FAKE NEWS: Study does NOT show covid gene-vaccines "saved nearly 20,000 lives in NSW alone"

Science journal 'investigating the issues' after media amplified wild claims from Moderna-linked-university study

• Catastrophic confounds in study promoting mRNA

• Senior author from Monash - which is building an mRNA plant

• Industry-linked universities are not independent

• Fake news written off press release becomes fake fact

• UPDATE: PLoS One investigation finished, they find no breach of policy

A flawed study that made wild claims promoting the covid gene-vaccines is being investigated by science journal PLoS One after it became fake news.

The study, Assessing the impact of Australia’s mass vaccination campaigns over the Delta and Omicron outbreaks by Lin et al, published in April, claimed tens of thousands of lives in people aged over 50 were “saved” by the controversial products in NSW alone.

Flawed study swiftly became fake news. Source: Nine

“In the absence of a vaccination campaign, ~21,250 COVID-19 50⁺ deaths (conservative estimate) could have been expected in NSW,” the study authors wrote.

They claimed this enormous figure was underestimated due to “indirect herd immunity effects” of the gene-vaccine - a product incapable of providing herd immunity as it has a zero to negative effect on your likelihood of catching and spreading covid.

The study consists of computer modelling from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and Monash University, and was derived from problematic NSW Health data.

Gene-vaccine firm Moderna is building an mRNA factory with Monash University, on its campus, to make 100 million yearly doses of mRNA gene-vaccines. Monash is not independent, it has partnered with the mRNA patent-holder - but no competing interests were mentioned in the PLoS One study.

The authors made the claim of thousands of lives saved despite admitting the data used was limited and subject to age and comorbidity confounds - and therefore modelling parameters were difficult to estimate.

Adjunct Professor of Medicine David Richards said without complete data the study results would be null and void.

“There is no possible way of reliably analysing the result,” he said via email.

University of Sydney covid misinformation researcher Raphael Lataster told Letters From Australia that the study was misleading.

“The statistical biases and confounding variables involved in this study, as well as the complete lack of discussion around the risks and harms, means that it cannot tell us if the benefits of the jabs outweigh the risks.”

Some of the RMIT modelling’s worst problems lie in the assumptions and problematic NSW Health definitions found in the supplementary S1 material, accessed by a link in the study itself.

The S1 assumptions reveal that the predictive modelling in this study cannot say anything meaningful about how many lives the gene-vaccines did or did not save because of faulty raw data and catastrophic confounds (flaws) that invalidate its claims.

Here’s why:

“Unvaccinated” includes people given one injection

The study can’t correctly count those in the zero gene-vaccinated group because NSW Health counted people given one gene-vaccine shot as unvaccinated for 21 days.

The NSW Health definition used for its data (used in this study, quoted at S1) says:

“Cases reported as no effective dose received their first dose of a vaccination course less than 21 days prior to known exposure to COVID-19 or have not received any vaccine dose”

If you were frail, elderly and became seriously ill after being injected with your first gene-vaccine, then died within 21 days, you were counted as a “no effective dose”. If you returned a positive PCR test and your death had no other obvious cause such as trauma then you were a “no effective dose covid death”.

That moves a bunch of “covid deaths” from the “one-dose” category to the “zero-dose” category, distorting the figures.

Screenshot from the S1 supplementary section. Highlighter, border added.

This is especially important as the controversial gene-vaccines themselves have mechanisms that interfere with and suppress the innate immune system (Seneff et al).

This one confound alone should invalidate the study claims - but it doesn’t end there.

The study conflates everyone aged over 50

The vast majority of deaths - 82.7 percent - were in the 70+ age group, according to a breakdown of the NSW Health data in the study’s supplementary section.

Source: S1 supplement from the study

But the study merges everyone over 50 together.

This is a logical fallacy that invites the public and media to extend the “lives saved” claim to younger age groups - to whom it does not apply.

Merging everyone over 50 together is useless because putting frail-aged people over 90 in the same category as a 55-year-old cannot tell us anything meaningful.

In October 2020 (before the gene-vaccine) University of Auckland public health lecturer Simon Thornley and colleagues wrote to the BMJ to warn that the covid infection fatality rate was only similar to seasonal influenza for the under-70s.

“The corrected median estimates of IFP (infection fatality proportion) for people aged lower than 70 years is currently 0.05%, which, for the population less vulnerable to deaths, is similar to influenza. However overall estimates for covid-19 are higher, due to the higher fatality rate in elderly people,” they wrote.

Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis has since confirmed these early estimates showing the infection fatality rate of covid (before gene-vaccines) was 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years, 0.035% at 40–49 years, 0.123% at 50–59 years, and 0.506% at 60–69 years with a combined median of 0.063–0.082% for all under-70s.

The median age of death from covid is older than natural life expectancy.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) found it was 85.5 years for all those who died from covid in Australia to November 2022 (which includes the study’s period of August 2021 to July 2022).

That is higher than life expectancy at birth for both men (81.2 years) and women (85.3 years), according to the ABS, which is the third-highest life-expectancy in the world.

Frail-aged people will be pushed over by anything because they are at the end of their lifespan. Throw in a positive PCR test, smash them in with the 55-year-olds and you’ve just cooked the books.

The study uses case fatality rate for infection fatality rate, overestimating it

The over-all median infection fatality rate of people under 70, without any gene-vaccine, across multiple countries, was found to be 0.063–0.082% (Ioannidis et al).

But the RMIT study authors plugged a figure more than 50 times higher into their modelling.

“We reviewed the public reports of NSW Health, and calculated that from 16 June to 7 October 2021, the case fatality rate (CFR) of Delta outbreak among the unvaccinated 50⁺ population was 4.45%,” they wrote.

You might notice they refer to the case fatality rate not the infection fatality rate.

But the study used the case fatality rate as the infection fatality rate.

“Although the number of infection cases may be under-reported, the crude infection fatality rate (IFR) should be approximated by the CFR. Therefore, we take the CFR of the delta variant as the IFR for 50⁺ unvaccinated in NSW,” they wrote.

The study set the baseline Omicron IFR at 1.38% and the Delta IFR at 4.45% and plugged those numbers in to the modelling.

Stanford Epidemiology Professor John Ioannidis told Letters From Australia via email that this assumption was too high.

“I think given the structure of the NSW population, the IFR in people above 50 is less than 1%, clearly not 4.45%. It would have been preferable to age-stratify, of course, since the risk is dramatically different between a 50-60-year old (roughly 0.12%) and an 80-100-year old (4.45% may be very well appropriate there), increasing about 4-fold for each 10-year increase,” he said.

Confusing infection fatality rate and case fatality rate has previously lead to serious policy errors due to getting the figures wrong.

Canadian public health expert Ronald Brown from the University of Waterloo warned that it was imperative not to confuse fatality rates or misleading calculations with significant consequences would follow.

“Confusion between CFRs and IFRs may seem trivial, and it is easy to overlook at first, but this confusion may have ultimately led to an unintentional miscalculation in coronavirus mortality estimation. IFRs from samples across the population include undiagnosed, asymptomatic, and mild infections, and are often lower compared with CFRs, which are based exclusively on relatively smaller groups of moderately to severely ill diagnosed cases at the beginning of an outbreak,” he wrote in 2020.

Faulty predictive modelling from Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London (funded by the Gates Foundation) confused IFR with CFR early on in the pandemic.

His wrong and discredited estimates led to shutting down most of the English-speaking world unnecessarily ahead of the gene-vaccines.

University of Auckland senior lecturer Simon Thornley warned in the BMJ back in October 2020 that Imperial College had overestimated UK deaths seven-fold.

“Observed fatalities in the UK now show that these models overestimated deaths by seven times … We now know that these projections were too high, and that lockdowns are of questionable value.”

“With” or “from” covid: comorbidities not accounted for

NSW Health’s definition of “covid death”, in the study’s S1 supplementary attachment, is not meaningful because it is confounded by a lack of information about comorbidities.

“According to NSW Health, a COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death in a confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 (e.g., trauma). There should be no period of complete recovery from COVID-19 between illness and death.”

The data from NSW Health cannot show whether a person they counted as a “covid death” would have otherwise lived if they had not been suffering from other problems.

If an 85-year-old person with late-stage pancreatic cancer caught covid, then died of breathing difficulties, they may be listed as a covid death under this definition. Would they have died if they had not had cancer? Or if they had not been 85?

NSW Health cannot say so therefore the study cannot say either - they get plugged into the modelling, giving the wrong result.

Many factors increased the likelihood of death from covid that had nothing to do with the gene-vaccines.

US CDC figures showed that after old age, obesity is the biggest predictor of severe covid. The US data showed 78 percent of adults hospitalised with covid were overweight or obese - before gene-vaccines were available.

The study authors acknowledge the comorbidities problem as a confound.

But then they go on to claim the gene-vaccine “saved” thousands of lives, even though this cannot be supported by the evidence.

You can’t tell anything from this data. The study says nothing meaningful about lives saved.

The only way to tell is by obtaining the all-cause mortality data (not the covid death data) stratified by age and gene-vaccine status (as of date of injection, not later).

Letters From Australia repeatedly asked the federal Department of Health and Aged Care for this figure for more than a year, and it has refused to release it.

Study cannot count those killed by the gene-vaccine

It’s not accurate to say the gene-vaccine “saved lives” if it kills more people from heart attacks, strokes, clots and cancer than it “saves” from covid.

This is especially important as the controversial products were only tested for two-and-a-half months before the control group was injected leaving no comparison group for long-term safety assessments.

Even those rushed trials show a comparatively high rate of deaths and injuries.

Pfizer’s gene-vaccine trial had one more death in the treatment arm than the placebo arm from all causes.

Independent analysis of both the Pfizer and Moderna trial results by Fraiman et al in Vaccine showed a 1-in-800 risk of serious adverse events per “fully vaccinated” dose regimen.

Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, doesn’t even know how many people have died from these provisionally registered products because of a lack of public awareness about the voluntary reporting it relies on as detailed here.

This is yet another confound that shows the claimed information can only be found through the all-cause-mortality figures stratified by gene-vaccine status and age.

Gene-vaccines cannot provide herd immunity

The study authors claim that widespread gene-vaccination reduced deaths in the uninjected population because it conferred “indirect herd immunity effects”, making their wild predictions “conservative” and “under-estimated”.

“Indirect herd immunity effects of vaccinations also affect the calculation but are not accounted for in the data-driven model. Thus the death rates r_k(t) could well be under-estimated for the no vaccination scenario (see Limitations and challenges section below), creating further under-estimation of the total deaths,” the study authors wrote.

This is simply wrong. The gene-vaccines did not provide any herd immunity as they produced blood-borne antibodies that could not prevent or reduce transmission.

It’s not just wrong but obviously untrue. More than 90 percent of Australia’s adult population received multiple doses of the gene-vaccines yet almost everyone had covid multiple times.

This is not due to “waning” but to “negative efficacy” as shown in the 2023 Cleveland Clinic study of more than 48,000 health workers from the USA which found that the risk of covid infection went up with the number of prior doses.

It was also shown in the UK Health Security Agency figures in early 2022, when week after week their tables showed that the more covid shots you got, the more you caught covid - until they were so embarrassed they simply stopped printing the table (see below).

Negative efficacy. Source: UK HSA

This is why Pfizer never tested for transmission. They already knew it was impossible because blood-borne antibodies from an injected gene-vaccine cannot confer mucosal immunity. Covid is spread through the air, entering through your mucosa. Blood-borne antibodies cannot stop it replicating in your mucosa.

For an explanation of this, see emeritus Immunology Professor Robert Clancy’s interview above.

Good data can be found - but not this way

The confounds listed are just some of the obvious ones. More can be found at Raphael Lataster’s takedown here.

The only way to tell whether or not the controversial products saved lives is to get the raw all-cause mortality data stratified by gene-vaccine status (measured as of day of injection) and age.

It is possible to get these figures because accurate data was collected during the pandemic and is held by a variety of federal government agencies.

The federal Department of Health and Aged Care has, however, refused to collate and release this figure despite being asked repeatedly for more than a year.

Conflicts of interest

The major funder of both RMIT and Monash is the Australian Government, which paid RMIT $627 million in 2022. The government pushed the covid-gene vaccines and is liable for the injuries from them, and therefore has a vested interest in promoting good publicity about them.

This conflict was not noted on the PLoS One study, which stated the authors had declared “no competing interets”.

Associate Professor James Trauer, of Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, was a supervising co-author of the RMIT study.

Monash University is promoting the mRNA gene-vaccines because Moderna set up its mRNA factory on Monash’s campus.

Monash and Moderna are a public-private partnership creating new training programs for Monash in the mRNA product pipeline including clinical trials and manufacturing.

This conflict was not noted on the study.

Associate Professor Trauer’s profile reveals that since 2020, he has worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) developing a platform to support epidemiological modelling for pandemic control.

The WHO and its second-largest donor the Gates Foundation are major promoters of the covid gene-vaccines

For a break-down of how the WHO works with Cepi, the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation to push Big Pharma products see this piece here.

Associate Professor Trauer is also a chief investigator in the PROPHECY study which is funded by the gene-vaccine promoting Burnet Institute and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, both of which are funded by the Gates Foundation. Burnet Institute director Brendan Crabb is on the Victorian Government’s mRNA advisory group promoting the gene-vaccine technology.

This conflict was not noted on the study.

While not a conflict, it is worth noting that the study’s corresponding author, editor and reviewer Lewi Stone has previously used mathematical modelling to make similar claims that more than 1.5 million deaths “were averted” in 12 countries by the gene-vaccine products, backed by similar assumptions.

FLAWED STUDY BECOMES FAKE NEWS

The press release

Four academics featured on the press release with potted statements ready for media organisations to choose from, contactable for customised quotes.

Only one, Paul Griffin, listed conflicts of interest: as principal investigator on several covid vaccine studies, speaking honoraria and serving on covid vaccine company advisory boards.

It doesn’t mention that he’s also a board member of the Immunisation Coalition that receives funding from gene-vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna.

It also doesn’t mention that his university, The University of Queensland, has partnered with Big Pharma giant Sanofi to build an mRNA hub.

So his employer is about to manufacture the “safe and effective” mRNA products that he touts as “one of the greatest achievements of medical science”.

The press release also doesn’t mention that Adrian Esterman has won multiple research grants (some ongoing) from the NHMRC - whose leadership board was stacked with state chief medical officers politically invested in pushing the gene-vaccines.

He also worked for 7 years as a staff member of the WHO in Geneva and Copenhagen - the same organisation pushing the gene-vaccine products globally.

Professor Esterman said he was not conflicted by these links.

“I have no links to pharmas and I am not reliant on NHMRC for grant income – I base whatever I say on the most recent scientific evidence,” he told Letters From Australia via email.

“I am not sure why you are having a go at World Health. They are by no means perfect, and have become too political for my liking. However, most of their funding now comes from organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plus country contributions. They are certainly not beholden to pharmaceutical companies.”

For a break-down of how the WHO works with Cepi, the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation to push products for Big Pharma see this post here.

The press release doesn’t mention that Tony Blakely an epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, is not impartial. He publicly promoted the gene-vaccines for years and co-authored the modelling that prolonged the Victorian lockdown with the failed ‘elimination strategy’, as reported by the AFR in 2020.

In 2021 Professor Blakely said covid would become “largely a childhood infection” in the AFR despite children being mostly unaffected then pushed the gene-vaccine for children as young as five under threat of not lifting lockdowns.

He is also the Affiliate Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington which in turn received more than $100 million in funding from the Gates Foundation since 2007.

The University of Melbourne where he also works has also received more than $6 million in funding from the Gates Foundation since 2009.

The universities are not independent

Australia’s news media accepts university medical stories straight from the press release without skeptical questioning.

Corporate outlets Nine and News Ltd appear not to have read the supplementary material - or even the study - before turning its wild claims into fake news.

This coverage amplified the assertions which were then widely re-reported.

Corporate news outlets quote each other as canon, wrongly assuming the first reports have scrutinised the source. This repetition turns claims into fake facts.

They do this because journalists are time-poor and conditioned to trust university academics as independent and qualified. When they seek unique quotes they often just ring the exact same people on the presser.

But universities are not independent. They rely on government and industry funding.

In some science stories this won’t matter. But in this case the Australian Government pushed the gene-vaccine and is liable for injuries from it, so it has a political interest in shielding the products from blame.

The universities are operating as public-private partnerships, promoting mRNA gene-vaccine industry ties for research funding, employment opportunities and prestige.

Global drug giants including Pfizer, Moderna, Sanofi, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), Roche, Bayer, Gilead and AstraZeneca can buy influence over Australia’s universities with partnerships.

The University of Queensland has partnered with Big Pharma giant Sanofi to build an mRNA hub with funds from the Medical Research Future Fund (influenced by the NHMRC).

The University of Adelaide is also building an mRNA plant together with Big Pharma subcontract firm BioCina, with money from the NHMRC and Adelaide Government.

BioCina is partnering with NovaCina, part of the Bridgewest group, to finish off the product in Western Australia, tying in the University of Western Australia with mRNA research funds.

The University of Adelaide’s medical faculty also works with the pharmaceutical industry and state/federal governments both directly and through its hospital research institutes.

In Victoria, Monash University partnered with Moderna to build an mRNA factory on its campus, using money from the Federal Government, Victorian Government and Moderna.

The factory is expected to be ready this year, to pump out 100 million doses per year “for respiratory viruses”. Victoria is also building an mRNA ecosystem, dishing out funding to numerous groups to advance the technology.

In February last year, Letters From Australia put through media requests to Australia’s top 10 universities including RMIT and Monash to ask how much money they received in the past five years from the drug giants.

Neither of them answered. All the universities wanted fees to process a freedom of information request (with no guarantee of answers), so the request died for lack of funds.

Some idea of the industry’s billion-dollar reach can be gleaned from MTPConnect, a non-profit started by the Federal Government in 2015 to foster university research ties to corporations and government.

MTP Connect reports that a total of $1.4 billion was spent on clinical trials in 2019, of which three quarters is paid by corporations who sponsor about a third of all trials in an attempt to commercialise intellectual property.

Most major universities sell themselves as a “partner of choice” for industry to encourage research funding growth.

This fosters an academic culture favourable to Big Pharma and informally restricts academic freedom.

The universities will not offer experts for comment if those experts will say things that damage the university’s industry-friendly brand. NSW University suddenly couldn’t find an expert to comment for a story on under-reporting in Australia’s drug-safety system last year, despite being quick to comment on covid in the past.

Academics must also apply for research grants - and those grants are issued by organisations whose leaders have a political interest in the covid gene-vaccines.

The Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) give out $1.5 billion in grants each year, according to Federal Health Minister Mark Butler.

The NHMRC and Business Grants Hubs administer these grants, giving the NHMRC the whip hand over the bulk of the nation’s grant funding.

The council of the NHMRC, which influences its policies and culture, includes the state and commonwealth chief medical officers - all of whom pushed the gene-vaccines during the pandemic and are politically invested in promoting positive news about what they pushed.

The NHMRC is an independent statutory agency in the federal Health Minister’s portfolio that advises the government and connects academics with industry - and it has a gene-vaccine-promoting culture.

The NHMRC leadership and governance committee members from 2018 to 2021 included Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton, NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant, Commonwealth chief health officer Paul Kelly. All pushed the gene-vaccines.

So the agency that funds research has multiple leaders who are deeply politically invested in supporting the exact same gene-vaccines that the RMIT study touts.

When asked if the NHMRC has a culture that promotes gene-vaccines indirectly through grant allocation, the NHMRC wouldn’t say. Instead they said grant applications are independently assessed by expert reviewers against published criteria.

Are academics really free to dissent when this might anger the universities, corporations, lobby groups and agencies that fund their research and pay their wages?

Professor Esterman said yes, he is free to say what he thinks (full response at bottom).

But then he never challenged the covid gene-vaccines.

Those who did were not quoted in university press releases. They were immediately marginalised.

This happened to Canadian vaccinologist Dr Byram Bridle after he was the first to raise the alarm about the covid gene-vaccine biodistribution taking it everywhere in the body. He filed a $3m lawsuit against the University of Guelph in 2022 for harassment and personal attacks. As of April he’d been locked out * of his laboratory and office for 1000 days.

Top experts worldwide who have been marginalised for criticising the mRNA gene-vaccines include:

• Harvard University Epidemiology Professor Martin Kulldorff who has now been sacked by Harvard for co-signing the Great Barrington Declaration.

• University of London Oncology Professor Angus Dalgleish who warns here that the booster shots cause cancer through immune suppression.

• University of Newcastle immunology Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy who warns here that multiple gene-vaccines cause long covid (long vax).

• UK Cardiologist Aseem Malhotra who gave evidence to the Helsinki District Court that the covid gene-shots accelerate heart disease and cause heart attacks, and that this was covered up.

• US Cardiologist Peter McCullough who warned the European Parliament that the covid gene-vaccines cause substantial heart damage and blood clots. He also warns that the WHO is pushing the gene-vaccines in a syndicate with the Gates Foundation, Cepi, Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum, which represents the world’s largest corporations.

• University of Queensland Psychiatry Associate Professor Peter Parry who gave evidence that the iatrogenic consequences of the covid vaccines have been overlooked by manufacturers for whom the criminal fines are less than the profits.

• US Critical Care specialist Pierre Kory who warned in a recent interview that the US 2023 excess deaths - including from the covid gene-vaccines - reveal more people killed than in the Vietnam War.

• Australian Pharmacologist and regulatory expert Phillip Altman who testified to a cross-party inquiry that Australia’s drug safety system is so broken that deaths caused by the gene-vaccines are not being counted by Australia’s drug regulator.

• US Critical Care specialist Paul Marik who spoke out about how doctors were prevented from treating covid patients in 2020 as treatments were suppressed to enable EUA authorisation for the gene-vaccines.

• UK toxicologist and former Pfizer vice president (head of allergy research global) Dr Mike Yeadon who warned for years that the gene-vaccines were toxic by design and would inevitably hurt and kill people.

• US Pathologist Ryan Cole who has warned of multiple problems including the presence of gene-vaccine spikes in the heart and testes, immune suppression and decreased tumour surveillance.

• US genomics expert Kevin McKernan who found DNA contamination exceeding safety standards in the Pfizer and Moderna shots from the manufacturing process.

• German microbiologist Sucharit Bhakdi who warns that mRNA technology is dangerous as it hijacks your cells to produce non-human proteins triggering immune dysfunction.

It is worth noting that the dissenting experts who criticise the covid gene-vaccines are often retired scientists and emeritus professors - the only people who cannot be professionally persecuted for speaking against the narrative.

Not only are there punishments for dissenters but there are carrots for those who pander to power. They enjoy career advancement and proximity to power.

US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his famous 1961 farewell address, warned of the corrupting effect of centralising power in a scientific elite. He named it as a major threat to democracy, whose undue influence needed to be guarded against.

“The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity…

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Scientific dissent has been suppressed in a way that was previously unimaginable.

This has enabled monopoly capitalist Bill Gates to continue pushing mRNA gene-vaccine technology globally through his billion-dollar Gates Foundation and its related entities Cepi and the WHO (see Dr John Campbell video below).

Factories are being built worldwide, creating manufacturing ecosystems in third-world countries that benefit local elites.

These local elites will profit from producing mRNA vaccines, ensuring the factories will be embedded securely. But all the while they will be using patented mRNA technology, sending intellectual property revenue stream upward to Moderna, the patent holder for mRNA platform.

Mussolini’s definition of fascism was the marriage of corporation and state. Ask yourself: is that what we are witnessing here? And if so, what are we to do?

REPLIES AND EXPERT COMMENT

Letters From Australia sought comment via email from the following for this story:

The RMIT Media Unit, Monash Media, Lewi Stone (RMIT) as corresponding study author, NSW Health, PLoS One, Nine reporter Daniel Jeffrey, Nine deputy editor Tim Rose, Associate Professor Paul Griffin, Professor Adrian Esterman and Professor Tony Blakely.

• PLoS One told Letters From Australia that it is investigating the issues raised regarding this study.

“We’re currently investigating the issues raised regarding this study. PLOS ONE adheres to the highest editorial standards in its publication process, and when questions arise post publication, we follow PLOS policies and the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) guidelines to resolve the case. These cases take time, and we cannot comment further on a pending case. We can let you know when the case is resolved,” said Head of Communications David Knutson, via email.

• The NHMRC was asked whether it had a culture that promotes the gene-vaccines, and whether the presence of gene-vaccine promoting chief health officers in its leadership team had indirectly discouraged academic criticism of these products through grant allocation.

An NHMRC spokesperson replied as follows:

“NHMRC welcomes all grant applications relevant to human health through a range of competitive grant programs. NHMRC predominantly funds investigator-initiated research – that is research teams have the freedom to decide their research area and strategy prior to submitting an application to receive NHMRC funding. Grants are assessed independently by expert reviewers against the published criteria for each program with the best science and most significant research applications funded based on the available funding allocation for that grant program.

The Medical Research Future Fund, managed by the Health and Medical Research Office at the Department of Health and Aged Care, complements NHMRC funding by supporting priority-driven research.”

• Monash Media responded: “This study was led by RMIT, so you'll need to direct any questions there.”

• RMIT acknowledged receipt of the questions but did not email any response.

• Professor Adrian Esterman responded promptly via email to defend the study.

Letters From Australia thanks him for his response which is printed in full below along with the questions for context.

It is worth mentioning that he engaged in an ad-hominem attack, accusing me of being an “antivaxxer”, because I asked adversarial questions.

It was surprising to see a professor use the hate-speech term “antivaxxer”, a pejorative used by drug-pushers during covid to silence criticism of the gene-vaccine.

The term “antivaxxer” vilified and marginalised people so their questions could be ignored as terrible things were done to them, such as excluding them from jobs, travel and public life.

This is the exact same way that dehumanising terms were used to marginalise other groups in history, such as black people in 1950s America - so they could be ignored as they were excluded from jobs, travel and public life.

The term “antivaxxer” discourages questioning of the covid gene-vaccines in case the critic finds themselves smeared, regardless of their view of vaccination in general.

Shortly before he died, legendary astrophysicist Carl Sagan said science is not a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking based on skepticism and questioning.

It is imperative that people be allowed to question and challenge those in authority, he said.

In his last interview, he warned:

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along. It's a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a Constitution or a Bill of Rights. The people had to be educated, and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Oherwise we don't run the government—the government runs us.” - Carl Sagan, 1996

Professor Adrian Esterman’s response (and questions) below in full

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Edits: 13 May 2024, added graphic screenshot from the S1 supplementary with the definition of “no effective dose”, adds Monash Media / RMIT lack of response.

Update: 06 September 2024. PLoS One investigation results

In an email dated 23 August, but seen only today, PLoS One responded that they have discussed the study with a member of the Editorial Board and will not take editorial action on this case.

PLoS One did not have a problem with the researchers counting vaccinated deaths as “unvaccinated” for 21 days after injection, as they state in their addendum, or substituting the (much higher) case fatality rate for the (much lower) infection fatality rate in their modelling, producing an inflated “number of lives saved”.

“The issues you highlighted regarding the validity of the conclusions were not confirmed following discussion with a member of the Editorial Board, and no additional issues of concern were identified,” a PLoS One spokesman said via email.

The spokesman said that the study authors’ competing interests, for example that Monash University, which employs a senior researcher on the study, is a partner in Moderna’s mRNA factory which will be completed on Monash’s campus this year, are not enough of a conflict to require being mentioned according to their policies.

“The concerns raised would not meet the definition of competing interests that require disclosure per our policy,” he said.

“We do not plan to take editorial action on the article at this time, and we are closing this case.”