My Request for an internal review of the decision to redact nearly all of the information I requested under FOI

The following was sent to the FOI branch at the Australian Department of Health today.

I had earlier notified you that I had filed a Freedom of Information Request back in January 2024 with the Department of Health regarding the answers to the following simple questions:

[1] How many doses of each of the following brands of COVID-19 vaccine were ordered by and delivered to the Australian Government or any of its Departments or subsidiaries;

[2] How many doses of each of the following brands of COVID-19 vaccine were administered; and

[3] How many doses of each of the following brands of COVID-19 vaccine were discarded as 'wastage'.

The brands I am interested in are:

Pfizer

AstraZeneca

Moderna

Novavax

The Department of Health requested 2 extensions of their statutory requirement to provide an answer within 30 days of receiving my request. In both cases, I agreed to the extension.

On 10th April, 1 day before their third deadline, I received the following 2 documents (below)

Foi 4945 Notice Of Decision

266KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Foi 4945 Documents For Release

1.74MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

As you can see, nearly all of the information is redacted! And they claim that this decision was made because it was in the public’s interest! Well excuse me! I’m the public, and it is absolutely NOT in my best interest!

Do I pursue this or not?

I had until today to file a request for an internal review of the decision to redact this information, and I sent the following email to them today. I will keep you informed of any correspondence I get in return.

To whom it may concern,

Per my conversation earlier this week with Alannah from your office, I have decided to request an internal review of the decision to redact nearly all of the information I had requested back in January this year (decision and release attached at the bottom of this message).

On the face of it, the questions I requested answers to have no bearing on any commercially sensitive data which might affect any of the vaccine manufacturers in question. Especially since the total number of doses purchased using Australian taxpayer funds is publicly available. 262 million doses for a country of 10 million people - or 10 doses for each man, woman, child and infant currently living here.

So I am gravely concerned by the lack of transparency evident in the amount of time it took to respond to my question and then, once a response had been issued, the fact that nearly every single figure had been redacted.

Who is actually being protected here? As I said before, I don’t believe replying to my request in full would have any effect whatsoever on the pharmaceutical companies who produced the vaccines. The only ones who might be affected are those who lead the Department of Health, the TGA and the other departments involved with the rollout and implementation of this campaign.

I believe that your refusal to provide full details in response to my request breaches not only the letter of the FOI Act 1982, but also the spirit of that legislation.

As an Australian citizen and someone whose taxes have paid for the supply of these experimental doses, I would like to request an internal review of this decision.

Kind regards,

Rubbery figures

ScoMo as a rubbery figure - probably slippery too

In the meantime, I would like you to consider that 262 million doses of COVID injectables were ordered (as of one year ago - May 2023. Have no doses been ordered in the last 12 months?), paid for and delivered to the Government. We have been told that 36% of them (in round figures) had to be discarded as wastage, which would be about 94 million doses.

I’m unsure of the exact price of each dose, and I don’t know how many were purchased from each company, but let’s assume for argument’s sake that it would have been around $25 a shot—which is a very conservative figure. By my estimation, at least $2.35 billion dollars in Australia has gone up in smoke on those 94 million doses.

But that still leaves nearly 170 million doses of this jab unaccounted for. And the Department of Health wants us to believe they were all administered.

However, according to this page on the Therapeutic Goods Administration Website, just over 71 million doses of all COVID jabs had been administered to Australians as of May 8th, two days ago.

This does not compute…

This leaves 100 million doses - with unknown use-by dates - unaccounted for.

1- I don’t believe that many Australians actually got 3 or more doses of COVID shots (with our population of just under 26 million, we would need virtually everyone to get triple jabbed or more in order to say that 71 million shots went into people’s arms. I call bullshit.

2- If Australia has not purchased any vaccines as of May 2023 - and the little bit of data not redacted in their reply to me (above) is dated as of May 2023, then every one of that 100 million doses has now expired. Another $2.5 billion down the tubes.

So, I am going to stay on this FOI request. I think it’s important for us to find out how truly incompetent these corrupt officials actually are.

If you would like to assist, I would like to ask you to forward a copy of this post to your federal Members and Senators and to ask them to do their own FOI request on this matter because they are much more likely to get a truthful answer than I.

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