Five years on from the declaration of a global pandemic, I’m weary of Covid inquiries. They tend to go either of two ways. They either run through bureaucratic checkboxes and give everyone a medal for having locked down the fastest and vaccinated the most. Or, they spend months reviewing submissions and focus group transcripts to come to very obvious conclusions, like “closing schools for prolonged periods is damaging for kids” or “people don’t trust public health authorities if you attempt to force everyone to take an over-hyped vaccine“.
A new report from the Australian Human Rights Commission examining the effects of the state and federal Covid response fits in the latter category, offering predictable insights like “human rights impacts were not always considered or protected”, and that many Australians felt they were “collateral damage” to Government policies.
However, being the only Australian review to have taken extensive and nuanced consideration of human rights, it is worth a look for what it reveals about how the flamekeepers of human rights in this country think about emergency management, conflicting rights and trade-offs.
Collateral Damage
The report, titled Collateral Damage, centres on the personal stories of more than 5,000 Australians following a national survey, community consultations and stories shared through an online portal.
It is the first national review to spotlight the Covid experience of everyday Australians to such an extent, after the Commission received thousands of enquiries and complaints relating to the pandemic.
Overall, it contains some useful insights. Where Government reviews have tended to assume that the right of the community to be protected from a virus automatically trumps the right, say, to bodily autonomy, the Commission makes no assumptions, discussing the human rights trade-offs of key policy decisions in detail, and in the context of Australia’s commitment to international covenants and treaties.
That said, the Commission found a high level of community support for privileging community well-being over individual rights. In the survey, 74% of participants agreed that the greater good of the community should always be considered before individual rights, and only 10% disagreed. When asked specifically whether the Covid vaccine should be mandatory for all except those with medical exemptions, a slimmer majority of 57% of participants agreed, and a sizeable proportion (29%) disagreed.
The report criticises the “disproportionate” nature of Australia’s Covid response, especially the inappropriateness of “blanket and inflexible policies that failed to consider local realities”, and the lack of compassion in the way that extreme measures, like travel bans, vaccine mandates and lockdowns, were implemented.
The Commission found that two in five Australians felt they had been disadvantaged by the Covid situation, while one in five said they had benefited from it (another two in five were neutral). Victorians, who were subject to the world’s longest lockdowns and some of the most extreme pandemic measures ever seen, were the least likely to think the pandemic had been handled well.
Unsurprisingly, people in vulnerable and low socioeconomic circumstances, including First Nations people, suffered the most, while people who could easily work from home and suffered no financial losses were more likely to feel they had benefited.
“In our research, we heard devastating stories of severe economic hardship, families unable to say goodbye to loved ones, women trapped in violent households, and communities left isolated due to blanket policies that failed to consider local realities,” said Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay, who co-authored the report.
“These experiences should never be ignored or repeated.”
These experiences, like a pregnant woman who didn’t want to get the vaccine, but relented because she couldn’t afford to lose her job. At 17 weeks pregnant, she experienced a stillbirth and had to deliver her baby alone in the hospital while her husband was refused entry due to a positive Covid test.
These experiences, like a woman who was “isolated and stuck in a DV [domestic violence] relationship” during lockdowns.
These experiences, like the man who watched his father’s funeral “in a suit and tie in my kitchen over a streamed video link” due to movement restrictions.
These experiences, like the daughters who placed their mother into aged care right before lockdowns and had to watch her through a glass window as she descended into a state of despair from the isolation, pleading to be let out.
These experiences, like a man stranded in Japan for two years with his Australian-citizen daughter, separated from family and disrupting education plans because of federal and state restrictions on movement.
These experiences, like refugees on temporary visas whose places of work were closed during lockdowns, but who could not access financial support due to lack of citizenship, leaving them unable to support themselves and their families, but also unable to return home.
Notably absent from these experiences are the voices of the Covid vaccine-injured, which did not feature anywhere in the report, despite submissions having been made.
Vaccine injuries and mandates: a blind spot
In a short section on vaccine side-effects, the Commission says it received “many story submissions in which people spoke of injury, harm and anger arising because their fears of vaccine side-effects were dismissed and that their claims of vaccine injury were ignored or undermined”.
Nevertheless, it is “important to acknowledge that the TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] continue to advise that vaccination against COVID-19 is the most effective way to reduce deaths and severe illness from infection, and that the protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks”.
That may be the case for the majority (although the effectiveness of these shots is seriously questionable), but it’s not for the people who are injured, which is the entire point of these people’s stories.
The report references almost 139,654 adverse events following immunisation (AEFIs) reported to the TGA’s safety database as at October 29th 2023, contrasting this figure against 68,864,839 doses having been administered, as though the comparative rarity of reported AEFIs somehow diminishes the impact or significance of the injuries experienced.
There is no mention of the underreporting factor of surveillance systems like that used by the TGA, which suggests that the AEFIs experienced in the population may be 10-100 times greater than those recorded. There is no mention of the fact that approximately 22,000 of the reported AEFIs were classified by the TGA as ‘serious’, and there is no mention of the 1,007 reported deaths at that point in time.
While the TGA likes to emphasise that AEFIs reported to its database, including deaths, may not be causally linked to the vaccines, the reverse is also true. Injuries and deaths may be causally linked to the vaccines, and there is no evidence to prove that this is not the case, as in almost all cases the TGA does not attempt to determine the causality of reported AEFIs or deaths associated with Covid vaccination, rather assigning a causality status of “possible”.
The Commission closes this section with a statement on the importance of adequate compensation for AEFIs, as though mandating a drug that causes life-altering injuries and death is acceptable as long as some money is handed out.
What the Commission is describing here is a death and injury lottery. You cannot work, travel, visit your loved ones, or access public venues and services unless you participate in the lottery. Your chances of injury or death are a point of contention, but rest assured that some of you, the unlucky ones, will pull a short straw.
If we were to discuss vaccine mandates in these terms, it would be a very different conversation.
Another issue raised by participants on the subject of vaccine mandates was the human right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without free consent (Article 7 of the ICCPR, to which Australia is a party). This is a non-derogable right, meaning that it cannot be infringed upon, not even in an emergency.
However, the Commission assures that the Covid vaccine rollout was not experimental, and therefore this concern is invalid.
“While COVID-19 vaccines were developed rapidly and were initially granted provisional approval, they were not a form of medical or scientific experimentation. The vaccines used in Australia were all approved by the TGA using the recognised assessment and approval processes,” states the report.
Ironically, this section is followed by another titled “lack of information”, in which participants describe not being able to find information relating to the effects of vaccination on their pregnancies or pre-existing conditions. This was because the vaccines had not been tested in these populations yet.
The Commission appears to have forgotten that the vaccines were rolled out during Phase 3 of the trials, i.e., they were experimental by definition, at least until the trials ended in December 2022-June 2023, and arguably well past these dates due to the lack of medium to long-term safety data.
As would be expected of any drug being rolled out before the completion of trials (and fast-tracked at that), some side–effects were not discovered until the shots had already been administered en masse, such as the potentially deadly risk of TTS with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Other side-effects and post-vaccine conditions are still only being discovered now.
Presumably, that’s why Australia’s Health Minister at the time, Greg Hunt, said on national television that the world was engaged in “the largest global vaccination trial ever, and we will have enormous amounts of data.”
The problem is that authorities and pharma companies want to have it both ways – and the Commission allows it. They want to say that the vaccines are safe but give pharma companies a liability shield in case they’re not. They want to say ‘we built the plane while flying it’ but also claim that the plane was already built and had passed all safety checks before leaving the tarmac.
It cannot be both ways, and we can’t have a proper discussion about human rights trade-offs without admitting that.
Considering the lack of information available about the vaccines, their experimental nature and blanket mandates requiring vaccination for participation in the economy and public life, informed consent was simply not possible for most Australians during the Covid vaccine rollout.
Informed consent requires that the recipient of a vaccine has the legal capacity to consent, is acting voluntarily in the absence of coercion, and has been given enough information about the risks and benefits to make a choice.
The report goes some way in addressing the lack of opportunity for informed consent, featuring the voices of people who felt “forced”, “bullied” and “coerced” into getting vaccinated, and acknowledging that “some people felt that they were not actually given a meaningful choice”.
This was such a problem that the Government had to publish directions to healthcare providers on how to handle people fronting up to their vaccination appointments saying that they didn’t consent, but they were being forced to get it to keep their job.
The report also discusses the short timeframes imposed on people to get vaccinated before consequences for refusal kicked in, and privacy concerns relating to the implementation of vaccine passports.
While the Commission emphasises that “it is preferable to encourage compliance rather than punish non-compliance” and that “vaccine hesitancy concerns should not be undermined or dismissed”, the door is left open for vaccine mandates to be implemented under a human rights framework in the future.
“Mandatory vaccinations should ideally be considered only after other, less invasive, strategies have been implemented,” states the report.
“Broad-based mandates run the risk of failing to consider individual circumstances and hence opens up the possibility of discrimination. More should be done to prevent feelings of coercion, as this erodes government trust and has ramifications for future emergency response.”
This reads a little la-la-land to me. People tend to experience feelings of coercion when they are being coerced. Mandates are coercive, and necessarily are incompatible with informed consent.
The Commission stopped short of acknowledging this hard truth, but any discussion of future mandates needs to start here to avoid spiraling off into doublespeak nonsense about voluntary mandatory vaccinations – people aren’t stupid, and are disinclined to trust authorities speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
Human rights as priority in emergency planning
The Commission recommends that all levels of government adopt an Emergency Response Framework, anchored by seven key principles:
- Human rights as a priority, embedded in decision-making from the outset.
- Meaningful consultation with all communities, especially vulnerable groups, as a one-size-fits-all approach is ineffective.
- Proportionate responses that are constantly reviewed and adapted.
- Balancing risk with compassion, ensuring timely and accessible exemptions.
- Tailored communication, addressing diverse needs and combating misinformation.
- Empowering and supporting local communities to help create more effective and considered plans.
- Planning beyond the crisis to avoid abrupt withdrawal of critical supports.
If adopted, this framework would be an improvement on what we lived through over the past five years.
“This isn’t about who is to blame, but how we can do better. We cannot wait for the next crisis to learn these lessons,” Commissioner Finlay said.
“We must rebuild trust, strike a balance between individual freedoms and public health, and place human rights at the heart of emergency planning.”
However, the vaccine mandate blind spot remains, and trust will not be rebuilt without accountability and restoration of free and informed consent.
Until authorities and mandate-pushers face the music and reckon with the human impact of their policies, we are unlikely to see meaningful human rights considerations in the development of emergency policies – especially vaccination policies – in the future.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnett’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Amused to see that Paul Staines is apparently in favour of freedom of speech, given the comments system used on Order-Order that’s so pathological that it censors such vile unacceptable hate language as “dirty”, “damn”, and the name “Paul Staines”.
I was blocked there long ago.
Off topic but does anyone have the graphic or stats about how only 833 under 50s have “died solely of covid”? It was posted BTL recently but I can’t find it.
Hope this is helpful – https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/only-6183-people-died-solely-of-covid?r=2mnu5&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Desperately needed in Sturgeon’s Dark Fiefdom!
No doubt Blair is smugly content with the the results of his “devolution” designed by Globalists to wreck the UK – it seems to have worked a treat !
Looking forward to the event tonight!
Best wishes to all those involved. Anything / body seeking to protect freedom of speech deserves and needs support.
“Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.”
Yay! Free Speech!
Breaking one of my rules but…
Hey EF,
Fuck Off.
Careful, I can smell that ban coming for you!
Thanks, but he is an utter waste of space.
Your free speech is not violated by the site having rules
Yes. This comment led me to write the following response to another of your posts.
Reply to Hugh
No, she was a censor who believed everyone except her had no brain at all.
Your ‘both ways’ doesn’t exist, she was a totalitarian.
Reply to Moist Von Lipwig
From the person who said that this site having rules doesn’t curtail freedom of speech?
I hadn’t heard that she was in favour of banning opinions. Merely upholding parts of the Obscene Publications act that she considered important. Why shouldn’t people object to swearing on tv before the watershed (for example)?
I still say campaigning for standards of basic decency is not necessarily the same as being anti-free speech. She was campaigning about analogue t.v. and radio broadcasts which are easily accessible to the general population, rather than something, for example, available via mail order. For me, that makes all the difference. Absolutely there should be different standards for a private members club than for things done in public, i.e. a tv broadcast which may be watched by half the country.
She was campaigning for censorship.
She gave so much publicity to what she campaigned against, Alice Cooper sent her flowers for the career boost he received from her.
https://edernet.org/2022/03/15/mary-whitehouses-pursuit-to-stop-alice-coopers-song-schools-out-from-airing-on-british-media/
“During the twentieth century, a moral activist and former teacher named Mary Whitehouse waged a battle against the BBC. According to Whitehouse and her group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, the network continued to show content that damaged the public.
She expressed her displeasure with Doctor Who for teaching youngsters how to make bombs. She voiced her displeasure with comedy characters that used the phrase “bloody.” She expressed her dissatisfaction with BBC coverage of the liberation of concentration camps (“It was destined to shock and offend,” she stated, describing the coverage as “extremely off-putting”).
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/26/ban-this-filth-ben-thompson-review
“Should the BBC’s function be to improve public morals? Or should freedom of expression, even if that involves broadcasting a once-great rock’n’roll guitarist’s wretched foray into the innuendo-laden novelty single genre, always be paramount? And was the “My Ding-a-ling” imbroglio really the right forum for these issues, as old as Plato and still vexed, to be debated?
The then-director general, Charles Curran, thought not. “‘My Ding-a-ling’,” Curran had written to Whitehouse on 21 November 1972, “begins with such a clear account of the contraption in question including bells, that although the possibility of a double entendre was recognised, we decided that it could be broadcast … We did not think it would disturb or emotionally agitate its listeners and we believe that the innuendo is, at worst, on the level of seaside postcards or music hall humour.” That phrase, “contraption in question including bells”, is surely worth the licence fee alone.”
“The exchange was typical of the collection of letters that Ben Thompson has so astutely assembled and comments on so drolly in this book. Here, the bottomless capacity for affront of morally upright, often evangelically Christian, middle England clashes repeatedly with the patrician disdain of those men (and they were overwhelmingly men) who ran the culture industries, be they telly, theatre, cinema, magazines or pornography. Thompson ingeniously suggests that Whitehouse shared much with her punk contemporaries – both were socially excluded, both rebelled against establishment values they detested. Mary as a punk rocker? Not quite. But both she and Johnny Rotten knew how to needle grandees and relished the experience.
But here’s the twist. At the end of his Ding-a-ling letter to Whitehouse, Curran wonders “whether the record would have remained in a high position in the charts for such a long time without the publicity attendant upon the publication of your comments.” Intriguing point. Perhaps Whitehouse, far from cleaning up society, was instrumental in bringing about the nightmarish scenario she prophesied.
Certainly her complaints could have unintended consequences. On 21 August 1972, Whitehouse wrote to the BBC’s head of light entertainment, Bill Cotton, complaining about Top of the Pops giving “gratuitous publicity” to Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out”. “Because of this millions of young people are now imbibing a philosophy of violence and anarchy … It is our view that if there is increasing violence in the schools during the coming term, the BBC will not be able to evade their share of the blame.” Cooper sent Whitehouse flowers in gratitude for the publicity her campaigning brought him.”
“Mary Whitehouse didn’t only fight against the BBC. During the 1980s, unsurprisingly, she was affronted by and complained about Channel 4’s output. “I am glad to see the home secretary’s unexceptional reply to your unnecessary letter,” wrote Jeremy Isaacs, C4’s chief executive, in 1984, responding to some dyspeptic jeremiad. She also took on the pornography industry: “Thank you for your letter concerning our bookstall at Crewe Station,” wrote John M Menzies on 28 May 1984, after Whitehouse complained about finding a pile of Knave magazines at a level where “almost any child could see and pick it up”. “Our policy … is not to sell these magazines to children.”
She tried to stiffen the established church in what she thought should be its homophobic resolve: “Will you state publicly and quite specifically,” she wrote to the Bishop of Southwark on 22 June 1979, “whether you are endorsing the practices of mutual masturbation common among some homosexuals, and whether you expect the church to do the same and whether you see such practices as the will of God.” “Yes, I jolly well am and jolly well do,” replied the bishop. I’m kidding. If only he had.
She demanded politicians revise obscenity laws. That prompted a reply from David Mellor, home office minister in 1983, arguing that her proposal that depictions of explicit acts of human urination or excretion be banned would outlaw “a picture of a baby urinating in a nappy advertisement; or a photograph of the mannequin in Brussels which serves as a fountain”. Similarly, Mellor argued, the NVALA’s proposal to ban depictions of mutilation, flagellation or torture would ban King Lear, certain religious paintings, and the films of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Nicholas Nickleby.
She campaigned against blasphemy and homosexuality, especially when, as in James Kirkup‘s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name”, they came together. Whitehouse privately prosecuted Gay News’s editor, Denis Lemon, in 1977 for publishing Kirkup’s necrophilic account of sexual assault on Christ’s crucified body. After Lemon’s conviction for blasphemous libel, she received a letter from the clerk of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church Synod, informing her of its unanimous motion thanking Whitehouse “for your unflinching stand against Sodomites in a recent court case”.
For Whitehouse, taking offence and imputing mucky motives to those who didn’t share her worldview weren’t so much tactics as irrepressible ways of being. In 1990, she was sued for libel by Dennis Potter’s mother. During an interview with Dr Anthony Clare on his Radio 4 series In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, Whitehouse had claimed that Margaret Potter had “committed adultery with a strange man and that the shock of witnessing this had caused her son to be afflicted” with the skin disease psoriasis. Whitehouse thereby confused a storyline from Potter’s The Singing Detective with the playwright’s life. No doubt her misdiagnosis and jejune psychosexual analysis was prompted by her loathing for Potter’s TV drama, which she believed had “made voyeurs of us all”. Similarly, perhaps, TV made Whitehouse a voyeur, though sometimes not a discerning one.”
Yes. I heard about the “Alice” Cooper business (vile toerag, even if he was on Top Gear), and some of the other stuff. She’s entitled to her opinions though at the end of the day. And if people don’t defend their culture, it will not survive – a point not lost on the Russians.
Besides, are some of the liberal woke fascists today very different.? And as for you satanists…
Remember that in the 1960’s the BBC was engaged in a biased campaign of subterfuge which helped result in changes which have since led to the deaths of millions of children. The BBC, who push minority views when it suits them, and other times refuse to give voice to minority views they consider beyond the pale, all the while posing as an impartial public service broadcaster. Of course there was going to be pushback.
Alice Cooper is a Christian.
This one elementary fact blows your flatulent balderdash completely out of the water.
Mary Whitehouse is the kindred spirit of today’s woke Maoists.
As for Satanists, I’m not one so your accusation is entirely the work of your imagination.
Mary Whitehouse didn’t defend ‘her culture’, she demanded witless, mindless, brainless conformity, something Russia has had centuries of, with the result being centuries of absolute monarchy, three quarter of a century of Communism, a religion that worships the omnipotent state, followed by the socialist dictatorship of a former Communist secret police officer who hasn’t essentially changed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed.
Russian culture has long worshipped death, the evidence speaks for itself.
Your anti-culture is the hatred of man’s mind.
Alice Cooper is in no way vile, he’s essentially an actor, comparable to Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, his shows are theatre, fantasy.
By contrast, Mary Whitehouse, in her quest to obliterate the individual human mind, was the villain from ‘Inherit the Wind’ in drag.
Her spiritual father was William Jennings Bryan and her effect was to give publicity to what she most hated, thereby ensuring it became far more popular than it would have been without her truly cretinous intervention, such was her mindlessness that she couldn’t comprehend that people didn’t take to have Nanny tell them she knows best.
We’ve just had two years of Mary Whitehouse in full control in Scotland.