nor disclose how they had weighed such risks in drafting their policies. Instead, government bureaucrats gave hand-waving appeals to ‘experts’, were dishonestly unequivocal, and never hinted at any risk associated with being injected.

In enacting these mandates, governments assumed total power over the bodies of millions of Australian citizens, violated Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, arguably breached the Nuremberg code, and parted with a century of sound medical ethics.

No Australian government, Federal, State or Territory, should ever be allowed to mandate medical procedures, regardless of the particulars of the situation — even if the product is assumed safe, effective and necessary. Either informed consent exists or it does not. In the Covid era, it did not.

There is little hope for a widespread restoration of medical ethics in Australia without a Royal Commission empowered to probe the astonishing abuses that took place during the Covid era.

9. Too Many Died From Experimental Injections

A “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and rapid vaccine rollouts has been identified in 17 southern hemisphere countries by a team of Canadian researchers, including Australia. The study identified approximately one death for every 2,000 injections, and implicated a broad range of products, including Covaxin, Sinovac, and Johnson & Johnson.

“In 9 of the 17 countries, there is no detectable excess mortality until the vaccines are rolled out,” according to the researchers, who also found “a new regime of higher mortality” following the start of vaccine rollouts in all of the other eight countries. “The Covid-19 vaccines did not save lives and appear to be lethal toxic agents,” they conclude.

Their findings were consistent with readily-available Australian data. Most Queensland Covid-19 deaths were of people who were “fully vaccinated” when the state borders first opened in December 2021. Excess deaths were detected in Australian states in 2021 when the injection rollout was in full swing but when many states still had no (or very few) Covid-19 cases. Western Australians suffered extraordinarily high rates of adverse events following Covid-19 injections — with a staggering 57% of them presenting at a hospital — at a time when most of the population was injected but no Covid-19 cases were recorded.

Analyst Dr Wilson Sy conducted a Bradford Hill analysis of Australia’s excess mortality data, concluding, “Strength of correlation, consistency, specificity, temporality, and dose-response relationship are foremost Bradford Hill criteria which are satisfied by the data to suggest the iatrogenesis of the Australian pandemic, where excess deaths were largely caused by Covid-19 injections.”

As a small consolation, the Australian Government does offer a free funeral gift card with every Covid-19 injection via its Covid-19 Vaccine Claims Scheme. Australians who have been maimed or rendered jobless by the injections can also apply for compensation. However, as of May 2023, only 164 out of 3,160 claims had been approved, or less than 5%. Over 900 claims had been deemed not payable, while 2,030 other claims remain in progress.

There have been over 139,000 adverse event reports for Covid vaccines in Australia. More than all other adverse event reports for all the other vaccines combined. https://t.co/LTZbsTgT8Q is unpacking the overwhelming Covid vaccine adverse reports data:

“A group of volunteer… pic.twitter.com/d3xQJ5sv7I

— ADH TV (@adhtvaus) February 8, 2024

10. Suppressing Alternative Treatments Was Unjustified

Inexpensive, safe and effective alternative treatments, most notably Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, when used early and in their respective triple therapies, have long been known to reduce Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths. Unfortunately, these drugs were dismissed, derided and ultimately banned by Australian Federal authorities during the Covid era.

Ivermectin, which has been distributed to the tune of 3.7 billion doses globally since 1987, and whose discoverers won a Nobel Prize for their work on the drug, was subjected to an off-label ban by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in September 2021, which prevented doctors from prescribing it to treat Covid-19.

Hydroxychloroquine, which also has a robust safety profile, came under a similar ban in March 2020. Five million doses of Hydroxychloroquine that were imported by Clive Palmer to donate to the public for the treatment of Covid-19 were seized by Australian authorities and destroyed.

The banning of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine violated the rights of Australians to access medical care and infringed the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. Given their safety profile, these therapies should never have been banned, even if their efficacy was contentious. Based on the available data, however, it appears certain the bans on these therapies contributed to the deaths of many Australians who would otherwise have survived if they had access to them.

Both obesity and Vitamin D deficiency have long been known as significant risk factors for poor Covid-19 outcomes. Australian governments barely acknowledged these facts, and failed to campaign for exercise, weight loss, time outdoors in sunshine and the use of Vitamin D supplements — all of which would reduced Covid-19’s impact on Australians. In fact, keeping Australians locked up indoors for months on end contributed to the problem.

These and countless other bungled policy decisions cry out for scrutiny.

It is difficult to imagine a debacle in Australia’s history more deserving of a Royal Commission.

Australians need answers. Let’s get this done.

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Image courtesy of Freepik.