Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I stand here today full of anger, rage, frustration and disappointment. I apologise to the House if, in the next 15 minutes, I'm not able to keep my emotions in check. Today I read a story published in The Australian, by David Penberthy, the South Australian correspondent, titled 'Coronavirus: Why were these four newborns left to die?' I quote from his article:

Victoria's stage-four lockdown prevented four sick newborn babies who subsequently died from being flown from Adelaide to Melbourne to receive lifesaving cardiac surgery.

The babies, the fourth of whom died only last Friday, would normally have been taken by a team from Adelaide's Women's and Children's Hospital and flown to Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital for specialist heart surgery.

But with Melbourne under lockdown the distraught families of the infants were told that their children were not permitted to enter Victoria for the operations.

Let me repeat that:

But with Melbourne under lockdown the distraught families of the infants were told that their children were not permitted to enter Victoria for the operations.

Last Friday, 16 October, when that fourth child died, there were two detected cases of coronavirus in the entire state of Victoria. Those four children are dead. They will never know what it is like to enjoy the life that we do. This should not have happened. Section 92 of our Constitution says:

… trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free.

'Absolutely free' means that sick children that need an operation get to fly from Adelaide into Melbourne. Then there is section 117:

A subject of the Queen, resident in any State, shall not be subject in any other State to any disability or discrimination which would not be equally applicable to him if he were a subject of the Queen resident in such other State.

What that means is that a child born in South Australia or born anywhere in this country has the right, under our Constitution, to go to that hospital in Victoria and get life-saving surgery. Every single person involved in this disgrace has blood on their hands. Deputy Speaker, I apologise that I'm upset over this, but it is not the first time this has happened. Back in August, we had a Ballina mother left to mourn the loss of one of her twins after that twin was denied entry into Queensland for emergency care. And we had the shocking and callous response from a politician in Queensland, who said:

People living in New South Wales, they have New South Wales hospitals. In Queensland we have Queensland hospitals for our people.

What a disgraceful comment when one young child has died. Then we had the case of a Queensland man having his treatment in New South Wales, under the great Dr Charlie Teo—brain surgery that was needed to save his life—and Dr Teo said: 'When you get back to Queensland, you need all the rest and recuperation that you can get. You should be able to go to your home.' We have the bureaucrats in Queensland, at a time when they let footballers go to resorts and let rock stars and movie stars go to their homes, forcing a 70-year-old recovering from brain surgery to be locked up in a hotel room. What an absolute disgrace!

Then we have the young mother, the Northern Rivers mother from New South Wales, who was refused entry to a Queensland hospital where her newborn baby was receiving urgent medical treatment. The paediatrician treating her, Chris Ingall, said it was a desperate situation, particularly in the vital early days usually shared by a mother and her new baby. He said:

"It borders on medical negligence actually because sick babies need their mother's immunity.

"To have this separation at this point for any baby, there is no medical upside. It is just bad.

"It's very saddening for the family and bad medicine for the baby."

This is what these lockdowns are causing. These are the appalling decisions that we are seeing by some politicians in this country and medical bureaucrats. It is an absolute disgrace.

But there is no worse disgrace than the continued ban on the drug hydroxychloroquine. We have state chief medical bureaucrats banning Australians getting access to a drug and a medical treatment that we know the evidence shows is saving lives around the world. Yet that medical treatment is being denied to sick Australians. What's the evidence? Only this morning, a new meta-analysis was published. It found that 19 out of 19 early-treatment studies found that hydroxychloroquine was effective in saving lives and reducing hospitalisation—and not just by a small amount; 63 per cent improvement was the average found in those 19 studies. What's the probability of there being a random chance of this being correct? They worked it out. The random probability that hydroxychloroquine is not effective, when you have 19 studies looking at early treatment, is one in 524,000—one chance in 524,000 that those 19 studies could be wrong.

It's actually worse than that. When you look at all 115 studies, 86 have concluded that hydroxychloroquine actually benefits you. The average improvement found in those studies—some were early treatment, some were late treatment—was 32 per cent improvement. And what did they say in this paper? That the probability that an ineffective, cheap treatment generated results as positive as the 115 studies to date is estimated to be one in 20 million. There's a one-in-20-million chance, based on the evidence, that the drug hydroxychloroquine is not effective. Yet today that treatment remains banned in every state of this nation. In Queensland a doctor that prescribes it, a doctor that looks at these studies and says, 'Wow, a one-in-20-million chance that this is wrong', can go to jail for six months.

How did we get to this stage? How did this happen? We've got a group called the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce. They have done a report on all the treatments and all the drugs. If you go to their summaries page, they state:

The evidence indicates hydroxychloroquine is potentially harmful and no more effective than standard care in treating patients …

That's completely contrary to the evidence. How did they come up with this? They say that the evidence comes from 11 randomised trials that compared hydroxychloroquine plus standard care. Hang on a minute! We've got 115 trials here, and this mob have looked at 11. Then they go on: 'The vast majority of evidence is from the RECOVERY trial which randomised 4,716 hospitalised patients with COVID.' So, basically, denying Australian citizens access to a medical treatment all comes down to one study—this RECOVERY trial.

Let's look at the RECOVERY trial. Firstly, the RECOVERY trial should be completely irrelevant because every doctor who advocates for hydroxychloroquine says that you must give the treatment in the first five days and you must combine it with zinc. In this RECOVERY trial, firstly, they did not use zinc and, secondly, they started the treatment, on average, nine days after the patient first started to get symptoms. So they gave the drug to the people too late and they didn't include zinc. Yet we are holding up this trial as the reason why we are denying sick Australians medical treatment.

It gets worse. When someone first told me that in this trial they had overdosed the patients I thought that couldn't be right. I didn't think you could overdose patients in a trial like that, so I looked at the evidence myself. It's clear that in that trial they gave the sick patients 2,400 milligrams of hydroxychloroquine in the first 24 hours and then they gave them another 800 milligrams every day for the next nine days, so all up they gave them close to 10,000 milligrams of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has a half-life of 20 or 30 days. They loaded those people up. What did they find? Surprise, surprise, the people loaded up with such a dose died.

How do we know that this was an excessive dose? The medical protocols written in published peer reviewed studies recommend 200 milligrams of the drug twice a day for five days, so that's 400 milligrams on day 1, 400 milligrams on day 2, 400 milligrams on day 3, 400 milligrams on day 4 and 400 milligrams on day 5. Yet in this study they gave these people 2,400 milligrams—six times the recommended dose—and they wondered why they got sick and died.

What's even worse is that, when the French online newspaper FranceSoir interviewed the gentleman behind this trial and asked him to explain how he came up with 2,400 milligrams—such an excessive dose—the only explanation from the answers given was that the people behind that trial confused the drugs. When they were asked that question they said—and there's a recording of it, so it can't be denied—the reason they went for 2,400 milligrams is that that's the typical dose you give to someone with amoebic dysentery. The problem is hydroxychloroquine is not a drug that you give for amoebic dysentery. Another line of drugs is—hydroxyquinolines. Yes, you can give 2,400 milligrams of hydroxyquinoline without a problem. As they said in that interview, you can give them 10 times as much. They confused the drugs.

This RECOVERY trial, which our clinical evidence task force hangs its hat on to ban treatment for Australians, should be investigated by the police. The size of the dose is verging on criminal. There should be a full investigation of this. The clinical evidence task force should take that off their website. Instead of looking at just 11 studies, they should look at all 115 studies and they would come up with the conclusion that there's a one-in-20-million chance. That's where we're up to.

It's very serious for these people to recommend that. There are universal human rights laws that apply that should guarantee Australians access to medicine. Firstly, article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including … medical care …

Medical care is being denied to Australians and yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has a right to medical care. There's also article 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Australia is a signatory. That concludes that there should be:

The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

That is not being provided to Australians.

These bureaucrats are in breach, in violation, of these international treaties by denying Australians access to these drugs. I ask them to go back and look at the evidence and change things. Australians should not, for one more day, be denied access to this treatment. (Time expired)

See this speech in context