Is this the first significant crack in the dam? This week, the UK Telegraph ran a story that should be extremely distressing to all Australians, and even more so to certain politicians, health bureaucrats, medical authorities and CEOs. It concerns the increasingly credible claims of the deadly potential of the Covid mRNA vaccines. ‘Covid vaccines could be partly to blame for the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic, scientists have suggested,’ said the disturbing article by science editor Sarah Knapton. ‘Researchers from The Netherlands analysed data from 47 Western countries and discovered there had been more than three million excess deaths since 2020, with the trend continuing despite the rollout of vaccines and containment measures.’ Her article was based on a paper in the respected medical journal BMJ Public Health.

Ms Knapton then went on to detail the failure of health authorities to adequately explore the well-documented rise in excess mortality rates in many countries, and included a somewhat unnerving diagram showing how risky AstraZeneca was for the under-50s compared to other causes of death, such as scuba diving, receiving a general anaesthetic, drowning in the bath and so on.

Furthermore, the researchers paper which she quoted suggested that it was ‘likely’ that lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, curfews and all the other ‘quarantine restrictions’ had contributed to the rise in excess deaths. To say it was not a comforting read is to put it mildly. To top it all off, the article also explained that many serious, vaccine-related, adverse ‘events’ have gone unreported.

In other words, people may have died or been injured due to coercion by governments, health authorities, the media, Big Tech and Big Business which in essence amounted to mandatory vaccination – in clear breach of international health protocols since the second world war. Call it manslaughter or malpractice or political malfeasance, it all amounts to the same thing if you lost a loved one. It seems there are parents, relatives, friends and spouses who may be grieving for the deaths of people who should never have died, who may well have not wanted to take the vaccine, and whose deaths it would appear did nothing to protect anybody else.

Who might be to blame? Will they ever be held to account? Would any of our political leaders have made different choices back then around lockdowns or labelling Covid-19 ‘the pandemic of the unvaccinated’ had they known what we now know about transmission or the efficacy and safety of vaccines? And if so, should they now apologise?

This magazine, alone among the mainstream Australian media, and indeed alone among most of the Western press, was adamantly opposed to any form of mandatory vaccination from the moment the Diamond Princess first sailed over the horizon and into the headlines. We editorialised against mandates from before the vaccines even existed, as politicians like Australia’s then prime minister Scott Morrison began insisting that vaccination when it arrived should be ‘as mandatory as is possible’. No, we said, it should not. Anything other than voluntary vaccination is and was a clear breach of the well-known concept of informed consent, we argued. We also queried from the get-go what evidence there was to support the (false) claim that the vaccines prevented transmission of the virus.

In article after article by writers such as Rebecca Weisser, Ramesh Thakur, James Allan, David Flint, David Adler, Rowan Dean, Robert Clancy, Julie Sladden, Alexandra Marshall and many others, both in this magazine and on our online Flat White, we opposed the insanity of lockdowns, the foolish futility of authoritarian social distancing, the stupidity of ubiquitous mask-wearing and the immorality of vaccine mandates. More recently, several of those same writers have explored the chilling data surrounding excess mortality.

So the UK Telegraph article will have come, perhaps, as less of a surprise to readers of The Spectator Australia than to consumers of other Australian or international media. Coincidentally or otherwise, this magazine, unlike virtually every other mainstream media outlet we can think of, does not look to lucrative advertising commissions from Big Pharma or from government to swell our coffers.

So where to from here? Will this study and report be a one-off, quickly dismissed by the usual suspects and soon forgotten? Already the claims in the article have been rejected by the ‘experts’. When Senator Ralph Babet from the United Australia party managed to get a Senate investigation up into the causes behind the rise in excess mortality data, the federal Health Department was adamant: ‘There is no credible evidence to suggest that Covid-19 vaccines have contributed to excess deaths in Australia or overseas.’

What was it Mandy Rice-Davies famously once said?