Senate Excess Deaths Inquiry - what can YOU submit?

You may have valuable information through your own experience. The deadline is now May 17th

The terms of reference for the Senate Inquiry on Excess Mortality have been released and Senator Babet has today (9th April) succeeded in getting the deadline for submissions extended to May 17th, so we now have time to do a good job.

This is a call-out to you, whoever you are. The total excess deaths figures for the nation are made up of thousands of individual unexpected deaths.

Because that is what an excess death is: a death that happened at least a year earlier than expected, and possibly many years earlier.

I don’t think the Inquiry Committee are expecting people to send in their personal stories about the unexpected and untimely deaths of people they knew and loved, but on the other hand, why not?

Such sad stories might play an important role in uncovering the causes of the 29,601 excess deaths that the ABS says there have been from 1st January 2021 to August 30th 2023. And I think they could be submitted under the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference point b) factors contributing to excess mortality in 2021, 2022 and 2023 (see image below).

Which is why I am urging you to think about your own pandemic experience from the point of view of deaths that were an unpleasant surprise.

Are you personally aware of an unexpected death?

So, have you, through your friends, family or work, known people who have died in the period 2021 to 2023, whose death was premature?

By that I mean, knowing that person in 2019, before covid, would you ever have thought that they would be dead now?

Is it perhaps a close loved one? If so, I am so sorry to bring back your pain. Maybe though, you want the Inquiry Committee to know why you think they died earlier than they should have?

Or perhaps it was a colleague at work, a friend at church, or in a club you belong to?

You could write up what happened to the person you know, say how they were before covid, and briefly describe what happened to them. You could give your thoughts on what factors you think contributed to their untimely death.

Have you noticed more deaths through your work?

Certain professions must have seen an increase in work load, because of the increased deaths. These include, but are not limited to:

• Celebrants and religious leaders

• Funeral directors and embalmers

• Ambulance officers and paramedics

• Doctors, nurses and alternative healthcare professionals

• People working in life insurance

• Grief counsellors, psychologists, people manning telephone helplines

If you work in such a profession, the comparison of your work experience before and after 2021 could be valuable. When did you start noticing more deaths? What kind of deaths were they? Have you noticed a change in the age mix or in causes of death?

And if you are a doctor - perhaps a GP, cardiologist, neurologist or oncologist - has your caseload changed in number and mix since 2021? How has it changed? How long are patients waiting to see you now compared with 2015-2019? Your insights could have enormous value.

Surprising terms of reference

The terms of reference for the Inquiry surpised me, because they ask for a comparison between death rates in the years 2021-2023 with those in the years 2015-2020.

I would have looked at deaths over the whole pandemic (2020-2023) and compared with the five prepandemic years 2015-2019. So for me, 2020 is in the wrong place.

But perhaps this is a blessing. Because one hypothesis that must be tested is that the novel genetic covid vaccines have contributed to excess deaths. This Inquiry is set up in a way conducive to that being examined, because, of course, the vaccines were introduced in 2021.

Deaths linked to covid vaccinations

If you think the person you know died because of a covid vaccination, then why not say so, giving the reasons you think this? In your submission, it would be good to say (if you know) whether their death was reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)’s Database of Adverse Event Notifications (DAEN). And if it wasn’t reported, and you know why it was not, then that would be good to say that too.

This is important, because we constantly hear that there have been only 14 deaths that the TGA have attributed to the genetic vaccines, despite 1,020 deaths having been reported to the regulator as suspected of being related to the vaccines. The figure of 1,020 reported death likely represents 10,200 to 20,400 suspected vaccine-related deaths in the community, as according to the TGA itself, in a 2014 publication, 90-95% of adverse events from medicines are not reported.

Furthermore, under-reporting of deaths related to the covid vaccines is likely to have been much greater than for other medicines and vaccines because health professionals received this position statement from the Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Authority (AHPRA) on March 9th 2021. Here is the key paragraph:

Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.

In view of this statement, many health professionals may have been reluctant to to put their heads above the parapet by reporting a patient’s adverse event.

An anecdote - skip if you don’t like them!

Just as an example, I was in the UK in February 2022 keeping my dad company. He had a pair of cleaners who came to clean his house every fortnight. One of them couldn’t come one week as she went to a funeral. When I next saw her, I asked how long after the death the funeral had been. “More than four weeks,” was the reply.

I told them that there were a lot more deaths happening than usual and that this was the second recent funeral that I had heard of being extremely delayed. I also told them that I was wondering whether the covid vaccines might be playing a part in the extra deaths.

To my amazement these two women, both just ordinary busy mums with young children and little education, each then enthusiastically agreed. The woman who owned the business said her previously healthy father had had a severe stroke two weeks after an Astra Zeneca vaccination. He had slowly recovered over months, thankfully, but it was enough to make her stop being a cleaner for the National Health Service, where she feared she would be compelled to get vaccinated, and instead to start her own business.

The other woman completely shocked me, telling me matter-of-factly that her mother, in her 50s and, again, previously in good health, had died 3 weeks after a Pfizer vaccination. She had been hospitalised with, from what I could gather, was a blood clot in her leg, which gradually “moved up her body”.

Importantly neither of these women, or the doctors treating their close relatives, reported these serious adverse events - including a death of a person in their 50s - to the UK’s yellow card system.

Now, correlation does not prove causation, but what is rarely added is that correlation is essential for causation. It’s a necessary but ‘not sufficient’ condition. We don’t know the vaccines caused the injuries and deaths in these two women’s families, but it is a sensible suspicion - which we will call a hypothesis - given the close temporal proximity to the vaccinations. If the vaccines did indeed cause the issues, and vaccine injury is as rare as we have been led to believe, the odds of two victims in my dad’s kitchen on that day would be miniscule.

I will probably be accused of spreading anecdotal information and inculcating fear and suspicion about the vaccines. And one must of course be careful about anecdotes. But as Professor Colleen Aldous said at the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society ‘Covid Revisited’ event on 2nd April, when similar anecdotes are being collected from many places, then they consitute evidence.

So my point is this: is my UK anecdote an isolated one, which should be brushed off, or is Australia full of similar stories? Your submission may help decide on the matter.

Deaths from covid

Did you lose someone to covid in 2021-2023? Before you dismiss that as inevitable, ask yourself whether the person was unvaccinated or vaccinated. If the person you know was vaccinated, why did they die, when vaccination was billed as protecting us from severe disease and death?

It is even theoretically possible that vaccination made death from covid more likely. Indeed the TGA’s public assessment reports produced for the genetic vaccines early in the vaccine rollout all mentioned the “important potential risk” of VAED (vaccine associated enhanced disease) and required the manufacturers to carry out further studies on this topic. In other words, at the time of the rollout, the TGA recognised there was a “potential risk” that vaccination could make covid worse.

We have not been given the breakdown of covid deaths by vaccination history, age and comorbidities, so we do not know what the effect of vaccination has actually been on covid mortality in Australia. Have they helped, done nothing or made covid worse? Your submission will add to the evidence.

It’s also possible that some hospital treatments for severe covid, were not appropriate or effective, and may have done more harm than good. This a just a hypothesis, but one that needs to be considered.

Please consider making a submission telling what happened in the case of the covid death you know about.

What about deaths from lockdowns and fear?

This Inquiry does not ask about excess deaths in 2020, presumably because the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ new model of Excess Mortality during the pandemic shows fewer deaths than usual in that year. But that doesn’t mean that some people didn’t die prematurely in 2020 because of the effects of lockdown.

One imagines there may have been premature deaths for which lockdown was a factor: suicides from failures of small businesses, loneliness and mental health issues, and deaths from missed diagnosis.

A doctor told me only yesterday of the death of a child for whom lockdown was a probably a contributory factor. The child’s fever was diagnosed by telehealth, and their admission to hospital was delayed, ending in death from a brain abscess.

It’s a shame that people who unexpectedly lost loved ones in 2020 are not being asked to submit to the Inquiry. If you fall into this category, perhaps you could submit under Terms of Reference point d) Any other related matter?

Finally could the climate of fear that we all lived in during the early days of the pandemic have contributed to excess deaths?

If you believe lockdowns or fear-driven mental health issues caused the untimely death of someone you know - then why not write in with their story?

Other factors leading to excess deaths

This Inquiry needs to be objective, scientific and open-minded when it comes to examining explanations for the extra deaths. If you have some other completely different hypothesis for the cause of excess deaths and some information to support it, then why not send it in so that it can be considered?

How to make a submission

Please carefully follow the instructions given on the Inquiry website here.

If you are writing the story of a particular death, perhaps you could introduce your submission by saying you believe it to be one of the excess deaths.

Including the underlying cause of death and contributing factors from the death certificate, will add important information. The underlying cause of death is the most important thing.

While the Inquiry Committee will need to know your name, my understanding is that you can opt to have your submission published on the Inquiry website anonymously, and you can also make a confidential submission which is not published.

By the way, the deadline for submission is Friday 17th May 2024 at 5pm Canberra time. The time is not stated on the website, but I have just called and asked.

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History of significant edits in this story (changing meaning, not fixing typos)

9th April, Changed the lead and final paragraphs to reflect the extension of the submission deadline from 26th April to 17th May.