Thursday, 3 August 2023

COVID-19 vaccination

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:57): (375) I rise today to raise an adjournment for the Minister for Emergency Services. I thank my colleague who very rightly brought up the consultative forum for Emergency Management Victoria, freeing me up to ask something different in my adjournment. I hope you will accept the fact that I have just had to scribble this down, because this is a very, very important point I am about to make and a very important action that I seek.

The action I seek from the Minister for Emergency Services is to advise the Australian Firefighters Alliance and me of what medical evidence has been provided which excludes non-vaccinated firefighters from being able to return to work. I say that because we know that on 12 July the occupational health and safety section allowing for the collection and holding of immunisation records was revoked, and this is confirmed by WorkSafe Victoria. We know that there are Victorian firefighters who are suffering due to the lack of consistency in healthcare advice and its implementation. Some have suffered vaccine injuries from having only one vaccination. In some cases they forced themselves to have two and were absolutely incapable for health reasons of having a third one. Others have seen this suffering or other situations with family members and chosen not to have any vaccines for health reasons.

Let me also say that the World Health Organization on 5 May said that we no longer have a global health emergency. What is more, we now know that the vaccine did not stop transmission or infection, and that was originally the purpose of the vaccine as per the TGA production assessment report, which said that it would prevent COVID. But of course that is not what actually happened. What is more, we know that there are large numbers of people who have now suffered from myocarditis and pericarditis, and this has been proven to be a risk of the vaccine. In fact the risk is highest in young, fit men, many of whom work for Fire Rescue Victoria. So I say that this is a major issue that we are seeing. I want to say too that repeated boosters have now been shown to slow down the immune system for new strains of virus in some cases. I think this is a really important question, and I do ask the minister to please take this action and do something about it.