Human Rights Make a Brief Appearance in ‘Bombshell’ COVID-19 Vaccine Ruling

For the first time in Australia, a court has ruled mandatory COVID-19 vaccination unlawful.

People stand outside a vaccination clinic at Slacks Creek in Brisbane, Australia on June 29, 2021. Jono Searle/Getty Images

Commentary

The other day, I received multiple excitable alerts from many sources telling me about a “bombshell” judgment from the Queensland Supreme Court.

Around 85 police and ambulance workers filed three suits against vaccination mandates issued in 2021-22.

For the first time in Australia, a court has ruled mandatory COVID vaccination unlawful. And on human rights grounds too.

Since from the earliest days, I had vigorously opposed COVID restrictions, most strongly on human rights and civil liberties grounds, I decided to check it out. While the judgment is pleasing, it’s not really all that exciting and deserves, at best, two cheers and not three.

This is so because the judgment (pdf) was essentially based on technical procedural lapses on the part of the police commissioner and the director-general (DG) of the Department of Health.

Under section 58 of the Human Rights Act, the employer is required to take into consideration the human rights implications of any directive to the workforce.

In a nutshell, if the police commissioner had been able to show that she had received, considered, and only then rejected any human rights advice, the vaccination mandate for Queensland police would have been lawful.

Officers of the two affected services provided expert advice on numerous studies and surveys on the transmissibility of COVID-19 variants and the efficacy of various vaccines. But the court decided the application on different issues.

The commissioner “was provided with Human Rights Compatibility Assessments” but “she did not consider them before making the directions. As a result, the decisions and the directions were unlawful.”

The DG claimed his orders were valid “because he had the power under an implied term of the employment agreements” for the ambulance service employees. The court held that he had failed to prove his contention.

Accordingly, the court set aside the commissioner’s order as unlawful and ordered her not to take any further action to enforce them. The DG was restrained from taking any action under his directions.

In addition to this procedural invalidation of the two orders, the court also agreed that the directions limited the human rights of employees because they were required to undergo medical treatment (a vaccination) without “full, free, and informed consent.”

An ambulance is seen outside of Melbourne Medical Centre at Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, on April 17, 2020. Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

However, the court held this to be reasonable in the prevailing circumstances of a public health emergency. The two services were trying to protect their workers against infection, serious illness, and life-changing health consequences.

The Queensland judgment follows a New Zealand court judgment just over a week earlier that held the New Zealand Defence Force vaccine mandate for soldiers to be unlawful.

We Need a Court to Examine the Merit of Mandates

What is yet to be decided, or even considered seriously, by a court is the substantive merits of COVID vaccine mandates. We need forensic scrutiny and tough cross-examination, in an Australian trial court, of several critical questions.

Firstly, where is the Australian data to establish the seriousness of the threat from COVID-19, broken down by age groups?

Authorities seem to have taken at face value highly dubious data from one city, Wuhan, in one country, China, on the infection and case fatality rates.

Did Australian authorities conduct representative seroprevalence surveys to estimate with reasonable accuracy the spread and timing of the infection in Australia in order to calculate the two fatality rates?

The early data, for example from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, showed conclusively that in the real world, under conditions most favourable for the virus to strike elderly people in regular contact with one another, this coronavirus was far from instantly lethal for the vast majority of the control population.

Of the 3,711 people on board, 712 were infected and 14 died.

A man cycles past city buses (back L) lined up to transport the first batch of passengers disembarking from the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the Daikoku Pier Cruise Terminal in Yokohama on Feb. 19, 2020. Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images

Subsequent data, from the U.S. and French warships, the Theodore Roosevelt (one dead of 4,085 sailors) and Charles de Gaulle (zero deaths among 1,767 crew), showed that fit and healthy young people were at vanishingly low risk of serious illness and death.

Both backed up accumulating data to confirm that the survival rate from COVID-19 infections was over 98 percent.

Australia was especially fortunate in its geographical location, climate, lifestyle, and housing patterns and should have experienced lower fatality rates than Europe and the United States.

Another Issue is Vaccine Efficacy

The second set of questions should address vaccine efficacy, effectiveness, side-effects, and harms-benefits equations for different age groups.

Since COVID-19 mRNA vaccines used a revolutionary new platform and were rushed into emergency use approval, ongoing monitoring of effectiveness and safety should have been more, not less, rigorous.

Most importantly, if, as is now universally conceded, the “vaccines” were not tested for and did not prevent either infection or transmission, then what medical justification was used by the authorities to mandate them for anyone, including healthcare and emergency services workers?

Nurses are seen doing COVID-19 testing at a drive-thru fever clinic in Ipswich in Brisbane, Australia, on Aug. 24, 2020. Glenn Hunt/Getty Images

“Efficacy” refers to the results obtained under tightly controlled conditions in the laboratory, while “effectiveness’” uses the hard data from the real world (that is, it doesn’t come to modelling-based conclusions that millions of lives were saved).

Did Australian regulators approve the vaccines after requiring locally conducted efficacy and safety trials? Were the data and results from the pharmaceutical companies from tests done overseas trustworthy, or massaged to exaggerate the efficacy and downplay the limitations and harms?

For example, defining people as unvaccinated until 14 days after their second dose, distorted the vaccine injury statistics broken down by vaccination status.

It also potentially exaggerates the benefits, because it attributes immunity after that period to vaccines and neglects the possibility of someone acquiring natural immunity through previous infection before that date.

Sooner or later, either the courts (preferably), or at least a fully empowered and robustly empanelled royal commission, must address the biggest elephant in the room.

The age gradient of the risk profile of COVID-19, and also of vaccine injuries, was exceptionally steep for different age groups.

Why did the authorities fail to tailor vaccine rollout strategies that would have targeted those most at risk and not infringed on the liberties and rights of the vast majority?

Only after the above questions have been addressed, will the courts be in a position to examine the compatibility of COVID-19 vaccine mandates with human rights protections enshrined in state and national laws, and also in international conventions.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.