Moral responsibility to acknowledge deaths from AstraZeneca
Below is an excerpt of longer form research, which can be found here.
Scott Morrison’s government ought to morally acknowledge that they forced something onto the public for the benefit of expedience, and that their decision-making process is fraught and flawed. They have a moral obligation to do this.
We call for an immediate commitment with dates confirmed to commence an independent inquiry or royal commission into the government’s pandemic response. An inquiry which only investigates the medical response to the pandemic – misses the point, that it was government decision making for which Scott Morrison claimed responsibility, that needs to be analysed as well.
On the 5th August 2021, we watched [former] NSW State Premier Gladys Berejiklian in the 11am daily press conference report on tragic deaths in NSW from the pandemic, failing to mention Katie. Subsequently, Gladys would say in her resignation speech due to an ICAC corruption investigation: “I have absolutely no regrets during my time in public life. At times we all stumble, we pick ourselves up […].”[1] Katie won’t be picking herself up, her voice was taken from her when she suddenly lost the ability to speak and move, due to a vaccine that Gladys Berejiklian also advocated for younger people in NSW to take without transparently conveying safety risks.
Whilst we are not affiliated nor do we advocate for any political parties, we note that at least one politician showed the moral courage to acknowledge deaths from AstraZeneca:
On the 23rd November 2021, Susan Templeman, Member for Macquarie, spoke in Australian Parliament on behalf of Katie’s family,[2] calling on the Prime Minister to acknowledge the deaths from AZ in Australia:
“I speak about this knowing that there are some in the community who will try and use what the family have said to me for their own purposes. That would be wrong. They are grieving and angry that Katie’s death is a direct consequence of the government’s reliance on AstraZeneca. They acknowledge that many other people have died because of the failure of the federal government to better manage the vaccine program. They know Katie listened to the urging of the government and made the decision to be vaccinated with AstraZeneca after discussions with her GP. For the sake of people’s mental health, she wanted to do her bit to help end the lockdown. They grieve that she was the one in a one-in-a-million risk. What’s added to their grief and distress is the lack of contact initiated from either the government or AstraZeneca.
What they’d like is for Katie’s death and that of others to be recognised in parliament. They’d like a public memorial acknowledging those who died during the pandemic, both as a result of the disease and of the vaccines and public recognition at major gatherings in the form of a minute’s silence. They’d like a vaccine compensation scheme that proactively reaches out to people who’ve lost a family member, one with specific time frames, relying on an expert legal and medical panel that considers impact statements from family members and treats them generously. What they want is reasonable. They also want to see the Prime Minister acknowledge those who have died or been disabled through the vaccination program. They want recognition by the Prime Minister of what these people have experienced and what their families have lost. They have lost this for the sake of the rest of the community.”[3]
The absence of acknowledgement causes more trauma and suffering to the affected families, friends and loved ones of the eleven people who died (twelve if you include a woman reported to have tragically died in the UK after receiving AstraZeneca in Australia as reported by the TGA on 1st July 2021, and thirteen if you include a person who tragically died from unrelated medical conditions while being treated for TTS from AstraZeneca as reported by the TGA on 28th October 2021).
It’s not just acknowledgement or recognition though, the erasure and ‘dumbing down’ of information from the current government goes much deeper. Currently, globally, tragic deaths from AstraZeneca exist in a data loophole where they are not transparently communicated for the public to access. They are not recorded or reported in data of deaths from covid-19. They are not recorded or reported in vaccine rollout statistics showing the amounts administered either. Where they live, if at all, in the public record, is in obscured, abstract locations of large bodies of text on official health websites, far down the page, and in the case of some countries, not even in the risk summary for AstraZeneca. If we’re to follow the government’s lead in employing metaphors for dramatic effect – trying to find specific, accurate information about the AstraZeneca vaccine is like searching for needles in an invisible haystack. In the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford for instance, the generic ‘COVID-19 vaccine’ is used as an umbrella term for many types of vaccines, the project does not show vaccine doses by type, data does not show adverse reactions to vaccines or deaths from vaccines, and does not differentiate between types of vaccines in most statistics. In the section ‘Which vaccines have been administered in each country?’, data from Australia was not available.[4]
What can be seen in place of inclusion into easily accessible infographic data tables of COVID-19 pandemic statistics, is a resulting scramble from medical experts to publish studies which investigate the risk of TTS from AstraZeneca from the basis of a range of theories including the common comparison of the [uncertain?] risk of blood clots that would naturally occur in the general population at any one time. An obvious reason why this can be seen as an inapplicable foundation for risk assessment is it erases the context in which the vaccine was rolled out as a living evidence experiment, sandwiched in complex, politicised layers in an urgent, global crisis. Very few studies look at actual real-world evidence in the context in which it occurred to provide analysis of known facts rather than suppositions of unknown risk factors where a deadly virus was not threatening human life on earth.
Is it a serendipitous coincidence that in the same 24 hours as a BBC documentary airing about the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, the TGA in Australia again provisionally approves AstraZeneca as a booster for anyone over the age of 18 on the 9th February 2022?
An elephant in the room whose silence hasn’t been brought to your attention yet, is AstraZeneca the company.
– Katie Lees’ Family
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/01/no-regrets-full-text-of-gladys-berejiklians-speech-announcing-her-resignation-as-premier
[2] Source [Hansard text from speech by Susan Templeman, Member for Macquarie, Federation Chamber proceedings, Parliament House, Australia, 23rd November 2021]: https://parlview.aph.gov.au/mediaPlayer.php?videoID=561706&operation_mode=parlview
[3] Source: https://parlview.aph.gov.au/mediaPlayer.php?videoID=561706&operation_mode=parlview
Katie Lees 