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

RENNICK () (): "We shouldn't continue to focus on conspiracy theories and fringe theories." I don't think the thousands of Australians injured by the COVID vaccine would take too kindly to that disrespectful remark there by Senator Urquhart and the Labor Party. Vaccine injuries are not a conspiracy theory.

I'm actually ambivalent about a COVID-19 royal commission, because, quite frankly, I don't trust the judiciary, and they do not have the knowledge around the biochemistry of the vaccine. But what I do want out of this process is accountability. I want the people that made these decisions and I want the people who gaslit the injured people to be held accountable. I'm sick and tired of these people being mocked by people in this chamber, the other chamber, the media, the health authorities. They are mocking people who followed government's advice in good faith and then have been trampled on and gaslit, because it does not suit their political agenda. That is absolutely shameful. That is absolutely shameful. To think, that came from a Labor senator who's on the actual community affairs committee that covers the health portfolio. That they should get up here and refer to these people as 'conspiracy theorists' is an absolute disgrace. That is the nub of this issue—the fact that democratic governments are all about holding people to account. Democracy, as the great patriots in 1776 fought for, was to upturn the establishment, and no longer would we have the ruling elite destroy the individual. Yet what we've got here is a complete gaslighting as to what happened in COVID-19.

Of course, it's not just the vaccine injuries that we need to look into. We need to look into the whole sorry saga. I will slightly disagree with Senator Hanson: I don't what the judiciary involved. I actually went to the Supreme Court and sat in the Supreme Court when those brave police officers stood up for their own rights, and I listened to a judge say that he didn't want to understand the biochemistry of the vaccine. Well, if you don't understand how the thing works, how on earth can you possibly rule on it? That's what the nub of this issue is. We need to understand how respiratory infections work. We need to understand pathogens, because there are different types of pathogens, and I'll touch on that now because I've got 15 minutes to speak.

It's very important that you understand there are different types of pathogens. You have bacteria, you have double stranded DNA viruses and you have single stranded mRNA viruses. Your bacteria is generally dealt with by the use of antibiotics. One of the reasons why we haven't had severe pandemics in the last 100 years is thanks to those great scientists like Fleming and Florey, who discovered penicillin, and we have effectively been able to use antibiotics to control the spread of bacteria. An issue that we need to look at here is why the COVID-19 evidence taskforce recommended against using azithromycin, which is a widely used antibiotic, for people who had COVID. If you understand respiratory infections, you will know that you might initially catch a viral infection, but older people or vulnerable people will get a bacterial infection.

This is another thing that needs to be looked at: the lockdowns in Victoria in August 2020 that led to about 800 deaths in aged-care centres. Why were those people locked down in aged-care centres when they should have been put in hospital? That's something that hasn't been looked at all. Aged-care centres weren't equipped to deal with people who had COVID. Those people should have been sent to hospital. Was that deliberate by the then premier to make sure that, if they went to hospital, it didn't become his responsibility? Was it all too politically convenient to let them die in aged-care centres so that the state government of Victoria could blame the federal government, which was a Liberal government?

The other thing, but it is one of many things that need to be looked at, is the politicisation of health, and we saw it with the premiers every day. They would get up there and perform their stunts like clowns in the media circus, terrifying people about the risks of that virus. It's a virus which, mind you, I accept was a risk to older people and people with vulnerabilities and comorbidities—all viruses are—but it's how you react to these things and it's how you handle these issues that matter. Locking down healthy people of the working-age population was completely unnecessary. You don't destroy the strong to protect the weak, yet that's exactly what happened here.

We know that the Labor government could never accept they lost the 2019 election, and we all know that in politics Labor are generally considered to be more trustworthy with health and education. The Liberals and the coalition are generally considered to be more trustworthy with defence, the economy and law and order. So Labor played to their strengths. They knew that they could terrify everyone—could lock everyone down—with their repeated propaganda. And that's what it was: it was nothing but propaganda in those daily press conferences. It was, 'Ooh, there's COVID in the sewage!' or Dan Andrews saying, 'If you don't take this vaccine you're going to be lining up for a machine that helps you breathe.' What type of hysterical hyperbole was that? That was not medical advice. That was unashamed and unabashed propaganda being used to exploit people who didn't understand what we were dealing with.

Now, some people—and I have to deal with these people as well—think the whole virus thing is not real. I disagree with that. I think viruses are real, they're genuine, and they need to be dealt with. But the fact of the matter is that most people could have coped with it—okay? And we did not need to lock down.

The other thing we really need to address when we look at this whole handling of the COVID pandemic is the PCR testing. There were two issues with the PCR testing. One issue was that the cycle threshold was set at 40. That would pick up any sort of dead virus in your body. If you'd had a virus in years gone by and any part of that was left in your body, that could pick it up. The other issue—and this is what really annoys me—is that we cannot get the primers or the genetic sequence used in that PCR testing to actually find out what the PCR testing said was COVID. We know that COVID is a virus with 29 proteins, of about 1,200 nucleotides in each protein. We know the sequence of COVID. What I've asked for from the TGA—and they won't give it to me because it's commercial-in-confidence—is the primer used in that PCR test to determine whether or not that PCR test could distinguish between COVID and other forms of viruses, whether it be influenza A or B or whatever.

It was interesting: when the Olympics were on, I noticed that people had COVID. They didn't have the flu; they had COVID. This is really, really important, because, as we've just heard Senator Urquhart say, there will be more waves of COVID. Really? Well, there's nothing new in that; we've had waves of viruses for thousands of years. Ever since man started to domesticate animals, we've been catching viruses from animals and sharing them amongst animals and humans and whatever, through contact, for thousands of years. This is nothing new. What is new, however, is the level of organised global propaganda by concentrated media that have access, through technology, into all of our phones, very easily.

Once upon a time—I remember, when I was growing up—you might listen to the news once in the morning on the radio, and you might have a news bulletin at seven o'clock at night, and, if you wanted to get the newspaper, you'd have to go out and get the newspaper, and that would be it. Today's technology allows news to be streamed to you every second of the day, and so that message can be constantly repeated. We saw that, yet again, here in Australia.

Clive Palmer rang me, as he wanted me to join his party early on when I withheld my vote, and he told me that, when he tried to put out advertisements to warn against the vaccine, he was told that no media would actually put those advertisements out because, if they did that, the government said, 'We will not give you any media advertising.' That was an absolute disgrace.

It raises the question: is our media too concentrated in this country? And I think it is. I think it was the Morrison government that abolished the cross-media ownership laws in this country. Well, we need to bring the cross-media ownership laws back and we need to break up the monopoly of, basically, the Murdoch press, the ABC press and the Nine-Fairfax press, because those three media organisations control, I'm guessing, 80 per cent of the mainstream media, and there is very, very little room to have a contrasting opinion, and if you do—heaven forbid!—you get shut down. So we need to have a look at that.

We also need to look at the excess deaths, yet again. We heard Senator Urquhart say that the vaccines saved lives. I would really like to know how you work that out, unless you are doing autopsies on all those deaths, unless you are getting tissue samples, unless you're looking for the presence of the spike protein, and the spike protein from the vaccine is different from the spike protein in the virus. There's a proline insertion at the 986 and 987 proline amino acid insertion. That will tell you very quickly if vaccine proteins are hanging round in the body causing damage.

Then we have the lipids, four different lipids, despite what Adjunct Professor—not a real professor, adjunct professor—Skerritt told me in estimates—that the lipids are nothing more than dietary lipids that you eat on your steak or sausage. They are not. They are actually lipids designed to cross the cell membrane of any cell. The virus could not do that; it could only cross the membrane of the cell with an ace receptor. Here's the thing: the spleen and the bone marrow don't have ace receptors. Those two organs are very important because they produce white blood cells. If you start messing around with organs that produce white blood cells to protect your immune system you are playing with fire. Yet this vaccine used to process core transfection, and this was the first medicine to ever be used that could cross the cell membrane, go inside your cell, where the ribosomes would start processing a new pathogen based on whatever was in that MRNA code. So we really need to have a further investigation into that.

And this is the thing: when they say 'save lives' or whatever, I actually think the lockdowns early on probably did save lives, for what it is worth. I am not disputing that, but at what cost and benefit? We went from 164,000 deaths in 2019 to 162,000 deaths in 2020—sure. So 2,000 people fewer died in 2020 because of lockdowns, right? But in 2021, we had an extra 10,000 deaths. So what caused that? Because COVID was not in the community in 2021. Maybe that was a bit of a blowback from the fact that we had delayed or deferred medical checkups. I think that is entirely plausible. But to have an extra 10,000 deaths in eight months was a spike of 10 per cent, and those deaths jumped the very first month after the vaccine rollout occurred. For these guys to gaslight those figures as being not related to the vaccine is absurd, especially when COVID was not in the community. It is much harder in 2022 when you had an extra 30,000 deaths. Sure, COVID was in the community. What was COVID or what was the vaccine? We don't know, even though I suspect it was probably both. Australia is unique in a sense because we stayed in lockdown for so long.

Then we need to look at those border lockdowns, because we had thousands of people in my home state, Queenslanders, locked out of Queensland and living in tents in Murwillumbah or living in the back of their cars. My office was bombarded with people who could not pay their hotel bills. They got caught out. They had bills of $10,000. They could not get to work. They had pets locked up in their houses, and, most importantly, they could not see their loved ones. I have a close friend who was in this chamber once upon a time who could not be there when her sister died because you guys stopped that from happening and that is disgraceful. That is absolutely disgraceful. I do not care what sort of inquiry it is. We need to get real and we need to hold the people to account that caused so much unnecessary suffering to Australians.