Australians for Science and Freedom

A US assessment released in September showed school closures had wiped out decades of progress in math and reading. Numerous studies show little correlation between the severity, timing and duration of lockdown either for countries or for US states. Age-adjusted mortality of Florida today is no worse than that of New York.

Much-maligned Brazil's mortality rate is less than half that of hard and extended lockdown Peru, significantly lower than Czechia, nearly identical to Chile and only slightly higher than UK and Italy. Its cumulative cases per million people is currently less than half that of Australia and the pandemic's hermit kingdom New Zealand, and lower than highly-masked Japan and South Korea.

In July 2020, Sweden's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said judge me in a year. Two years later, he stands vindicated. Sweden's cumulative Covid deaths per million puts it 30^th of 47 European countries. Many hard lockdown countries fared worse: Czechia, Italy, Belgium, UK, Spain, France, Austria. Sweden's cumulative excess mortality is lower than these seven. Its cumulative cases per million people is lower than Australia, New Zealand, the EU, the US and South Korea.

Crucially for my purposes today, Tegnell explained in April 2020 that lockdowns have no "historical scientific basis." Skepticism toward lockdowns and masks was the reigning scientific and policy orthodoxy before 2020. The UK Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, for example, acknowledged that: "Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting."

Western governments were impressed by dubious claims of success from Beijing in eradicating the virus, on the one hand, and panicked by the doomsday predictions of models using flawed assumptions, on the other. But "settled science" built up over a century cannot be overturned in weeks and all the data since early 2020 reinforces the prevailing pre-Covid scientific and policy consensus.

Last December Hillsdale College in Washington, DC announced the creation of the Academy for Science and Freedom. Its mission is "To combat the recent and widespread abuses of individual and academic freedom in the name of science." In the effort to enforce a nonexistent consensus, dissident scientists were "silenced, censored, and slandered" as the single-viewpoint-dominant public health community actively engaged "in intimidation and false declarations of consensus."

Many health experts made profound errors in judgment, failed to adjust based on growing data and continued to pronounce their initial assessments as forever correct.

Australians…

On September 21, Drs. Conny Turni and Astrid Lefringhausen published an Australia-centric peer-reviewed article on Covid vaccines in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Immunology. They decry the dismissal of robust and durable natural immunity, the banning of treatment using low-cost repurposed drugs recommended by many US doctors and the dogmatic rejection of the claim that, like existing coronaviruses that became endemic even without vaccines, Covid-19 too would do so.

They hold that under-18s are more than 50 times likely to die from mRNA vaccines, which cause more side-effects than any other vaccine, than from Covid. Their very final sentence asks: "Who gave bureaucrats the means to destroy the fundamentals of science and tell scientists not to argue the science"?

Good question.

In July, Denmark banned Covid vaccines for healthy under-18s and in September also for under-50s. Norway has banned them for healthy under-65s. Both are among the world's most aggressive countries in public health measures. Meanwhile on July 19, Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration approved a Moderna vaccine for children aged 0.5-5 years, followed by a Pfizer vaccine on September 29. They cannot all be following The Science™.

NSW Health data back Denmark's and Norway's conclusion that Covid poses grave risks only to the elderly. In the last four months (May 22–September 17), just 0.1 and 1.5 percent of the 2,134 Covid deaths were under 20 and 50, respectively. Among those with known vaccination status, only 16 of the 7,857 hospital and 10 of 730 ICU admissions were unvaccinated, compared to 5,769 and 538 boosted, respectively. This is consistent with the results from an Oxford study published in Lancet on June 30 which found that two doses of the vaccine increase the infection rate by 44 per cent (supplementary Table 7). The strain on the health system-the only justification for coercive mandates-is much greater from the numbers of healthcare staff who've been fired for refusing the jab than from the great unvaxxed.