Senator Claims TGA ‘Overriding’ Experts While Processing Vaccine Injury Claims

A nurse is seen working at a Covid-19 testing clinic at Ipswich Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, on Aug. 24, 2020. Glenn Hunt/Getty Images

Senator Gerard Rennick has alleged—under parliamentary privilege in the Senate—that the Therapeutic Goods Administration is “overriding the decision of the specialists” in refusing claims for vaccine injury from people who received COVID-19 vaccinations.

Services Australia administers the scheme, which offers people a way to seek a one-off compensation payment, instead of going through legal proceedings, if they experienced harm from a vaccine.

The Scheme was designed to “compensate for losses due to the harm ... suffered” and not for “pain and suffering.” The compensation covers lost earnings, out-of-pocket expenses, paid attendant care services, and “deceased ... vaccine recipient payments and funeral costs.”

To meet the criteria for the payment, Services Australia’s website says a person must have:

• received an approved COVID-19 vaccine.
• met the definition of harm, for example, an administration-related injury or one of the clinical conditions listed in the policy.
• been admitted to hospital as an inpatient, or seen in an outpatient setting for an eligible clinical condition.
• been admitted to hospital as an inpatient for an administration-related injury.
• experienced losses or expenses of $1,000 or more.

The site also lists the eligible conditions including myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and the autoimmune disorder Guillain Barre Syndrome.

A claimant must have their condition verified by “a medical specialist in the relevant field of practice” (for instance, a cardiologist for myocarditis), and then send the medical report and evidence of the expenses being claimed for assessment by Services Australia.

Senator Claims to Have ‘Insider’ Informant

Mr. Rennick told the Senate that he had spoken to “an insider from the TGA” who had since resigned, and who “played a big role in designing this scheme.”

“The whole point of that scheme was that once the injured person got a specialist to say that the person was injured by the vaccine, he or she would be entitled to compensation. Now that is not happening,” the senator said.

“What is happening is Services Australia make these people wait [on average] 297 days to get a decision. Many of them can no longer work. They are seriously ill. They have to do all the legwork of trying ... see a specialist, a cardiologist or a rheumatologist, and that takes a lot of work. It’s very expensive. You’ve got to go and get MRIs or something to back [it] up. And then they’ve basically been neglected.”

Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick during Senate Estimates at Parliament House in Canberra, April 6, 2022. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

He alleged that, once the claim came up for a decision, “what they do is [refer it] back to the TGA, [and the] TGA is a turning around and saying ‘we are overriding the decision of the specialists who actually examined the patient.’”

“Now my insider tells me these doctors at the TGA are not qualified to be overriding specialists. And I believe that if you haven’t examined the patient who you decide this isn’t actually a vaccine injury, how would you know?”

Mr. Rennick said he had talked to scientists—whom he did not name—who told him that “you will never know while a person’s leaving because you can’t take tissue samples from living people. So we are operating in the dark here in regards to our ability to examine what’s really going on as a result of these vaccine injuries.”

Only 14 Deaths Recognised as Vaccine-Related

Senator Rennick claimed there were 1,000 reports of suspected deaths due to the vaccines in the country.

“And how many have the TGA recognised? 14,” he said.

“When you press the TGA and you say to them, ‘Can you actually prove this wasn’t a vaccine?’ They say, ‘No, we can’t.’

He also claimed there were 10,000 unexplained excess deaths during the period between May and December 2021 when the vaccines were being administered.

The Epoch Times has contacted the TGA for a response to the senator’s comments.

Debate Over Excess Deaths

Melbourne’s RMIT University concluded that excess death figures do not “point to vaccines as a culprit” and that, of the 11,200 deaths in early 2002, half (5,620) were directly attributable to COVID-19 and “much of the remainder was likely due to infectious diseases or other conditions that were exacerbated by COVID-19.”

Another analysis by the Actuaries Institute found there was a 12 percent increase in excess deaths in 2022, mostly among those aged over 65.

Of the additional 20,000 deaths for the full year, the Institute found 10,300 were attributed to COVID-19, while in another 2,900 deaths, the virus was a contributing factor.

The remaining 6,600 excess deaths were deemed unrelated to COVID-19, with ischaemic heart disease and cancer being the most common causes, leading to 2,020 and 970 excess deaths respectively.

The Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee reviewed the Vaccine Injury Bill last year and found that “many Australians with personal experience navigating the COVID-19 Vaccine Claims Scheme have found it to be restrictive, complex, onerous, and ultimately unhelpful” and that “eligibility requirements currently in place for the scheme appear to have been, on several occasions, prohibitively restrictive for many Australians and failed to meet the central stated aims of the scheme”.

It recommended that the government review the scheme, but this didn’t receive majority support.