Sassy response to anti-vaxxer’s question

Queensland senator Gerard Rennick wasted no time in the new parliament, submitting a question on notice to the minister about how many claims for death and injuries have been paid out since the rollout of the Covid jab. But Mr Shorten refused to buy into the senator’s questions and instead referred him to an “easy read” fact sheet. “Billions of people worldwide have been vaccinated against Covid-19. This has prevented millions of deaths, including tens of thousands in Australia,” he said.“This is in stark contrast to previous pandemics before the advent of vaccines. The Black Death, for example, is estimated to have killed somewhere between 30-50 per cent of the European population in the years between 1347 and 1351.“In order to provide himself with the best possible protection, I would encourage Senator Rennick to book in for his winter booster dose of a Covid-19 vaccine if he has not done so already.”Mr Shorten later outlined that less than 1 per cent of applications received under the Covid-19 vaccine claim scheme had been approved. But the sassy response did not sit well with the senator, who lamented to his substantial Facebook following about Mr Shorten’s “disgraceful” response.“Bill Shorten clearly has no empathy for those injured by the vaccine,” he said.Mr Shorten is just the latest in a long line of health officials to reject claims made by the Queensland senator, whose Facebook following surged after he began sharing stories of people claiming to have suffered injuries from the Covid vaccine. Many of the claims shared by the senator have been disputed by health officials and he himself conceded in an interview with The Guardian last year that he was unsure how many of the stories were true. Last week, the government rejected Senator Rennick’s request to make documents available to the upper house, given “(his) motion, by its own admission, seeks not a document that is in existence but a statement”. “A request of this kind in this way is appropriate for a question on notice,” Special Minister of State Don Farrell wrote in a letter to Senate president Sue Lines.