Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of Senator Roberts's motion on the need for a royal commission into COVID. It is long overdue. I will qualify that by saying that, if there is a royal commission into COVID, all aspects of the management of the COVID pandemic should be looked at properly. I say that because, when I went to the Queensland Supreme Court to listen to the police case put forward by the Queensland police that were stood down because of the mandates, the judge said that he wasn't interested in the biochemistry of the vaccine. If you're not interested in the biochemistry of the vaccine and the biochemistry of the human body, I fail to see how you can do a proper review of what took place.

The first thing we need to have a good look at in any royal commission is what genomic sequence was used in the PCR test. Knowing that the virus had 29 proteins of about 1,000 nucleotides each, which part of those nucleotides was actually used in the PCR test to determine a positive COVID case? We still don't know what was used in the PCR test in terms of that part of the sequence. There's a primer, and then there's a probe. What part of that probe was used and amplified—40 times, I might add? The cycle threshold used in Australia was 40 times. Anthony Fauci himself said that anything over 30 is basically considered dead nucleotides. The TGA said that the PCR test couldn't distinguish between a live and dead virus. So how many people tested positive for COVID that didn't actually have COVID? We need to do some serious quality assurance here.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars locking the country down. Before we even got to the vaccine rollout, we caused immense harm through government overreach in locking people out of their homes, states and the country. When they were allowed in, they were locked down for up to two weeks. I'm still getting emails from Queenslanders who have been asked to pay for their two weeks in hotel accommodation, and they can't afford it. They have a $10,000 bill because they were locked down against their will for two weeks. We have to look at why the state government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on these quarantine facilities that were never used. In Queensland, the Wellcamp quarantine facility at Toowoomba has been handed over to Wagners. I can assure you that these guys don't need any free gifts from the government.

It's the same in Western Australia, where $600 billion was spent on RATs. All they did was test for antibodies. You could have antibodies, day or night, for all sorts of coronaviruses. We need to have a serious look at this. We need to ask the question: why did three different pharmaceutical companies have a vaccine for a coronavirus in the first two weeks after Joe Biden was elected when, 40 years prior to that, they'd never been able to find a vaccine for a coronavirus? Suddenly, after Joe Biden's election, we have pharmaceutical companies that have a vaccine for a coronavirus that was supposedly going to stop transmission and infection. Did it stop transmission and infection? No.

By September 2022, we had 10,000 recorded cases of COVID. When I caught COVID, I didn't bother telling the government. I just stayed home for seven days. This idea that you have to get a test and tell the government every time you catch a virus has never taken place before. Are we going to go forward with rules like that? I don't think so. It's not sustainable to live in a society where we terrify people about a virus. I'm not saying there wasn't a virus; I'm sure there was a virus and a pathogen out there. By all means we should be protecting the vulnerable, but we shouldn't be locking down healthy people, especially those in the working-age population, denying them the right to work and not allowing them to make proper choices, given the risk of the virus for them is very low.

I personally dispute whether the vaccine did stop serious infection. I'd actually argue it possibly enhanced it, given that studies show that there was an increase in IgG4, which is a down-regulating antibody, and there was also an increase in the interleukin 10 cytokine. These are all down-regulating proteins in your body, which are designed to stop your immune system from reacting to all this overexposure to viruses. I welcome a royal commission into COVID, but I would hope that it's done with the best intentions and not with the idea of being a political hit job. (Time expired)