Dear ,

I thought I should let you know that the Queensland Parliament's Health and Environment Committee is holding hearings today on the Public Health and Other Legislation (Extension of Expiring Provisions) Amendment Bill 2020.

There were 119 submissions, most of them in the last few days before the submission deadline, and I estimate that around 100 of those submissions were against extending the legislation. I recognised a number of names of people who signed our petition.

You can read the submissions by clicking here.

The committee is conducting hearings today which you can view by clicking here (don't worry if you miss the live broadcast as a recording will be available after the broadcast has finished).

I'm disappointed that we weren't called to give evidence before the committee when a number of organisations who did not make submissions did. But you might keep an eye out for the last witness of the day, Gene Tunny, who has written papers for us on economic matters, and who broadly agrees with our position on this issue.

I've also come across this excellent paper by Robert Clancy who is Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Newcastle Medical School. He is a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s COVID-19 Expert Database. What I took from his paper is that vaccines  will not destroy COVID-19 or its variants and that herd immunity may never be reached. Further, it is likely that vaccines will only treat the disease once an individual is infected, and may not prevent them shedding and spreading the virus, and that the immunity that they confer may not be longlasting.

This raises the question as to how long we can continue to behave as though we are in the midst of an emergency when COVID-19 is really our new normal? Does anyone really think that the rest of human history should be a series of rolling lockdowns every time there is an outbreak of COVID?

Regards,

Graham Young
Executive Director