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COVID emergency ends, COVID reckoning begins?

In brief
  • The US and the World Health Organization have declared an end to the global COVID emergency, but it continues in NZ law.
  • Many lawsuits and investigations around the world are examining the harms of COVID mandates and vaccines.
  • All over the world, COVID vaccines have reported rates of deaths and injuries drastically higher than flu vaccines.

No more COVID emergency

On 5 May 2023 the World Health Organization (WHO) ended its global emergency status for COVID-19, over three years after its original declaration. The US followed suit a week later, but the state of emergency in New Zealand and many other countries continues, as do vaccinations.

Yet, in April, due to the relatively high risk to low expected benefits, the WHO urged countries to give low priority to COVID vaccines for healthy children and teenagers. Denmark, Sweden and Norway stopped recommending the vaccines for children and healthy adults in 2022. Switzerland, the global headquarters for many pharmaceutical companies, no longer recommends COVID vaccinations for anyone.

The impacts of the national responses to the declared global emergency will be felt for a lifetime. There are now many lawsuits and government investigations underway around the world into draconian COVID vaccine mandates.

COVID emergency ends, COVID reckoning begins? - Centrist
Big Pharma is facing investigations over possible misrepresentations regarding safety and efficacy of their COVID vaccines.

Legal wheels turning

A class-action lawsuit was filed in the UK in March 2023 against the AstraZeneca vaccine. The vaccine has been withdrawn from many countries for its poor risk/benefit ratio.

On 26 April 2023, a group of over 500 Australians filed a class-action lawsuit against the Federal Government, claiming severe injuries caused by COVID vaccines, and that the Government misused its authority and was negligent in promoting and mandating them.

In Australia, as of April there had been 986 deaths and over 138,000 adverse events formally reported following COVID vaccination. This compares with 28 deaths and 3,924 adverse events for their entire history of flu vaccines (since 1971).

The data is similar all over the world, and regulators say such reports are a small fraction of the actual number of incidents, since the vast majority go unreported. New Zealand reported 184 deaths and over 64,000 adverse events before Medsafe stopped reporting them in November 2022.

In the US, as of September 2022, there had been over a thousand lawsuits filed against vaccine mandates.

There are now also several US state investigations underway. On 1 May 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson for misrepresenting the efficacy and safety of their COVID vaccines, and for manipulating vaccine trial data. This follows another launched by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in December 2022. These investigations are expected to probe the evidence for and against the decisions made around COVID vaccines and mandates, and are in contrast to  New Zealand’s Royal Inquiry, which seems designed to applaud the measures used.

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