Katie Lees

About

Katie was a vibrant, healthy 34-year-old woman living in the inner west of Sydney. Katie was a writer, stand-up comedian and performer who brought laughter and spirited vision to the world, channelling her fierce creativity.

Katie Lees was also my daughter and eldest child. Tragically, at 5pm on Wednesday 4^th August 2021, Katie died from her first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. There is no dispute about the cause of her death – it is written on her death certificate and confirmed by the Ministry of Health.

Before you stop reading, Katie and her family are not ‘anti-vaccination’. Quite the opposite. Katie acted on the direction, encouragement and instruction of the federal and state governments who pushed the message (based on the delayed procurement of vaccines and a lockdown resulting from an outbreak in Sydney, NSW, caused by a lack of preventative measures) that vaccine targets needed to be reached and if people wanted to end lockdown, then they had to get vaccinated. The catch was, there was only one vaccine available, and it wasn’t recommended for people under 60 by ATAGI.

Katie died a hero of the vaccination campaign. She died for the liberty most people are now living in Australia. She ‘could have been any of us.’

Not that you would know it from the silence from the federal and state governments and AstraZeneca, censorship and silencing from local and federal government, some in the corporate world and downright hostility and minimising of Katie’s death from many people we meet – even after saying we’ve lost a loved one.

If this was your life:

To be clear, as it stands, if you were the one to die from a vaccine you were directed to take for the community in Australia (during lockdown), your family and loved ones will not hear from the federal or state governments, nor the pharmaceutical company who created the vaccine. No leader will make a statement about your death, nor acknowledge or recognise it (even after a local representative speaks in Australian parliament on your family’s behalf). Your death will not be reported in the pandemic death toll, the media will have no interest in reporting who you were, diversifying their media coverage of the pandemic or critically evaluating the lack of transparency around communication of risk in relation to blanket medical advice. Your death will not be featured in local and global vaccine rollout data; (the global authority on this is conveniently the same authority who created the vaccine that caused your death). Absence of acknowledgement in all these areas is akin to your life, and death, experiencing an erasure from history. But not only that, after the mass communication to get vaccinated, no-one is interested in broad communication to stop it from happening to anyone else. Unless your family and friends speak up on your behalf, the medical action that you took for your community which cost you your life will not live on in the collective memory of those lost during the pandemic. After you have passed, your family and friends will not be offered any grief counselling or support – even as they are isolated from each other struggling with the acute grief and trauma of losing you during a three month lockdown.

Katielees.com is a work-in-progress website created by family and friends of Katie in our deep devastation, sadness and acute grief, to memorialise and honour the amazing, positive impacts of her life, share what we are doing to remember her, and highlight some of the failures of government policy and decision-making that led to her horrific, sudden death to inform policy and improve processes. Our hope is that as you explore this site, you will understand more of who our Katie was and the situation of her death, contextualised in local and international decision-making.

We are calling for a royal commission into the government’s pandemic response in Australia, please consider signing the petition here. Katie believed in actions like petitions and the power of people joining together, using their voices to unite for just causes such as climate change and women’s/people’s rights – loudly and proudly.  

We hope that you get to know the wonderful, imaginative, vibrant young woman that our Katie was. By reading, watching and listening, we hope she will continue to inspire, amuse, inform, and be a guiding light for us all. Everything on this site is reflective of who she was, dedicated to her legacy and only a snapshot of her brilliant, precious life and the future that was so unjustly taken from her.

Katie grew up in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, Australia. She was the eldest of our four children. From an early age she moved in the world in her own way, as a free spirit, intuitively seeing what others couldn’t see and often expressing what others felt but couldn’t give voice to.

Katie’s passion from early in her life was performance.

We were treated to endless shows, with her siblings, cousins and friends sharing in creating the rich, infinite, imaginative worlds and storytelling that often started as a spark from Katie.

After starting other, in her words, “sensible” degrees, Katie decided to go with her heart and studied Arts/Performing Arts at Wollongong University setting off to pursue her life dream and passion of being an actor. Through her 20’s and into her 30’s she honed her craft, experience, and skills by performing and writing for stage and screen, collaborating with creative peers. Performers who inspired Katie include Hannah Gadbsy and Claudia Karvan. Writers who inspired Katie include Elena Ferrante and Clementine Ford. Like most artists, she worked all kinds of jobs to pay the rent, although always with strong core values of how she could use her presence in these roles to contribute positively to society.

Katie’s most recent gifts to the world were her one woman show “Temporary” and her comedy show “The Hour of Power” performed with her dear friend Grace Rouvray.

As many creatives do, Katie struggled at times, to find her way in this corporately driven, pragmatic, and materialistic culture. These often-unnecessary pressures placed on artists to have a ‘work identity’ outside of their actual art practice, contributed to her suffering some anxiety and depression at points along the way. Katie always emerged more and more determined to live her own life on her own terms, as an advocate for the importance of self-care and mental health, and seeking to open people’s minds, despite the world often having such a narrow view of so many aspects of humanity.

In her most recent years, Katie had decided that her passion in performance was in standup comedy and as a writer.

She pursued these stage practices with witty intellect, humour and rigour. She was scheduled to perform her show ‘Temporary’ at the Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville. Sadly, COVID-19 lockdowns in Sydney led to this being cancelled. To honour her performance career, together with Flight Path Theatre, Katie’s family and friends have created the inaugural Katie Lees Fellowship – please visit here to read more.

Like so many people, Katie’s life was shattered by the pandemic. Out of passion for creative and broader communities, relationships, humanity, and to ‘do her bit’ to help end lockdowns, she followed the advice to take the COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine, which was the only one available to people under 40 during the lockdown which started on 26^th June 2021. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and members of his government, declared this vaccine safe for all despite the medical evidence from overseas (beginning January 2021) and in Australia (from April 2021) saying otherwise.

Katie, like many, believed what we can now see as the government’s deceitful spin, repetitive messaging and slogans, believing that her action – which we were all asked to do, would make a difference to lockdowns ending. Katie did her bit for our community, for your community. She gave her life in the process.

Despite the government claiming the risk to be ‘one in a million’, Katie’s death from AstraZeneca was in actuality, one in approximately 76,595 people under 40 at the time of her first AstraZeneca vaccine. Tragically, Katie was also one of eleven in Australia who died as a result of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and horrifically, one of a much larger international death toll, including seventy-nine in the UK.

Katie’s death tragically occurred only a few weeks into an almost four-month lockdown, and we watched the NSW State Premier at the time rattle off the daily COVID death toll without so much as a mention of what happened to Katie even though her death had been reported by the TGA. Gladys Berejiklian would later say there was nothing she could do to help and in her resignation speech, say she had ‘no regrets.’

Only ten people were legally allowed to physically attend Katie’s funeral, which more than 500 people attended online. This left us as family and friends completely isolated from each other during the worst time of our lives. We wish to extend our sincere thanks for the messages of love and support during those three months grieving in lockdown.

Now that most people are living the liberty that Katie died for, we, as Katie’s family and friends, ask that you take a moment to honour her memory and get to know what she did in her one wild and precious life.

As much as we are devastated by her horrific, needless, appalling and unnecessary death, and the enormous loss that is without words, we mostly want everyone to remember her life.

We hope you will find something of the spirit of Katie Lees as you explore this site.

This website has been created by family and friends of Katie Lees. It is a collaborative work in progress created during unfathomable heartache and trauma as we try to navigate life without Katie through our personal and collective acute and prolonged grief.

If you would like to leave a message or tribute for Katie, please reach out by contacting us here.

– Katie Lees’ Family