Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance
And Yes, they did claim the vaccines would prevent transmission
below…
The intelligence community and Silicon Valley have a long history
They’re always watching. - Jeff Nesbit
Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.
The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.
But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.
Backstory: The intelligence community and Silicon Valley
In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.
The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes.
A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?
Answering this question was of great interest to the intelligence community.
Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.
To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities who were creating this supercomputing revolution. These scientists were developing ways to do what no single group of human beings sitting at work stations in the NSA and the CIA could ever hope to do: gather huge amounts of data and make intelligent sense of it.
A rich history of the government’s science funding
There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.
The internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort.
In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.
Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.
They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project
MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.
“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”
Over the next few years, the program’s stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm, Symantec, Netscape, and others, and funded the pivotal research in areas like Doppler radar and fiber optics, which are central to large companies like AccuWeather, Verizon, and AT&T today. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.
The CIA and NSA’s end goal
The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.
The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing.
Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?
By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, computer-science boy wonders
In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?
This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.
It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.
The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
Left out of Google’s story
The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.
Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.
Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.
The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google.
To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The intelligence community’s enduring legacy within Silicon Valley
Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.
Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. “Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet,” says the ACLU. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.”
When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies—from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.
But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.
In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.
Klaus Schwabbed tells Google Founder Sergey Brin
“Imagine”, says Dr. Evil, “Imagine a time when we no longer need ze elections because AI can predict what we need better dan us! Das is da future!” or something like that
First Covid deaths were fully vaccinated, Queensland Government records show
In 2021, the Queensland Government closed the state’s borders and campaigned heavily to get everyone vaccinated. The state had managed to keep Covid cases to near zero since the start of the pandemic, but it couldn’t stay closed off forever.
The borders would reopen when 80 per cent of the community had been vaccinated, promised Premier Annastacia Palazczuk (pronounced pal-uh-shay). This would “stop the spread of this virus,” and “protect vulnerable Queenslanders.”
But when the state hit its 80 per cent target and the borders reopened in December 2021, the exact opposite happened.1
Cases exploded, and as the vaccines had evidently failed to prevent infection or transmission, the official messaging quickly pivoted to focus on vaccines providing protection against severe illness and death.
However, documents filed by Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerard in legal proceedings show that the first Covid deaths after the vaccination rollout were mostly double jabbed, indicating that it was known to the Government as early as January 2022 that the vaccines did not prevent deaths either.
This information has come to light as a result of a court case brought by Doctors Against Mandates to challenge Queensland Health’s Covid workplace mandates, for which Dr Gerard filed an affidavit which included a summary of Queensland case deaths. The summary details the first 183 Covid deaths recorded in the state from the start of the pandemic, from 13 March 2020 until 27 January 2022.2
While Queensland recorded seven deaths early in the pandemic, none of these were from community spread (five were from cruise ships and the other two caught Covid outside of the state).
It wasn’t until Queensland opened its borders in December 2021 after years of strict on-again-off-again lockdowns, quarantine and border closures that cases took off in the community, and the first locally acquired Covid infection leading to death was recorded - a double-vaccinated man in his 80s.3
After a year of hyping the vaccine-as-magic-bullet myth, it was a potential PR nightmare for the Queensland Government that the first locally acquired Covid case death turned out to be someone who was fully vaccinated. Luckily for them, no media reported it.
Over the next month, the large majority of people who died with Covid were fully vaccinated. They were also mostly aged care residents in their 80s and 90s.
Of the 176 deaths from the border opening up until 27 January 2023, 115 were fully vaccinated (65 per cent). 13 were boosted (7 per cent), and 47 were unvaccinated (27 per cent). 14 were recorded as either partially vaccinated (one dose), or were of uncertain status.
One individual in his 90s died with five doses of vaccination recorded on his file.4
Of the unvaccinated cohort, it is quite likely that many were elderly aged care residents who were ineligible for vaccination because they were too frail to be vaccinated. However, any ineligible people, elderly or otherwise, were not included in the official vaccination statistics, which only reported vaccination coverage in the eligible population, not the whole population. Therefore, the true number of unvaccinated Queenslanders is unknown.5
All we know for sure is that the proportion of unvaccinated Queenslanders is under reported due to the omission of ineligible people.
Regardless, the vaccines clearly weren’t working to prevent transmission, infection or death. And clearly, the elderly were by far the cohort at greatest risk. In the eleven cases where comorbidities were documented, every one had underlying health conditions (the remainder are recorded as TBC).
The case death records in Dr Gerrard’s affidavit show that the Queensland Department of Health knew this. A sane and compassionate government would acknowledge that their policies were not even coming close to achieving the desired outcome and adjust their messaging and strategy to respond to the situation on the ground.
But instead, the Queensland Government doubled down, maintaining proof of vaccination restrictions for most venues until April 2022, and retaining work mandates well into the year - some are still in place. Palazczuk, who is not a medical doctor, continued to push boosters to young people, despite the fact that Australia’s vaccine advisory body did not recommend it.
The media acted as wingman for government interests, dutifully reporting on the most terrifying cases, mainly a handful of deaths in younger people, and usually without any insight into their comorbidities or other contributing factors.
It’s hard to say why the Queensland Government did not come clean about the failure of its Covid policies without mindreading, but from a political standpoint, it would have been political suicide to admit the truth.
They’d just spent a full year confidently telling Queenslanders that vaccines were going to save the state. Palazczuk had dangled civil rights as a ‘reward’ for getting jabbed and enforced proof of vaccination restrictions and work mandates to ‘keep Queenslanders safe.’ She had told Queenslanders that, “the virus hunts down the unvaccinated.” Later that year, the Palazczuk Government would sign a lucrative partnership with mRNA vaccine manufacturer Sanofi.
It simply would not stand to admit that the vaccines and associated policies hadn’t worked. There was too much at stake - reputation, reelection, business opportunities.
Sadly, the failure of the Queensland Government to take stock of its own Covid policies and communicate the truth of the matter may have resulted in the early deaths of thousands of Queenslanders.
Last week I reported on an in-depth analysis of Queensland mortality data, by Andrew Madry, which identified that all-cause mortality started trending upwards with the Covid vaccine rollout, nine months before the borders opened and the first locally acquired Covid deaths started to occur. Madry demonstrates algorithmic techniques that he believes could have detected this trend change in real time, enabling the Government to identify that something was going wrong and adjust course.
I asked Queensland Health what methods they used to measure the impacts of its pandemic policies, and if they could refer me to any relevant studies. They declined to provide comment.
It is a chilling prospect that a government could hold evidence that its policies are not working, and are potentially causing the deaths of its own citizenry, and not take action to prevent further harm.
Learn more about Doctors Against Mandates and their ongoing fight for medical ethics, here.
Note these figures do not include people 16 and over who were deemed not eligible for vaccination, either because they have an exemption, or they are too old and frail, or otherwise. We don’t know how big the ‘ineligible’ cohort is.
Supreme Court Proceeding numbered 367/22 in the matter of Ishiyama & others -v- Aitken & others. Documents 46 – 53 constitute the Affidavit of J Gerrard (in 8 volumes). The documents referred to in this post are Volume 6, pp.1553-1557. They are publicly available from the Brisbane Supreme and District Court for a fee of $81.35 per volume. I have chosen not to publish them in unredacted form in this public post so as to protect the privacy of those concerned. However, if you would like to obtain a copy for private viewing, please feel free to email me at mail@rebekahbarnett.com.au(.) A redacted copy of the relevant pages is attached below.
The quarantine and border rules were so strict that news stories from this time frequently recounted families unable to get past borders or through quarantine, while their loved ones died alone, and in an especially shocking case, a woman who lost her baby because border rules did not allow her to go to the nearest hospital.
The documents note that this may have been due to an administrative error, such as a duplicated entry.
If someone wants to do the maths by finding the best population estimate for Queensland at the end of 2021 and deducting the total number of Queenslanders vaccinated in each age group per the Australian Government vaccination stats from the same period, please leave your workings in the comments! Extra points if you can isolate the proportion of the population 80+ that had not received any dose of vaccination.
Note that if we were talking about vaccine-related deaths here, the presence of comorbidities would in most (if not all) cases disqualify the death from being attributed to the vaccine.
Yes, they claimed the vaccines would prevent transmission
After a “scandalous” admission by a Pfizer executive testifying before parliament this week, there is one massive lie being told to everyone.
COMMENT
No, you’re not crazy. Yes, they claimed the vaccines would prevent transmission.
One of the most bizarre lies being told this week in response to Pfizer executive Janine Small’s testimony to EU Parliament is that, actually, the Covid vaccines were never supposed to stop the spread of the virus.
Asked by Dutch MEP Rob Roos whether the company had tested its vaccine on “stopping the transmission of the virus” before it rolled out globally, Ms Small said “no” because “we had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market”.
“And from that point of view we had to do everything at risk,” she said.
In a viral Twitter video which has now been viewed more than 12 million times, Mr Roos described the response as “scandalous”, arguing “millions of people worldwide felt compelled to get vaccinated because of the myth that ‘you do it for others’”.
Mr Roos said the admission removed the entire basis for vaccine mandates and passports which “led to massive institutional discrimination as people lost access to essential parts of society”.
“I find this to be shocking, even criminal,” he said.
Of course, fact checkers were not happy.
This is not the bombshell it is being presented as, they argue, because it was public knowledge that the primary outcome measured in Pfizer’s clinical trials was reducing risk of disease, but not transmission.
Moreover, as the Therapeutic Goods Administration stressed, “transmission effects” are “not an approved indication of any Covid-19 vaccine” currently available in Australia.
That might be technically true, but it feels like just that — a technicality.
And this is why Mr Roos’ video, while not strictly being new information, struck such a nerve.
Because setting aside what it says in the fine print, the public was told repeatedly, for months, both explicitly and implicitly, that the vaccines would prevent transmission.
They’re all on tape saying it.
US President Joe Biden, for example, said in July 2021 that “you’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations”.
White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci said in May 2021 that vaccinated people become “dead ends” for the virus.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky said in March 2021 that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick”.
In Australia, politicians and health officials held millions of people hostage for months, lecturing and threatening them to get vaccinated to regain their “freedoms”.
The vaccines were the “way out” of the pandemic, they were not to just to protect ourselves but to “protect others”, they would “stop the spread”, and not getting vaccinated was “selfish”.
Vaccine passports, the “vaccinated economy”, were necessary so people who “did the right thing” would feel “safe” knowing they weren’t “mixing” with the unvaccinated, who were a “risk to the community”.
By late 2021 and early 2022, as Omicron became dominant and it was clear vaccinated people were still catching and spreading the virus, the messaging changed.
“Stopping the spread? What are you talking about? It’s about reducing hospitalisation and death. We have always been at war with hospitalisation and death.”
That’s all well and good — but it’s an entirely different moral calculation
Vaccine mandates, like other Covid restrictions, were always a balancing act between personal choice and public health.
But with the vaccine no longer stopping the spread of the virus, mandates are effectively like the police kicking down your door and forcing you to eat your vegetables at gunpoint.
Or like protecting immunocompromised people by simply welding them inside their homes.
This is not a new argument.
In January this year, Nobel Prize-winning virologist Luc Montagnier and constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld argued in The Wall Street Journal that, in the face of the Omicron variant, the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates were obsolete.
“It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target,” they wrote.
“Mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalisation or death).”
Even the World Health Organisation, as far back as April 2021, cautioned that “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission”.
At that time, evidence was still emerging about the vaccines’ ability to stop transmission of the original strain of the virus — and besides, as everyone now tells us, that was never the primary goal, but merely a nice added bonus.
And yet mandates were introduced anyway.
Yes, politicians and health officials have changed their tune and no longer talk about vaccines stopping transmission.
Yes, newer strains of the virus changed the situation.
But it’s insane to claim, as many now try to, that they never did in the first place.
Below is just some of what they said.
A simple “sorry, we were wrong” would go a long way.
Gladys Berejiklian
August 25, 2021: “Don’t hold off, get your hands on any vaccine you can. Keep yourself [and] your loved ones safe. It’s also doing a community service by helping stop the spread and keeping people out of hospital. The quicker we are vaccinated, the quicker we will get to the next target.”
September 2, 2021: “Anybody should come forward and get vaccinated. We don’t want to see anybody vulnerable without vaccine. This is I’ve said a couple of times a pandemic, an epidemic of the unvaccinated. When we see people who are fully vaccinated hospitalised or horribly die, often there are other conditions associated with that.”
September 7, 2021: “I wouldn’t want to be in the room with lots of people who aren’t vaccinated. And I certainly hope that all of our colleagues [parliamentarians] are vaccinated. That’s the message we’ve been sending the community. And obviously as workplaces open up, every workplace will have their policies according to what the government is indicating. But I just want to make this point very clear — if people want to enjoy the things we have missed such as a meal or … any other venue, they’re going to have to be vaccinated.”
September 13, 2021: “I don’t want people to think they can sit back and let everybody else do the hard work [getting vaccinated]. We all have choices and if it’s your choice not to be vaccinated, well that might mean you cannot participate in things that [the] fully vaccinated do.”
September 15, 2021: “We don’t want anyone who hasn’t been vaccinated yet to sit at home. Come out, get vaccinated, do your bit for yourself and your family. Remember that people might say well if you’re not vaccinated, that’s on you and you might get sick — well, no. Unvaccinated people spread the disease more readily. So if you’re in a venue or somewhere and there’s unvaccinated people [you have] more chance of contracting the disease from them because they don’t have that protection.”
September 20, 2021: “I just want people to acknowledge that because unvaccinated people … it’s one thing to put themselves in jeopardy, but they’re jeopardising everybody else because they’re more contagious. If you choose not to be vaccinated, it’s one thing to make that decision for yourself and your family, but you’re also making that decision, suggesting that you don’t care if you’re more contagious to other people. [People choosing not to be vaccinated] means all of us have to be on guard, because as Dr Chant and myself and everybody’s been saying, even if you’re double vaccinated and have underlying health conditions you can still be at risk. I worry for people like my parents or others in the community who are aged or fully vaccinated, but yet could still be vulnerable.”
September 27, 2021: “It is not too late. You have the option, go today, make your booking and get vaccinated not only to protect yourself and your loved ones but also the community.”
Brad Hazzard
July 29, 2021: “There are a lot of people who don’t base their decisions in science or evidence. I’d say to those … not wanting to take vaccines, my message to them is you’re being extremely selfish if you think you can not have a vaccine just because you don’t want to have a vaccine, well you should think about what you’re doing to your family and to the community, and I would say even more than that, what a hide you have, what a ridiculous position is that when you’re going to put health staff at risk, and when you get sick you’re going to expect to come into hospital and get paid for by taxpayers.”
Daniel Andrews
September 5, 2021: “We’re going to move to a situation where, to protect the health system, we’re going to lock out people who are not vaccinated and can be. If you’re making the choice not to get vaccinated, then you’re making the wrong choice, you’re making the wrong choice. And for safety’s sake, back to that point of how much work our nurses have to do, as this becomes absolutely a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and we open everything up, it’s not going to be safe for people who are not vaccinated to be roaming around the place spreading the virus. That’s what they’ll be doing.”
September 22, 2021: “There’ll be announcements [about vaccine mandates] made based on the very detailed consideration and determinations of the chief health officer. I wish I could just do a whole blanket list but he has to go through a process so that it’s properly, legally done. So it’s not about people unfairly picking on the construction sector — that’s where the cases are so that explains the required vaccine decision. Then there are other industries where we can get ahead of cases and prevent the spread of coronavirus.”
October 19, 2021: “I’m not going to say to someone, just wait us out … just wait for five weeks and then you will be able to go to the pub. No, if you make the judgement to not get vaccinated and you reckon you can wait us out or the publican or whoever you want to think you are waiting out — you won’t outwait the virus. Because the virus will be here for a long time and your only protection against it is being vaccinated.”
October 26, 2021: “If you’re on the fence, if you haven’t quite made up your mind yet about whether you will or won’t get vaccinated and be protected by these vaccines that are free, that are safe, that are effective — please reconsider that decision. Two doses of this vaccine is the greatest protection that you can have for your health and the health of those you love and, indeed, the health system.”
January 30, 2022: “I think it’s only a matter of time before the relevant federal agencies confirm that it’s three doses … [that are needed] in order to be protected, not just against really critical illness but to be protected or to minimise the likelihood that you get it and that you give it to the people that you love.”
January 2022: “At the moment two doses are protecting the vast majority of people from serious illness, but it’s only with three doses that you’ll be prevented not just from serious illness but from getting this virus, this Omicron variant, and therefore giving it to others.”
James Merlino
September, 2021: “A requirement for vaccination of teachers will be important to stop the spread and protect our kids.”
Annastacia Palaszczuk
November 9, 2021: “People want to be able to go to a music festival, a stadium, a cafe or a restaurant and know the people who are around them are fully vaccinated and it’s safe for their families. This is an important step in keeping our freedoms. Millions of people have gone and got vaccinated and they need to be rewarded for their efforts. They have done a great job, they have done everything I have asked them to do. But as a community, if we are going to stop the spread of this virus when the borders open and the virus is going to come here, we need people to get vaccinated. Families want to know they are safe when they are out in public.”
Jeannette Young
October 7, 2021: “The only thing that’s going to stop us getting locally acquired cases going forward, we know is vaccination. We can’t stop it. The only way to stop it is vaccination. It does take five weeks from your first dose of Pfizer to be fully protected and six weeks from your first dose of Moderna.”
Yvette D’Ath
December 7, 2021: “December 17 is going to be a great day for so many people in Queensland who will get to go out and enjoy the lifestyle that we love so much. They will be able to go there knowing that they’ve done the right thing by getting vaccinated and that they’re walking into a venue where everyone else is vaccinated as well.”
Mark McGowan
October 31, 2021: “I just urge these people to go and get vaccinated … the time for protesting and reading crazy conspiracy theorists online is over … Some of the material they’re spreading is extreme, misleading and frankly lies. [They should] get on with life, like everyone else. They are reading wacky theories online that are untrue. This rubbish that’s put out online and some of the lies and misleading information … is dangerous. I just urge them to stop, go and get vaccinated and just act like normal, rational human beings.”
January 13, 2022: “Following WA’s Safe Transition, we want the public to be confident in these public settings, and that they’re only mixing with other vaccinated people. People less likely to be carrying or able to pass on the disease. It reduces the risks posed by unvaccinated people bringing the virus into busy, populated settings. Life will become very difficult for the unvaccinated from January 31. No pubs, no bottle shops, no gym, no yoga classes, no gigs, no dancefloors, no hospital or aged care visits. If you go and get vaccinated today you can have your second dose by early February, but if you choose to remain unvaccinated — and at this point, it certainly is your choice — you’re choosing to put yourself at risk, you’re choosing to put the people around you at risk and you’re choosing to increase the burden on our health staff.”
Roger Cook
October 20, 2021: “Unvaccinated workers in settings in where exposure is likely can cause tremendous harm. They are a risk to themselves, their colleagues and the community. The danger from Delta is very real. We simply cannot afford the hesitant or complacent infecting those workers who have already been vaccinated.”
Steven Marshall
May 25, 2021: “This is Kaylah Pascoe — she’s among the first 16 years olds [sic] in regional SA to roll up her sleeve and get a Covid-19 vaccine. Thank you Kaylah. By getting vaccinated, she is not only helping protect herself, but is preventing others from suffering from this insidious disease.”
November 24, 2021: “We’ve had a very, very good uptake in South Australia … They know that when they look interstate at the moment, this is essentially the disease of the unvaccinated.”
December 14, 2021: “There are people who do have legitimate reasons why they can’t be vaccinated. My strong message is that it’s really important to get vaccinated now. We’re going to provide choice but there are increasingly more venues and individuals that don’t want to be out and about with people that are unvaccinated.”
Nicola Spurrier
March 9, 2021: “The vaccines … may not always stop you from catching the virus, but they are very effective at stopping you from getting sick from Covid. Since the initial clinical trials, more than 200 million doses of Covid vaccine have been given worldwide, and the initial data we are seeing is that the vaccine may also be effective at reducing the rate of spread of disease.”
Michael Gunner
September 15, 2021: “I know I am supposed to say I respect people’s choices and reasons for not getting vaccinated — I don’t. I don’t understand, I don’t respect it. You don’t get to choose to burden our health system because you refuse to follow preventative health measures.”
November 22, 2021: “A lockout means fully vaccinated residents are able to move about the community freely, while wearing a mask. If you give a green light, give comfort to, support anybody who argues against the vaccine, you are an anti-vaxxer. Your personal vaccination status is utterly irrelevant. There are people actually supporting the idea of a teacher being unvaccinated in a remote community classroom with kids who can’t be vaccinated. I reject it. If you’re out there in any way, shape or form campaigning against the mandate, then you are absolutely anti-vax. If you say pro-persuasion, stuff it. Shove it. We are absolutely going to make sure as many Territorians as possible are vaccinated. I will never back away from supporting vaccines, and anyone out there who comes for the mandate, you are anti-vax.”
January 6, 2022: “Work is not a reason to leave the home for the unvaccinated. The chief health officer has also determined that restriction of movement is critical right now and that one hour of exercise for the next four days is not essential. There has been plenty of time for people to get vaccinated, people who are not vaccinated present the greatest risk of spreading the virus and are the most at risk of becoming seriously ill if they get the virus. The fully vaccinated are free to continue to go about their lives as long as they comply with the territory-wide mask mandate. We’re doing this [vaccination pass] early as a sustainable measure that provides the best ability to control community transmission and who ends up in our hospitals. Territorians love having a beer with their mates, and the overwhelming majority get to keep doing this. We want you to be as safe as possible while having a frothy or a feed. I know there are unvaccinated people who can be impolite, I have experienced that. I do not want our hard-working frontline workers to experience that. If there are trouble makers who try to breach this direction — call the police.”