An Australian Sceptical Note on COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness

Written by Ramesh Thakur on July 1, 2025. Posted in Current News

According to Our World in Data, New Zealand achieved 75% coverage of the initial COVID-19 vaccination protocol (two doses) on December 29th 2021, when its Covid-related death toll was just 44, and 80% (tantamount in effect to universal adult coverage) on June 8th 2022, by which time deaths had risen to 2,095. As at May 13th 2025, its death toll stood at 4,538.

In other words, more than half of all New Zealand’s Covid deaths occurred after effectively universal adult vaccination had been achieved and a scarcely believable 99% after 75% of the country’s population had been double vaccinated.

Trust the government health experts as your single source of truth on anything and everything to do with Covid, including vaccines. They always prioritise your health over Pharma profits. And they are always right, even when they do a 180 degree about turn. Australia’s Department of Health advice on June 3rd 2025:

COVID-19 vaccine is not recommended for healthy infants, children or adolescents who do not have medical conditions that increase their risk of severe illness. This is because the risk of severe illness was extremely low in this cohort over the course of the pandemic, and benefits of vaccination are not considered to outweigh the potential harms.

Never trust us non-experts, who said this all along.

Meanwhile Dr Sara Brenner, the US FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner (and acting commissioner for a short period), revealed last month that she refused the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine while pregnant despite the FDA promoting it as ‘safe and effective’ for pregnant women.

Maryanne Demasi also reports on another FDA expert, Dr Janet Woodcock, who privately supported testing ivermectin’s initial promise for treating Covid (“Wow – we should definitely test it”) before doing an about turn and joining the FDA’s mockingly public denunciations of ivermectin as a horse and cow medicine.

Setting aside questions about their safety, how anyone can claim that these statistics are compatible with the ‘COVID-19 vaccines are effective’ narrative is mind boggling. Moreover, if we accept Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for disproving a scientific claim (if the claim is that all swans are white, and we find just one black swan, then the claim is empirically falsified and scientifically invalid), then the narrative is false not just for New Zealand but for the world.

The crucial period for looking at Australia and New Zealand in comparison to the UK is the nine months from November 12th 2021 to August 10th 2022.

All three countries had achieved two-thirds double vaccination in their populations in November 2021. Despite increased levels of vaccination coverage after that date, over the next nine months Covid-related deaths jumped 6.9 times for Australia and a whopping 63 times for New Zealand, but only 1.2 times for the UK (Figure 1).

The same variance can be seen in the second chart that depicts the temporal correlation between vaccine doses administered and the Covid-related deaths per million people in the three countries (Figure 2). Meanwhile in Japan, after examining an 18-million strong database, Dr Yasufumi Murakami, Professor at the prestigious Tokyo University and Vice Director at its Research Centre for RNA Science, came to the sobering conclusion that “the more doses you get, the sooner you’re likely to die, within a shorter period”.

Clearly, leaving aside the question of their safety, COVID-19 vaccines were hardly effective at all in preventing Covid-related deaths. If someone believes as an article of faith that Covid vaccines are effective and Australia and New Zealand Covid deaths were low compared to high-income country averages because they refused to open their borders until after vaccination, then no amount of evidence will change their mind.

For those who are prepared to look at the data with an open and critical mind, it is nonsensical to argue that a dramatic fall in Covid deaths after vaccination drive takes hold in Europe, UK and US is evidence of vaccine effectiveness, while an even more dramatic spike in Australia and New Zealand in the same period is also proof of vaccine effectiveness: heads you win, tails I lose.

Figure 2 and Table 1 show that the deaths per million in July 2022 for New Zealand and in January-February 2023 for Australia were among the highest in the world. Yet, for both, the deaths were flat in the pre-vaccination period. By contrast, peaks for the other three I have used for reference in this chart (UK, US, Europe) were at their highest before vaccination took hold. This is why I remain surprised that Australia and New Zealand data have not figured far more prominently in the commentary by those sceptical of the narrative.

If not vaccines, what other factor might explain the difference in Covid mortality between the three countries? Well, thanks to their geographical remoteness in the southern and eastern hemispheres and their decision to close both inward and outward international travel before coronavirus was widely seeded in the community, as well as the good luck of summer season south of the equator during the initial virulence on the northern hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand avoided mass infections when Covid was first rampant.

Many epidemiologists warned at the time, as indeed had the WHO in a report in September 2019, that this would delay but not avoid mass infections. In November 2021, compared to around 14% of the British population having been Covid-infected, the rates were only 0.7 and 0.2 percent in Australia and New Zealand, respectively. That is, the UK had a head-start over Australia and New Zealand in infection-induced natural immunity.

Thus a significantly higher proportion of the British population had immunity acquired through infection than their Australasian counterparts by the end of 2021. When, believing in the protective benefits of the vaccine, Australia and New Zealand opened up again, their Covid-naïve populations were vulnerable to the virus. By August 2022 the cumulative case totals were comparable in all three countries: slightly over one-third (35-37%) of the population. And by now there is a wealth of literature indicating that natural immunity is both more robust and longer-lasting than the weaker and shorter protective efficacy of Covid vaccines (which also rather changes the harms-benefit equation for healthy people under 70). Australia and New Zealand stand as stark demonstrations of this.

Is it any wonder that a dramatic erosion of trust in public health institutions has lowered Australia’s childhood vaccinations to alarming levels, as the ABC reported on May 16th. This mirrors the situation in the UK, where the share of children being vaccinated against diseases, including measles and whooping cough, has likewise slumped to the lowest levels in more than a decade and below the 95% threshold said to be necessary for herd immunity.

Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. A former UN assistant secretary-general, he was the principal writer of the late secretary-general Kofi Annan’s 2002 UN reform report. An earlier version of this article first appeared in Spectator Australia.

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