COVID’s Last True Believers Keep the Faith

I kind of admire the fortitude of those making an heroic last stand in defence of the collapsing COVID narrative, a brave stand but an unforgivable one when waged by people for whom critical thinking and analytical rigour should be high on the list of intellectual attributes.  Two local examples of this – one from an opinion columnist and another from a nurse educator – swam into sight as I was idly rummaging through the on-line news media in Adelaide, ‘the jewel of the south’, as we call it (because no one else will).

Matthew Abraham is a retired ABC Adelaide radio host famed for his abrasive, ‘shock-jock’ interviews who has never been shy about sharing his opinions with his listenership.  He now has a gig as a weekly columnist for the on-line Adelaide newspaper, In-Daily, which bills itself as proudly ‘independent’ while displaying all the woke hallmarks of its rival ABC (In-Daily is crazy for The Voice, for example).  The ABC was a main propaganda outlet for COVID hysteria and policy tyranny, so it is no surprise that Mr. Abraham is still trapped in the great pandemic delusion.

Mr Abraham laments that the mySAGOV app – the app that brought us ‘COVID-safe’ check-in QR code surveillance and vax passports (Mr Abraham politely calls them by their official moniker of ‘certificates’) – is scrapping these two functions.  You would think, he says, that this would now mean that the ‘pandemic’ must at last be over.  Not a bit of it, says a distraught Mr Abraham.  The SA government’s paring down of the app is extremely reckless, he says, because the virus is still cutting down swathes of the population and we need all the bio-security defences we can muster to continue to protect ourselves.

Even though Mr Abraham does concede that whilst there had been “stifling”, but necessary, “state control of every aspect of our lives” for the last three years, the policy pendulum has swung too far to the “who-gives-a-rat’s phase”, a state of carelessness symbolised by politicians who are now always unmasked in their photo-ops and who have ceased to exhort everyone to get boosted.  By the Abraham reckoning, this is a terrible dereliction of leadership because there are “busloads of Australians dying every week from COVID or its complications”.

Mr Abraham concedes that “nobody in their right mind would wish for a return to the crushing, depressing lockdowns, limits on hospitality numbers, compulsory face masks, and the many other draconian rules imposed by Police Commissioner Grant Stevens and SA’s Chief Public Health Officer, Professor Nicola Spurrier”, all of which, while extremely irksome, “kept us safe from COVID and saved lives”.

Luckily for us, however, there is a way through the Scylla of COVID and the Charybdis of pandemic restrictions, namely, the glorious COVID vaccine.  Whilst it is commendable that “older and vulnerable Australians are at least being advised to get the latest vaccination”, he says, this is little comfort as a state of “official relaxation” over vaccine take-up is now de facto government policy when, to the contrary, it is only full-on vaccination that can rid us of the viral rampage for good.

So, as the government holsters its primary vax-weapon, COVID continues to run amok.  As evidence for his assertion of ongoing viral carnage, Mr Abraham gloms onto the report by the Actuaries Institute’s COVID-19 Mortality Working Group which claims COVID has risen to be the third-largest cause of death in 2022 and is responsible for around half of Australia’s total excess mortality of twelve per cent for that year, compared to the usual annual variation of under two per cent. Mr Abraham accepts, prima facie, that the actuaries’ estimates for COVID deaths are accurate, rather than extremely inflated due to the lumping together of ‘died with COVID’ and ‘died from COVID’.

Mr Abraham hurries past the mystery cause of the other half of the excess mortality, which had nothing to do with Covid at all.  He is unable to help out the actuaries who have also thrown their hands up about what is causing 50 per cent of Australia’s excess mortality. It never once enters his consciousness that the vaccines might be a causative agent for premature deaths.

Indeed, Mr Abraham won’t hear a word against the miracle jab. He complains bitterly that it has taken weeks for him to arrange jab number five – “my wife and I are booked for our fifth COVID jab next week, along with the flu shot, the earliest appointment we could get at our local GP clinic after booking weeks ago”.  Well, here’s an idea – perhaps it is the unprecedented rate of jabbing with an experimental genetic vaccine that is behind the unprecedented rise in mortality, as any number of vaccine-adverse reaction consistently signal.

During his radio days, Mr Abraham was an insufferable boor, way too fond of the sound of his own voice.  Now he is an insufferable COVID boor and the delight in his own mouthy wisdom remains undiminished.  For Mr Abraham, and others like him (see below) it remains all about COVID – its ever-present danger but with the vaccine as deus ex machina saviour.  And this is the type of journalist the ABC saw fit to employ, which says a lot about the ABC, and just as much about Adelaide’s new, ‘independent’ media voice.

None so deaf as those who cannot hear

Someone else blind to, and, as it turns out, nearly deaf to, the reality of the vaccines is University of South Australia nursing lecturer, Kim Gibson, whose sudden deafness has been written up as a case study in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal and which made it to the same issue of In-Daily.  The ABC, quite naturally, have also run with the story, eager to hone in, again, on the ever-present terror of COVID and deliverance via the wonder ‘vaccine’.

Ms Gibson “suffered a sudden sensorineural hearing loss, along with vertigo and tinnitus, in one ear five weeks after testing positive for COVID-19 last year” and she continues to experience intermittent tinnitus.  Hers is a plea for sudden deafness to be “listed as a potential side effect of COVID-19”.  Her actual virus symptoms were described as ‘mild’ but an otolaryngologist “confirmed her condition, describing it as a little-known and poorly understood side effect of the virus”.

You are probably ahead of me here. Perhaps there is a better candidate for the cause of Ms Gibson’s condition. She is  a “fully vaccinated nurse” who “had received three doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer Comimaty) COVID-19 vaccine” prior to her hearing problems. This suggests a culprit other than the virus itself.

To take the WHO’s VigiAccess database (a global compendium of adverse events databases from those countries that keep them), as of March 16, 2023, there have been 140,995 adverse events (at right) involving ‘ear and labyrinth disorders’ (audio-vestibular injuries) following COVID vaccination. There is good reason to believe these numbers are vastly unreported.

These includes tinnitus (57,630), vertigo (49,824), ear pain (17,731), deafness (5,858) and sudden hearing loss (3,237).  These injuries are likely caused by “autoimmune reactions, blood clots (vascular), or blood vessel inflammation (vasculitis)” arising from the vaccines, says Dr William Makis, a Canadian physician, but the “medical literature has gone to great lengths to minimize these debilitating audio-vestibular side effects”.  The BMJ’s case study of Ms Gibson is one such exhibit, where COVID, rather than the vaccine, is fingered as the perpetrator by the patient, her specialist and the medical journal where her case appears.

On the other hand, if it was COVID, not the vaccine, that damaged Ms Gibson, then that is also a strong argument against the vaccine.  Despite her, at the time, three jabs, she nevertheless got COVID which inflicted the vertigo, tinnitus and sudden hearing loss.  Wasn’t the COVID vaccine supposed to protect against ‘severe outcomes’ of SARS-Co-V2 infection?  Losing your hearing, being plagued by psychologically debilitating, incessant tinnitus, and falling over from loss of balance (I have had vertigo and it is quite incapacitating), sound like severe outcomes to me. Yet, neither Ms Gibson, nor her specialist, nor the BMJ, nor In-Daily, nor the ABC, ever mention this gross failure of the vaccine which, like Caesar’s wife, must always be above suspicion.

“I now feel very nervous about a second COVID-19 infection. What if I experience this again, or even worse?”, said a worried Ms Gibson, no doubt crossing off the days until her next booster. 

These are just two examples of COVID narrative defenders, still composing their jeremiads about the dangers of the virus whilst magnificently ignoring the mounting evidence against the wretched vaccines.