Below is an excerpt of longer form research, which can be found here.

Australia’s current government was so desperate to pitch AstraZeneca to everyone who didn’t die, that ironically, they forgot the ones who [tragically] did. By default, when sharing our loved one’s death, we are made out to be somehow responsible for the life-saving vaccine taking our loved one’s life. Perhaps it is the shock of the news, as we have experienced a spectrum of reactions from horror to sympathy and condolences, to argumentative dismissiveness, silence, and ghosting – simply from sharing that our loved one died. All the while being a few weeks into a four month lockdown, with constant messaging ringing in our ears around covid-19 and vaccinations.

We wonder… how many people would say to a grieving family of someone struck by lightning that it was their loved ones responsibility to not die in a freak weather event? Not only that, We wonder… who would suggest that their loved one’s death doesn’t actually matter at all to the community and doesn’t even warrant being included in history’s daily disaster/pandemic death count and global data set?

We wonder… how many people would say to a grieving family, that it was their loved one’s fault for getting mauled by a shark, struck by lightning, bitten by a mosquito, or drowning in a ‘once in a lifetime’ disaster?

We wonder what kind of leader, of what kind of broken country, wouldn’t even acknowledge deaths caused post-vaccination, by a vaccine rollout within their control, whilst perversely and concurrently scaling the risk of deaths to the magnitude of a natural disaster pre-vaccination? This leader, of this country, we call Australia/many countries.

People did not have to die. A chain of decisions made by leaders in this country, are decisions that ended the lives of innocent, healthy people. Those same leaders are not stepping forward to apologise, acknowledge, recognise, or offer support.

Pre-vaccination, the message was: individuals need to get vaccinated for the health of the collective community, to reduce transmission, hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, ‘we are in this together’.

Post-death-from-vaccine message: the collective has disappeared, replaced with silencing and ghosting – the health of the individual no longer matters to the collective, the death is not reported in the historical memory as being part of the collective that reduced risk of COVID-19.

So where does that leave the loved ones of these 11 people? We can only speak from our own experience (not on behalf of all eleven families), but we can share that it leaves us in a limbo state of disenfranchised grief, where trying to grieve and speak about what happened is met with reactions that echo the government and media responses – hinting that we should be somehow grateful that more people didn’t die, whilst stifling the part of grieving which is sharing our stories about our loved one.

– Katie Lees’ Family