Final COVID-19 Bulletin for 2022

Dear ,

Wishing you a happy and healthy Christmas. This is a final round-up of COVID news for this calendar year, and I wanted to start with some very good news.

An organisation called Australians for Freedom and Science has been formed, and includes many of the public intellectuals who signed the open letter to Australian heads of state that you also signed. The public launch will be soon and I will let you know when it happens.

I'm hoping it will take over some of the work that we have been doing to up-date you, although we will continue to do our own projects.

With Christmas being a time to give gifts, I thought you might also be interested in three books on COVID that came out during the year - two by Gigi Foster, in collaboration with other authors, and one by Professors Augusto Zimmerman and Gabriel Moens. We have an online book store, so please check them out and buy one for yourself and one for someone else. The books are:

* Do Lockdowns and Border Closures Serve the Greater Good, Frijters, Foster and Baker

* Emergency Powers, Covid-19 Restrictions & Mandatory Vaccination: a ‘Rule-of-Law’ Perspective, Zimmermann and Moens

* The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next Foster and Sabhlok

In other news, the Queensland Government passed the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2022 which makes a "guiding principle" of the system:

(1)(b) public confidence in the safety of services provided by registered health
practitioners and students (Clause 34)

in place of to make health and safety of the public paramount. This effectively allows AHPRA to deregister any medical practitioner who questions the dictates of public health authorities, and forces them to put government policies ahead of the welfare of their patients.

A cost benefit study by the IPA "Hard Lessons: Reckoning the Economic, Social, and Humanitarian costs of Zero-COVID" finds that costs drastically outweighed benefits in COVID lockdowns.

Professor John Ioannidis from Stanford, who early-on found the modelled incidence of COVID to be too high, has just published a study that finds the disease is much less deadly than thought, explained in this article "COVID-19 Much Less Deadly Than Previously Thought, Major Study Finds". While this analysis finds that the Swedish approach has been justified just in terms of deaths Sweden Wins! Country That Refused Lockdown and Kept Schools Open Has Lowest Pandemic Mortality in the World.

This information site from the Australian government admits that deaths occurred from the COVID vaccines: Deceased COVID-19 vaccine recipient payments and funeral costs, while an academic study finds that censorship had little effect on the debate (meaning the censorship was a waste of time, not that we shouldn't worry about it) Communication Is Not a Virus: COVID-19 Vaccine-Critical Activity on Facebook and Implications for the 'Infodemic' Concept.

Thanks for your support during the year, and I will be in touch again in the New Year, The battle on COVID policy is slowly being won, but it will be a long slog.

Regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR