Researcher Martin Steward says there are legitimate questions around why wealthier countries experienced higher excess death rates than poorer countries.
The COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic lockdowns are likely a “strong contributing factor” to the nearly 20,000 excess deaths in Australia during the 2020-2023 period, according to one scientist.
Martin Stewart has 14 years of experience as a biomedical researcher at academic institutions in Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Australia.
He also worked at the Robert Langer laboratory, named after the founder of Moderna, who produced an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.
On March 26, the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs opened its inquiry into “excess mortality”—a term that refers to the number of deaths in a country that exceed the yearly average.
According to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), excess deaths in Australia during the pandemic era reached 30,332. Of this, the total number of excess deaths deemed unrelated to COVID-19 was 19,401.
In his submission (pdf) to the Senate Committee, Mr. Stewart noted that many countries were experiencing “a high degree of excess mortality event after the worst and most deadly phases of the pandemic are over” and that these excess deaths “cannot be attributed to COVID-19 related illness.”
The “deadliest phase” was from late 2021 to early 2022 onwards, according to Mr. Stewart.
Most Australian states reached a 90 percent or more vaccination rate by December 2021, which was followed by a relaxing of restrictions in the Christmas period of 2021, and then a large-scale removal of restrictions and lockdowns in 2022.
However, 2022 and 2023 are the years when the country saw the most COVID deaths (10,301 for 2022, and 4,525 for 2023) and excess deaths not related to COVID-19 (9,644 and 8,361).
Mr. Stewart noted that the excess deaths “may be associated with long-term effects after COVID-19 (e.g. long COVID), longer term problems due to the healthcare system being inhibited from properly caring for people throughout 2020-2022, or due to government-sanctioned interventions such as lockdowns and COVID-19 vaccinations.”
“It is a complex and multi-factorial problem, however the data presented in this report strongly indicates that unproven and novel COVID-19 vaccinations are likely to be a contributing factor in excess deaths.”
