The Peter Doherty Institute: Meet Australia's Spectacularly Wrong COVID Alarmists
Why should Australian taxpayers fund an organization that feeds them untenable, fear-mongering nonsense?
My previous article detailed Australia's pivotal contribution to the Great Corona Con, in which researchers from Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute claimed to be the first outside of China to 'isolate' the mythical Sars-Cov-2 virus.
My article explained in detail why they didn't isolate diddly squat. In a sane world, their 2020 Medical Journal of Australia paper describing this alleged 'isolation' would be considered a bad joke, not a scientific breakthrough.
Of course, this is not a sane world, but Planet Megalomaniac. As such, the Doherty Institute is not only taken seriously, but allowed to wield immense influence over Australian 'health' policy.
Who, Exactly, is the Peter Doherty Institute?
Officially, the Peter Doherty Institute is a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and The Royal Melbourne Hospital in Victoria, Australia. It masquerades as a health institute, and was founded with lavish government (taxpayer) largesse. It also swims in drug company money and has intimate ties with a multitude of vaccine manufacturers. It is a wholly unelected entity whose ‘research’ is used by government to enact policies that have had a dire impact on everyday Australians.
Australia’s Masters of Disaster
In 2021, the Peter Doherty Institute proved to be Australia's equivalent to the UK's Imperial London College. Just like incurable alarmist and hypocrite Neil "Master of Disaster" Ferguson and his Imperial College comrades, the Doherty Institute released a bombastic COVID report based, not on science, but computer 'modelling'.
'Modelling', for those unaware, appears to be the more palatable and widely-used synonym for "politically-motivated, computer-generated, speculative nonsense."
George E. Box, who has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century" famously said, "All models are wrong, although they can be useful".
The Doherty modelling was spectacularly wrong, but sure proved useful to government and Big Pharma in their quest to have as many Australians ‘vaccinated’ as possible.
Australia’s COVID ‘vaccination’ campaign began on February 22, 2021. The first victims, uh, I mean, recipients, were the elderly, the physically impaired and the Indigenous.
On July 31, 2021, the Doherty Institute released an "interim" report, the first of a series of federal government-commissioned 'modelling' reports designed to accelerate uptake of the dubious new gene therapies.
Leaked versions of the modelling, evidently meant for the government's eyes only, predicted up to 200,000 'COVID’ cases a day by late January/early February 2022. At that rate, every single person in Australia would have been infected within 130 days. Not too shabby for a virus that doesn't even exist!
"I just want to assure people," said then-PM Scott Morrison, after the ridiculous figures were leaked, "the modelling that has been reported is a very unlikely, extreme case scenario that assumes that nobody does anything, nobody gets boosters, there are no changes that take place, that no one exercises common sense.”
So according to Morrison, a man whose lack of integrity knows no boundaries, "common sense" meant not only taking dubious new drugs made by confirmed criminal enterprises like Pfizer and AstraZeneca, but also embracing the absurd and unprecedented charade of endless "boosters".
In a rational world, Australia's smirking PM and its Doherty Institute would have been laughed out of existence but, again, we're talking Planet Clown Show here.
And so in early August, the Doherty Institute promptly followed up with the first of numerous updates to its modelling charade. The purported intent of the modelling was to show Australia the "way out of lockdowns."
The best way out of lockdowns was for people to pull their heads out of their apathetic butts and realize their freedoms were being taken away because of egregious and pre-orchestrated lies. They then needed to direct their resultant anger - not at each other, which is the classic Aussie dipshitted way - but at the incurably corrupt taxpayer-funded institutions of government and policing which not only stole taxpayers’ freedoms but fined and bashed them when they took even small steps to regain them.
As you might surmise, rising up against corrupt institutions was not the recommendation made by the Peter Doherty Institute, which receives lavish funding from government. Nope, their solution was something far more dear to the heart of Aussies:
Drugs.
According to Australia's clown prince of health institutes, the solution to the manufactured pandemic was to inject the majority of the country with pretend vaccines that were really gene therapies based on technologies with a 30-year track record of dismal failure.
What could possibly go wrong?
Doherty claimed its "modelling shows vaccination rates of 70 and 80 per cent can significantly reduce transmission, and there is a necessity to vaccinate 'key transmitting age groups' as a priority."
In its August 10, 2021 update pimping the gene therapies, the Doherty modelmakers claimed "ongoing outbreaks in undervaccinated populations are reasonably anticipated from international experience."
That's a most unreasonable lie. The international experience was already showing that in any country where the mRNA and viral vector gene therapies were being rolled out en mass, 'COVID' cases and deaths were skyrocketing. It was an occurrence so predictable you could set your watch by it.
The untenable Doherty modelling was based on "a single outbreak involving 30 individuals" that would initiate "community transmission at the time of transition to Phase B". This “transition to Phase B” was the point at which target vaccine coverage would be achieved. The model considered vaccine targets in the adult population of 50%, 60%, 70% and 80%.
Each simulation was run for 180 days after this “transition to Phase B”.
For the sake of brevity, let’s focus on the Doherty model of the 80% ‘vaccination’ of "all adults" target. This model predicted that 180 days after 80% coverage was achieved, there would be 306 deaths among the vaxxxinated and 673 deaths among the unvaxxxinated.
Right.
The 80% target was achieved within months of initiating the Doherty modelling charade. According to the federal government, by November 7, 2021, 80.4% of the Australian population 16 years and older was 'fully vaccinated.'
Here's what happened to the 'COVID' death rate in Australia after the Doherty Institute began blessing us with their clueless models:
At the time of the Doherty Institute’s August 10, 2021 update, there had been 978 so-called 'COVID' deaths in Australia.
On November 7, 2021, when the 80% vaxxxination rate had reportedly been achieved, Australia's 'COVID' death rate was 1,897.
Its kooky model, based on an initial outbreak among 30 people, predicted 979 ‘COVID’ deaths over the subsequent 180 days.
In reality, 180 days later on May 6, 2022, the 'COVID' death toll in Australia was 7,454.
Oops.
Let the record show the Doherty modelling was spectacularly wrong. The true death toll was almost six times what they predicted.
These people, by the way, were given a free, state-of-the-art, multi-storey building in the Melbourne CBD at taxpayer expense to engage in this kind of bollockery.
In addition to greatly underestimating the death toll, the Doherty crew predicted that the death rate among the ‘unvaccinated’ would be 2.2 times higher than that of the vaxxxed.
Of course, that's not what happened. Just like us 'anti-vaxxers' predicted, it turns out people who take dangerous drugs with a 30-year track record of failure made by lying criminals like Pfizer are the ones more likely to die prematurely.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has never released figures showing the proportion of Australians who are dying according to their ‘vaccination’ status.
However, at least until the figures became too embarrassing, most Australian states were providing regular updates showing the proportion of 'COVID' hospitalizations and deaths according to vaxxx status. Sleazy SA Health did its best to obfuscate the figures by grouping those who had 1 or 2 clot shots together with those who had none into the ‘unvaccinated’ category, but even that egregious sleight of hand couldn’t conceal the fact most people hospitalized and dying of ‘COVID’ in SA were vaxxxinated.
NSW Health, presiding over the country's most populous state, apparently couldn't bring itself to be as egregiously dishonest as its SA counterpart. Here is its December 31, 2022 update on 'COVID' hospitalizations and deaths in New South Wales. The figures for those who had zero clot shots are highlighted in yellow, near the bottom:
After having extensively researched this entire charade for the last 3 years, I have no doubt whatsoever that 'Sars-Cov-2 / COVID' is a pre-orchestrated depopulation campaign, and that hospitalizations and deaths in the ‘vaccinated’ are due primarily to the adverse effects of the ‘vaccines’ themselves.
Some of you reading this will no doubt accuse me of being a 'conspiracy theorist' - you know, that bizarre brand of person that likes to think for himself instead of believing sleazy politicians and smirking software magnates who hang out with known sex predators and who have absolutely no health or medical expertise. You're the poor sods who still believe the world really was suffering a ‘deadly’ Woohoo virus. If that's the case, then you have no choice but to concede the so-called 'pandemic' in Australia (and the world) was a pandemic of the 'vaccinated.'
Fifth ‘booster’ shot, anyone?
Sadly, the majority of Australians did as they were told, rolled up their sleeves, got the poison prick, and ...
... became sicker than ever.
'COVID" cases (aka adverse 'vaccine' reactions) promptly shot through the roof. Australians began dying off in unprecedented numbers, with the country's excess mortality leaping to levels not since World War II.
Thanks, Doherty Institute - we couldn't have done it without you!
Let’s now meet some of the people at the Institute, and their good buddies in Big Pharma.
The Peter Doherty Institute: Living Large on Taxpayer and Industry Money
The Peter Doherty Institute has its own multi-storey "state-of-the-art" headquarters in the Melbourne CBD, gifted by the 'generous' Victorian and Commonwealth governments and the University of Melbourne using 210 million taxpayer dollars.
In addition to government largesse, the Doherty Institute is awash with funding from drug conglomerates and a certain uber-wealthy media oligarch.
The Murdoch-Doherty Vaccine Complex
Australian-born media monopolist and bully boy Rupert Murdoch led the transformation of ‘news’ into the stupefying, polarizing and distracting form of entertainment that it is today. After acquiring British tabloid The Sun, he began featuring a different bare-breasted "Page 3" woman in each issue (a practice the newspaper only recently abandoned in 2015). A 2011 Economist article credited Murdoch with having "invented the modern tabloid newspaper - a stew of sexual titillation, moral outrage and political aggression."
This is the pedigree of man (I use the term loosely) who owns News Corp Australia, whose tabloids have for years run an obnoxious "No Jab, No Play" campaign designed to portray those skeptical of vaccines as unhinged nutters whose families deserve to be ostracized by the rest of society. At least until such time as they become obedient little sheep like most other Australians.
One thing these hate-based articles never mention is that News Corp Australia (and Foxtel) is a corporate partner of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, an organisation involved in vaccine research and intertwined with the Peter Doherty Institute. For example, the Vaccine and Immunisation Research Group (VIRGo) is a collaboration between the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and the Doherty Institute.
Doherty himself is a member of Friends of Science in Medicine Inc., a group that portends to fight "quackery, conspiracies, frauds, scams," all the while promoting quackery and scams like anthropogenic climate change (the monumentally absurd proposition that the world is going to overheat because of the 0.28% of global greenhouse gases attributable to humans) and vaccines (that unique drug class whose failure is the fault, not of their poor efficacy, but of the people who don't use them! Think about the logic behind that assertion for a moment).
Friends of Science in Medicine is a politically motivated outfit that readily weaponizes all the usual leftist slurs like "deniers" and "anti-vaxxers" (as opposed to, say, "people who exercise their right to eschew drugs with a surprisingly poor evidence base made by criminal corporations with decades-long track records of dishonesty offences, such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GSK, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, etc"). This self-appointed "quackbuster" outfit supported the anti-scientific "No Jab, No Play" policy at the Senate Hearing in November 2015.
Australia's gushing media invariably presents Doherty as a Noble Prize-winning elder statesman, when in reality he belongs to an outfit supporting a form of medical apartheid and his institute is awash with vested interests.
VIRGo has received funding from vaccine manufacturers Sanofi, Seqirus (CSL), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Janssen, Merck and Novavax.
VIRGo leads the Vax4COVID alliance at the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. Vax4COVID, which received start-up funding from the Victorian Government (taxpayers get stitched yet again), "is an alliance of Australian vaccine clinical trial centres, with extensive experience and expertise in the conduct of vaccine clinical trials, including pandemic viral vaccines, formed to facilitate the conduct of Phase II trials of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates in Australia."
In other words, the Peter Doherty Institute is all about the vaccines, just like Fauci's NIAID and the various "CDC" agencies around the world.
In a press conference on August 3, 2021, the Doherty Institute and Murdoch Children's Research Institute's Professor Jodie McVernon said she would like everyone “immunised tomorrow” for 'COVID-19'.
Of course she would. McVernon has been an investigator on a number of clinical drug trials. Her employer University of Melbourne has received grants from bioCSL, GSK, Novartis and Pfizer. She's received funding from the Australian Research Council for vaccine clinical trial investigations. She's Director of the Influenza Specialist Group (ISG). Like so many Big Pharma-buttered researchers, she's had her travel to attend pharma-sponsored workshops and symposiums covered by vaccine companies.
The Doherty Institute has its own WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza. The WHO, of course, being the same Gates-sponsored spruikers who brought us the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009, and then declared a global 'COVID pandemic' in March 2020 after a handful of swabs were analyzed by government-owned and pharma-friendly researchers in China, Australia and US.
The Deputy Director of this Centre is Ian Barr, who in 2007 and again from 2015 to 2016 was on the Advisory Group of Experts for WHO Consultations on the Composition of Influenza Virus Vaccines. Barr is a member of the Immunisation Coalition, which is funded by vaccine manufacturers including Pfizer, Moderna, CSL/Seqirus, GSK, Sanofi and Merck. Cancel culture and surveillance behemoth Google is also a supporter.
Terry Nolan is a member of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection & Immunity, COVID-19 and the current head of VIRGo, which he established in the 1990s at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. From 2005 to 2014, Nolan was Chair of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), an organization that has proved pivotal in pushing the COVID gene therapies upon Australians.
In 2009, during his stint with ATAGI, Nolan was a CSL Limited vaccine advisory board member and lead author on CSL’s Panvax swine flu influenza vaccine trial, tested on 370 children.
That’s right: The lead author of a pharma-sponsored trial was simultaneously allowed to chair an outfit that heavily influences vaccine policy in Australia.
Gee, no possible conflict of interest there.
(For the edification of readers outside Australia, CSL stands for Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, a government-created and subsequently privatized disgrace whose achievements include recklessly destroying innocent people's lives with contaminated blood transfusions).
Nolan has served on a GSK data safety monitoring board for its HPV vaccine and GSK advisory boards (allegedly unpaid) for pertussis vaccine (2014 and 2016). He was a contributor to WHO and Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) meetings on evaluation of pandemic influenza vaccines in clinical trials each year from 2006-2011.
To top it all off, in 2010, Nolan published a report “The Australian model of immunization advice and vaccine funding”, where he claimed, because of Australia's small population, "involvement in industry-sponsored vaccine research where payment is made to an institution and not to the individual is generally not considered a conflict requiring exclusion."
I bet if I gave $100,000 to your boss, and you subsequently published a ‘study’ singing the praises of my books, my critics and haters would be over it like a rash. But if Pfizer, recipient of the world's biggest ever criminal fine for offences including bribery, gives your employer the same amount for the same outcome, Nolan says it's "generally not considered a conflict."
Welcome to The Commonwealth of Australia Inc., a limited liability and zero transparency company where Anglo pretensions of orderliness meet with third world levels of shitefookery.
That, dear readers, is the pedigree of the Doherty Institute, whose researchers claimed to have 'isolated' Sars-Cov-2 in late January 2020. The Institute is deeply intertwined with the vaccine industry, yet is allowed to influence public vaccine policy in a manner that ultimately benefits the vaccine industry.
Doherty Institute ‘Discovers’ the Health Benefits of Garlic - 8,000 Years After Everyone Else
There is a rather bizarre addendum to the sorry tale of the Doherty Institute.
On June 1, 2023, the Doherty Institute issued a press release claiming its in vitro (lab) research showed garlic can fight COVID and influenza A. In fact, a variety of garlic sourced from sites in the Northern Territory and Mildura, Victoria, was allegedly 99.9% effective for “curbing the infectivity of the viruses.”
The study was in vitro. It was funded by a company called Australian Garlic Producers. And it was conducted by the Peter Doherty Institute.
Based on that alone, the study means little to a hardened skeptic like yours truly.
However, researchers in other countries have long known that garlic possesses antimicrobial and ‘anti-viral’ effects in vitro. I wrote about this in my 2006 book The Great Cholesterol Con.
Clinical studies in actual humans, as opposed to petri dishes, are thin on the ground. A UK study published in 2001 found that, over 3 months, subjects taking an allicin-containing garlic supplement had significantly fewer colds than the placebo group. Garlic subjects who did get a cold experienced a significantly shorter duration of symptoms (1.52 days vs 5.01 days for the placebo group).
More recently, Spanish researchers administered a standardized garlic and onion extract to elderly care home residents. Over 36 weeks, they found the extract significantly reduced the incidence of respiratory infections. It also decreased the number and duration of the associated symptoms compared with the placebo group.
What we need are additional, larger RCTs confirming that garlic and garlic supplements do indeed prevent and/or reduce the severity of respiratory infections. Unfortunately, the Doherty Institute are too busy tooling around with the kind of in vitro experiments other researchers have been doing for years.
Only after claiming that 80% coverage with toxic gene therapies was the way out of lockdowns, and only after the majority of Australians unthinkingly followed their advice, does the Doherty Institute begin to ‘discover’ what the Chinese knew 8,000 years ago and what any Italian nonna could have told you during the last few hundred years:
Garlic is an effective (and tasty) way to guard against colds and flu. One that doesn’t harm people, let alone kill them at a rate not seen since the World War era.
In the next installment of my ongoing dissection of Herd Stupidity, we'll look at whether researchers controlled by the Chinese Communist Party can be trusted when they claim to have isolated a novel virus called Sars-Cov-2.
Ciao,
Anthony.
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Thank you for this. My family is in Melbourne so I have a personal interest. This is a painful topic but you manage to bring the goods and make me laugh at the same time. I appreciate your thorough research and irreverent style.