Dear all,
Australians for Science and Freedom is gaining members and building our reputation as a place where free-thinking individuals are supported to dream of and build towards a better future for Australia as we emerge together from the covid era. I’m delighted to announce that the inaugural ASF conference, “Progress through Science and Freedom”, will be held at UNSW’s Kensington campus from November 17 through 19, 2023. More details will be available in the next Voices newsletter, including how to register. For now, please note the dates of this forward-focussed event that will feature many of the ASF team as well as thinkers, organisers and leaders from across the Australian resistance and across the professions, exchanging reform and restoration ideas in health, education, policy, law, media, and society. Many of the topics about which you’ve been reading thoughts and analysis on the ASF site – including higher education reform, medical freedom, media censorship (also happening in spades here in Australia), and social decay – will be discussed at the conference.
If you or someone you know would be interested in helping fund ASF’s November conference, please let me know over email (gigi.foster@scienceandfreedom.org) or make a donation to ASF here: https://www.scienceandfreedom.org/donate/.
In addition to my writings for the Brownstone Institute (whose early-November conference in Dallas should be a blast) and ASF, I spoke together with several others at the Down the Rabbit Hole Ball in Sydney organised by Andrew Madry at the end of April. You may find useful this paper I recently released with the Centre for Independent Studies detailing the costs paid by young people for covid policy mistakes (based on my and Sanjeev Sabhlok’s 2022 cost-benefit analysis of Australian covid lockdowns, and covered in an op-ed in the AFR) and two recent interviews (here and here) with Paul Brennan on New Zealand’s Reality Check Radio. I was also interviewed recently on the George Christensen Show and will be speaking this weekend at the annual Liberty Gala in Melbourne.
Since I last wrote, in the face of mounting pocketbook pain it has become possible even in polite company to state unequivocally that lockdowns were a disaster (a conclusion arrived at again and again by analysts) and that our present economic woes are in large part attributable to covid policy failures. US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has publicly opined that freedom restrictions in the name of emergencies can leave a society with only a “shell of democracy”.
Whether the mass-scale covid vaccine rollout, complete with coercion and social disapprobation for those who failed to comply, was a good idea is still a delicate topic – but at least one can now mention covid vaccine side effects (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; those with post-covid-vaccine illness may wish to consult here, here, and here), if not their inefficacy, without people’s jaws dropping. The TGA finally unblocked ivermectin (which, with Australia’s high and plateaued vax rate, no longer threatens vaccine up-take) – though it also granted full (overwriting ‘provisional’) registration to the Moderna Spikevax vaccine, while the data management practices at NSW Health that underpin the state’s ability to transparently report on covid vaccine effects have been revealed to be comically incompetent. A class action lawsuit over covid vaccine injuries has been launched in Queensland and other large-scale legal activity in this area is brewing, notwithstanding the lack of success by the heroic team that launched the Australian Babies Case.
In the US, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine held two long professional meetings (the second with public comments) reviewing the literature about covid vaccine effects, while Switzerland became the latest Western country to stop recommending the covid vaccines to the general public. Soon after covid vaccine sceptic Aseem Malhotra toured Australia drawing crowds and getting covered even on news.com, outspoken vaccine advocate Peter Hotez refused to debate noted vaccine critic (and now US presidential candidate, with Ed Dowd as co-treasurer) Robert F. Kennedy Jr on Joe Rogan’s podcast, even for $1.5 million donated to his charity of choice. Even those enthralled with the covid vaccines must wonder what he is afraid of. On the other side of the political aisle, Ron DeSantis is calling for a covid “reckoning” for the US mainstream establishment in charge during covid, even while US President Biden officially declared the covid “emergency” “over” and clearly culpable CDC head Rochelle Walensky became the latest rat (also see here) to quietly flee the ship. While talking heads spar in public, excess deaths continue worldwide with nary a whisper of attention on mainstream media, and outrageously, the Australian Senate outright rejected a need to investigate them. Still, some covid-era leaders are feeling enough pressure to try to re-write history, and biopharmaceutical top brass are likely sweating in private in foreboding over increasing revelations (see here, here, and here) about the depths of their companies’ malfeasance.
Recently, ASF’s Julie Sladden wrote a scathing piece on the militarisation of medicine for Spectator magazine, Graham Young (Executive Director of the Australian Institute for Progress, and member of the ASF executive) gave the Australian Human Rights Commission a spray on Spectator TV, and courageous Australian investigators have uncovered evidence of sweeping government censorship. While selected publications publish courageous pieces (also see here) and individual people and groups in our country fight in various corners (e.g., see here, here, here, here, here and here), Australia still searches for a collective post-covid voice (beyond calling for fire and brimstone against RBA governor Philip Lowe), and many covid-era mandates persist.
The Kiwis have made a film about their covid policy protests, while other organisations overseas are hosting frank discussions with concerned scientists, promoting fruitful across-the-aisle communication, tackling government censorship in the courts, helping doctors and victims rediscover their critical thought and their ethical compass, empowering and protecting the sick and vulnerable, doing their own investigations of vaccine side effects, putting together networks to facilitate patient access to donated blood from unvaxxed people, encouraging citizens to find their voices, legally demanding that people in power correct their lies, and bringing global thought leaders together to create a positive vision for humanity’s future (hang on, does that lattermost bit sound eerily like ‘WEF Mach 2’? I’ll be attending the ARC’s inaugural global meeting later this year in London, and shall report back on that point.) While the non-covid-fetishising Amish are looking good, covid policy inquiries of various stripes have begun in the UK, Canada, the US, and elsewhere, including in the ivory tower – and the third international covid summit was held in the European Parliament.
In the academic and medical arena we have seen a take-down of the TOGETHER trial which was initially billed as finding no efficacy of ivermectin in treating covid, an investigation of the harms of masking, a new book on the covid vaccines, and a review by an academic of the deluge of censorship faced by his ilk during the covid era.
Some other recent developments of note:
- Tucker Carlson was booted from Fox News for what appears to have been a professionally fatal case of wrongspeak
- Israel officially admits that nobody young and healthy died of covid, notwithstanding all the hoo-hah
- Even the Guardian reports on a media censorship controversy involving Naomi Wolf
- Rowan Atkinson articulately defends free speech
- A teacher writes of the attacks on him for merely doing his duty to try to protect children during the covid madness
- A French doctor grapples with covid-era (im)morality of his profession
- Some advice for coping with information overload
- A resource (focussed mainly though not only on Canada) tracking excess deaths and other fallout from the covid response, under the clever tagline, “You can lead the Hordes to Data, but you cannot make them Think”
- A public survey of views on the covid vaccines
- A place to tell the story of how covid policies affected you
- An organisation helping local communities organise (see also this one)
- A description of the horrific conditions endured by patients in hospitals receiving financial incentives unaligned with patient wellbeing (also see here)
- The UK starts allowing questionably-qualified people to join the National Health Service that is riddled with staffing woes
- As yet another sign of the continuing madness, a mother of seven in the US is rejected for a kidney transplant because of her unvaxxed status
- A creepy animated short film
There is still clearly much work to be done to restore morality, critical thought, tolerance and freedom to their proper places of honour in society, not to mention to heal the many wounds of this period. To help us along, some humour:
Remember to mark your calendar for the ASF conference (17-19 November at UNSW in Sydney) and please continue to send me material for these newsletters, which I plan to continue compiling quarterly until at least the end of the year.
Until next time, be strong and show your love.
gigi
