An Australian Aboriginal Community Story
Stories from the trenches #4
Report from an Australian Aboriginal Health Service Worker – Rural/Remote - November 7th, 2021
I worked in several remote communities. In June, the Health Service began its campaign of vaccination across the communities. They began by driving and flying teams into the communities. The teams organised barbecues and public meetings. The atmosphere was festive and encouraging. In one community meeting that I witnessed, community members were told that vaccination teams would be coming soon as they “rolled out” their vaccination campaign. People were told that “… if you get the shot, you will not get COVID and you will stop all your old people from getting COVID.”
In my presence, I never heard anyone inform people that there was any risk of adverse reactions, possibility of “breakthrough infections”, possibility of death or that it was an experiment. Only positive messages and the guilt trip that if they didn’t get the shot, they might be responsible for the death of their old people.
One old man stated that he did not intend to get the shot because he believed it could be dangerous. The health care worker asked him where he had heard that. He just repeated that he thought it was “too dangerous”. The health care worker kept trying to get him to open up about why he thought that and when he refused to discuss it beyond repeating “too dangerous”, she asked, “Did you read something on the internet? It’s all misinformation on the internet.”
A week or two later, the vaccination team arrived. When a number of people did not go to the clinic, they came down and gathered them up from where they were sitting around their campfires. They cajoled and encouraged them. They put the walkers and wheelchairs into the clinic cars and ambulance and drove them to the clinic. They convinced even the old man who had thought it “too dangerous”.
Their techniques were persistent. They were friendly and dismissed concerns. There was no discussion of adverse reactions or any potential serious consequences. They took a tribal people, many of whom are illiterate and for whom English is a second language and they told them that the vaccination was the only way to protect their old people; the implication being that if they were unvaccinated and somebody died, it would be their fault. They planted the seeds of guilt. It was not informed consent.
As an employee of the organisation, I received regular emails advising me of the anticipated dates of “the rollout”, telling me that it was my role as an employee to encourage and advise community members to get vaccinated. It was obvious that we were not supposed to tell people anything else. We were also asked for our vaccination status and told that if we didn’t want to tell them our vaccination status, we should complete a statutory declaration to the effect that we would not be informing them of our vaccination status. There was no mention of the Commonwealth Privacy Act or that filling out the stat dec was not a legal requirement.
As the rollout progressed, we were emailed multiple times and told to ask for and report the vaccination status of the people who worked with us. There was no mention that this was in defiance of the Commonwealth Privacy Act.
In one community, one of the nurse managers had to take time off work after the second shot. She told me that she had “…the worst period of my life with massive bleeding and clots you wouldn’t believe.”
I responded, “You know that is a recognised side effect of the vaccination?”
She looked shocked and surprised and said “Really?” as if she found it hard to believe. I could tell by her reaction that she hadn’t been given full information about the possible side effects either. I took from this that at least some of the nursing staff were also uninformed.
In another community, a seventeen year old indigenous boy had a (I believe) non-fatal heart attack about a week after one of the rollouts. The reaction of most medical staff was “How unusual!” but no-one said that it could possibly be linked to the vaccine. I could see that the nursing staff were unaware and I wondered how they would even recognise a possible adverse reaction or recognise a reportable adverse event. I doubt that the nurse with the bad period thought to report her experience as a potential adverse reaction.
With a two week period, three people died from a community I was in. Two were people with known medical co-morbidities (so who would know if they were pushed over the edge by the vaccine) and one was a woman in her thirties who, according to members of her family “…walked outside and dropped to the ground dead with blood coming out of her mouth.” The family were told that the cause of death was a heart attack although I’m not sure that could have been definitively determined as she was dead when medical help arrived and no autopsy been done at that time.
I noticed a big uptick in “chest infections” in the weeks after the rollout although most people had been given a flu shot in the weeks leading up to the Covid vaccinations. Also, people making comments about an old woman “I never realised how shaky X is getting to be”. This comment was made after the first set of shots and again, no-one seemed to consider that it might be connected.