Australian health agencies are inspiring misinformation on Covid vaccine injuries

The issue of Covid-19 vaccination injuries and deaths have been largely ignored by the media. It’s a dangerous business which allows misinformation to flourish.

There have been some notable exceptions.

Last month, Christine Middap’s sensitive article in The Weekend Australian included profiles of people who had suffered serious Covid-19 vaccine injury. And Chris Kenny recently drew attention to the problem in a thoughtful way on his program on Sky News.

The figures on vaccine related injury should be widely available, published by the Therapeutic Goods Administration to the point where even the incurious will have a broad understanding.

The compensation scheme, known as the Covid-19 Vaccine Claims Scheme is administered by Services Australia. The scheme was announced by then health minister Greg Hunt as the vaccines were rolled out in the first half of 2021. Therein lies an acknowledgment that Covid-19 vaccines were likely to cause injury and death in rare cases.

Less than 10 per cent of 3206 claims have been approved. Most of the remainder are still being considered.

These are Australians who have suffered injury as a result of taking the Covid vaccine and they should not be forgotten or cast into a bureaucratic abyss.

Even obtaining an official figure on vaccine related deaths is fraught. My understanding from the often tortured TGA’s reports is that 14 Australians have died from severe adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, nine from Astra-Zeneca and five from mRNA based vaccines, including Pfizer and Moderna. One of those five is an extraordinarily harrowing story of the death of a 21-year-old Melbourne woman in March 2021.

Those who suffered injury, and often extended periods of incapacity have been left to deal with the usual bureaucratic exercise that requires medical evidence, which may include but not be restricted to proof of hospital admission, sending the forms in, then sitting and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

In the United States, a similarly convoluted compensation scheme is in place. The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program is known to be a well-intentioned office but under-resourced and not fit for the purpose of dealing with thousands of claims and determining outcomes in a timely fashion.

At the end of 2022, there were more than 7500 claimants to the scheme. Some have been waiting for compensation for more than a year. I’ll leave it to the mathematicians to figure out the percentages of claims for Covid vaccine injury against the more than 600 million doses of the Covid vaccine administered in the US.

A void of information is filled with misinformation and the people perpetrating are armed and ready, bristling with falsehoods and deceit.

Stew Peters is a Minnesotan former bounty hunter who has developed a business model to achieve fame and fortune from the pandemic. He refers to Covid vaccines as “bioweapons”. Peters contends Covid vaccines are a means of global depopulation.

Peters’s pseudo-documentary, Died Suddenly, has been described as a “tsunami of anti-vax misinformation and conspiracy theories” by Science Based Medicine magazine. It has been viewed over 250,000 times on Rumble. The documentary makers were allowed to post the entire 69 minutes on Twitter.

The ersatz doco includes the appropriation of news items reporting on people who had suddenly died, many of which were probably not vaccine-related. Some of the sudden deaths exploited in Died Suddenly occurred before the pandemic.

Retired teacher turned writer in Los Angeles, Dolores Cruz, published an article in the Huffington Post about the grieving process she had undergone and written extensively about in two books. Her youngest son, Eric, had died in a car crash in 2017 at 24-years of age. The fake doco used a screenshot of the headline in the film, portraying his death as vaccine related.

It would be difficult to imagine more ghoulish behaviour. I reached out to Cruz recently, asking how she felt seeing Peters appropriate the death of her son.

“I want people to know that the suggestion that my son died from the Covid vaccine is completely false. I was angered to see that the title of the article I wrote for HuffPost was used in the documentary Died Suddenly. My article was about my grief and healing journey after my 24-year-old son died in a car accident in May of 2017 which was years before the pandemic began and has nothing to do with the Covid vaccine. The documentary has misappropriated how my son died and it hurts to have my son’s story used in this way,” she wrote.

But she was not surprised that it happened. “Though this has made me angry and caused hurt, sadly, false information runs rampant in the world today by way of news media, social media, and film and television.”

This fake documentary watched by a relatively small audience in global terms has now taken on a life of its own as a hashtag that runs across every possible social media platform, republishing every newspaper headline, every media article, small or large, where the phrase ‘died suddenly’ is mentioned and aggregates them to infer people have died suddenly from vaccine-related injury.

Liberal MP Russell Broadbent is advocating on behalf of the thousands of Australians who have experienced an adverse reaction after getting a… COVID-19 vaccination. “They feel … they are not being heard, they don’t feel like they are being justly treated by governments,” he told Sky News host More
On Saturday February 13, a Belgian goalkeeper, Arne Espeel, died suddenly while playing in the second division league in Belgium for Winkel Sport B. According to reports, Espeel made a save and then collapsed. He was attended to by a doctor at the ground and a defibrillator was used. The attempts to save his life failed and he was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

And there it was again. A flurry of Died Suddenly hashtags amid anti-vax comments on social media.

Espeel’s sudden death comes after a bogus review announced that 108 footballers had died suddenly in 2021. The original report was published in Hebrew but was subject to a Reuters Fact Check that found that, of the 108, only a few died playing soccer. There were archers, American footballers, hockey players – both on ice rinks and on fields, rugby league and union footballers. Some were not playing at all, including a cricket coach, and a golf caddie.

What the misinfo shouters didn’t account for is that FIFA established a sudden death register in 2014 due to concerns that had risen over decades that men and women playing soccer were dying on the pitch at a fairly high rate.

In the five-year period 2014-2018, the sudden deaths of 617 footballers were registered with FIFA, on average 123 in any year. Elite players were less likely to suffer sudden cardiac arrest due to elevated fitness levels and were more likely to survive these events due to the increased likelihood of being attended to by skilled first aid practitioners and the presence of defibrillators. Nevertheless, the study published in the British Medical Journal and peer reviewed found that five per cent of the 617 deaths came from the elite level.

Misinformation is easy to create and requires ten times the energy to refute. ‘Died suddenly’ should not be a loaded term but that’s where we are now.

The issue of proper and prompt redress to people who have suffered Covid vaccine injury and those who spread misinformation is deeply entwined. Morally, those who have suffered injury should not be pushed into the shadows, collateral casualties of a rush to vaccinate. But more so, the vacuum created by bureaucratic babble and evasion will always be filled by misinformation. The truth gets left dazed and bruised by the roadside.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/how-our-health-agencies-are-inspiring-misinformation-on-covid-vaccine-injuries/news-story/f9ea6549bd70d7ee026fad0a8d64358f

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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