Censorship: a threat to public health and safety?

Practitioners are the bulwark between people, weak or corrupt leaders, captured authorities, and powerful vested interests. This bulwark is being slowly dismantled through severe censure, and punishment, posing a serious threat to public health and safety. Practitioners who dutifully use their intellectual freedom and right to political communication to speak what they believe in defence of patients and the public find it costs them their entire career.

Censoring the medical frontline during this pandemic as a means to create confidence in government public health messaging and combat vaccine hesitancy is proving to be a very grave error indeed. In the name of ‘keeping us safe’, authorities silenced doctors and partnered with big tech to withhold and control information. As they say, a terrified and deceived public is a compliant public.

In contradiction to our pandemic preparedness plans, the frontline was censored: denying every Australian fully informed valid consent. This apparent unconstitutional threat to medico’s made by AHPRA and National boards on 9 March 2021 poses, in my opinion, a continuing risk to public health and safety. Unelected medical bureaucrats refuse to discuss the secret health advice, and also refuse to allow open scientific discourse. This is extremely odd behaviour.

If evidence shows government Covid public health policy is causing an iatrogenic catastrophe rather than a measurable benefit, doctors and nurses have a moral, legal, and scientific duty to warn people. National and International laws, agreements, and regulation from Nuremberg to the Health Practitioners Regulation National Law reinforce the duty of physicians to serve humanity and to first do no harm. If policy created at the ‘speed of science’ appears to be neither safe nor effective, the community expects protective action. Doctors must be permitted to use their constitutional right of intellectual freedom and political communication to save lives even from State-sanctioned policies. This is clearly outlined in the recent Ridd vs James Cook University High Court case;

‘Intellectual freedom plays “an important ethical role not just in the lives of the few people it protects, but in the life of the community more generally” to ensure the primacy of individual conviction: “not to profess what one believes to be false” and “a duty to speak out for what one believes to be true”.’

And the Nuremberg code deals with,

‘…The principle of voluntary informed consent protects the right of the individual to control his own body.

 

‘This code also recognises that the risk must be weighed against the expected benefit, and that unnecessary pain and suffering must be avoided.

 

‘This code recognises that doctors should avoid actions that injure human patients.’

What has unfolded over the last few years is what Professor Jay Bhattacharya called ‘the greatest public health mistake in human history’. The medical misinformation that has characterised the Covid pandemic is unparalleled. For a disease with a highly stratified median infection fatality rate of 0.05 per cent in 2020, similar to the seasonal flu, with healthy children having a statistically 0 per cent risk, we locked down the country and much of the world, casting about 150 million people into extreme poverty. On flawed modelling governments forced quarantined, separated families, let people die alone, impaired child development, closed businesses, shot their own people with rubber bullets, amassed generational debt, and made livelihood conditional on submitting to participation in what former Health Minister Greg Hunt called the world’s largest clinical trial.

Governments in cahoots with medical authorities supported the mandating of potentially dangerous experimental novel gene-based countermeasures, that were never tested for transmission, with a less than 1 per cent absolute risk reduction that were not tested for genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, or reproductive toxicity, with literally zero long term safety data. All while indemnifying manufacturers in secret contracts, reducing legislative safety and efficacy requirements, silencing doctors, and banning early treatments that showed great promise. All of this was supported by AHPRA and the National Boards silencing of health professionals for our ‘safety’.

We have witnessed a never-ending stream of manipulated data, politically based medicine, behavioural nudge units, and secret health advice maintained by intense censorship, suppression, and reprisal. The ultimate goal it seems was to terrify the populace so they would submit to a coercive global vaccination campaign. We continue to witness what Dr Aseem Malhotra describes as ‘the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetime’. Medical ethics, the precautionary principle, due diligence, and transparency are now concepts relegated to historical fiction rather than time-honoured codes.

Today, according to medical regulators, raising safety concerns through data and evidence is not considered a moral professional obligation but unprofessional bullying and harassment that requires either re-education or immediate suspension of one’s registration to practise.

When data does not support the government narrative, the apparent correct response regulators expect from practitioners is to stay silent while authorities simply stop reporting it, as demonstrated recently by NSW Health. Can’t have the truth getting in the way of a good public health crisis… It seems stating facts is now considered professional misconduct because it might demonstrate a failure of government policy and undermine confidence in the ‘message’.

During the time of Covid we have witnessed the destruction of bioethics and human rights by the very authorities and institutions entrusted to uphold them. This system abuse has resulted in policies that have caused harm. Exactly how much harm is yet to be revealed. Increasing all cause mortality, serious adverse reactions, and declining birth rates commensurate with the vaccine rollout are not painting a pretty picture. A recent Rasmussen report showed ‘more than 1-in-4 think someone they know died from Covid Vaccines’. How much longer before the number of coincidences makes the ‘safe and effective’ mantra impossible to believe?

There are doctors and scientists across the country trying to raise safety signals, seeking answers to questions, writing letters, applying for FOI’s, and sending reports as they fight to fulfil their codes and oaths. They are heroes, great lights in this nightmare, sacrificing careers and livelihood to adhere to time-honoured codes and ethics. We need real debate, open scientific discourse, acknowledgement of injuries, and access to unredacted data. For our medical authorities and political leaders to continue to enforce censorship in the face of possibly the greatest public health mistake in human history, an iatrogenic miscarriage of medical science causing untold harm shows a reckless indifference for the sufferings of Australians.

The curtailment of practitioners’ intellectual freedom and political communication, by AHPRA and National Boards, appears to be in breach of the constitution, professional codes, and international ethical declarations. The current enforced censorship has undermined confidence in public health and continues to pose a serious threat to public health and safety. Censorship kills confidence, destroys trust, costs lives and it must stop.

Kara Thomas is the Secretary of the Australian Medical Professionals Society

Original publication 15 February 2023 in The Spectator