The Spectator
Rebecca Weisser
27 April 2024
9:00 AM
Punishing Petrovsky
It was Walter Map in his 12th century work ‘On the Trifles of Courtiers’ who created the character Eudo, who famously, ‘left no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded’.
Human nature has changed little in the intervening centuries at least to judge by the behaviour of 21st century courtiers presiding over Covid management in Australia.
Take the case of Professor Nikolai Petrovsky. He seems to have committed the cardinal error of behaving with academic brilliance, honesty and integrity throughout the pandemic. That will never do.
His first mistake was to advise that, ‘The earliest known Sars-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission,’ which he and his team published in Scientific Reports which is published by Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world.
The implication of the research published by Petrovsky and his team was that it was highly unlikely that the Sars-CoV-2 virus was transmitted from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan, and far more likely that it was adapted to human cells, one possibility being that this had happened in a laboratory from whence it was transmitted to humans. This was denounced as a ‘conspiracy theory’ at the time but is now considered to be the most plausible explanation for the origin of Sars-CoV-2 by most US agencies.
Petrovsky was also the only Australian scientist to successfully develop a Covid vaccine against Sars-CoV-2. It received emergency-use approval from the Iranian Food and Drug Administration and was widely administered in Iran reducing infection rates and in particular severe disease without inducing serious adverse events associated with mRNA vaccines.
Petrovsky demonstrated his confidence in the safety and efficacy of his invention by vaccinating himself with it before vaccinating anyone else. This however led Petrovsky to refuse to be vaccinated with either the mRNA or AstraZeneca Covid vaccines approved by Australia’s drug regulators, pointing out that the effect of combining the two different types of vaccines was unknown and could be dangerous and counter-productive to his health. As he said in November 2021, there is ‘no clinical data on what would happen if someone who is fully vaccinated subjected themselves to a whole further round just to satisfy an arbitrary mandate’ and it would therefore ‘not be safe’. That did not go down well with the Covid courtiers who were so determined to vaccinate every man, woman, and child that they even denied natural immunity.
Professor Petrovsky further sinned by providing expert evidence in numerous legal challenges to vaccine mandates two of which, in the Supreme Court of Queensland and the New Zealand High Court, were successful, ruling that vaccine mandates imposed on Queensland police and healthcare workers, and New Zealand police and defence forces were unlawful. He also offended the Grand Poobahs of public health by daring, quite truthfully, to describe the mRNA Covid vaccines as experimental ‘gene therapy’.
Who, you might ask, is, or was, Professor Petrovsky? The Director of Endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre and Professor of Medicine at Flinders University, vice-president and secretary-general of the International Immunomics Society, the founder and principal investigator of Vaxine, since 2002 a biotech company that has been continually funded by the US National Institutes of Health across multiple vaccine research projects totalling approximately $50 million in funding. He has also been involved in multiple successful grants bringing income to South Australia from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, MTPConnect –Australia’s Life Sciences Innovation Accelerator, DMTC – which develops technology solutions to enhance Australian defence and national security capability, Global Connections – an AusIndustry body funding joint science projects between Australia and India, the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, FastGrants, BioSA Bioscience Industry Development, Industry SA, and Innovate UK, equating to approximately another $10 million. Petrovsky is also the winner of the 2009 AMP Innovation award at the Telstra business awards, the developer of vaccines against influenza, hepatitis B, sting allergy, malaria, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, and HIV, is working on a personalised vaccine to cure cancer, is the author of over 240 original research papers, and has been invited to give keynote presentations at over 200 international conferences.
You might think this would make Professor Petrovsky one of the most successful scientists in South Australia if not the whole of Australia, and Vaxine a South Australian success story.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It made Professor Petrovsky the tallest of poppies. Punishment has been swift and remorseless.
The South Australian government has terminated Petrovsky’s position as Director of Endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre and Flinders University removed his academic status and that of senior scientists associated with Vaxine. Why? Because, according to them, he has not contributed sufficiently to the academic community. Yes, you read that right. Despite all those grants and awards, developing a successful Covid vaccine, and working on a cure for cancer, Professor Petrovsky has not been pulling his weight.
So, instead of lauding Petrovsky as a hero, Flinders University and SA Health have evicted Petrovsky and Vaxine from their premises two years into a five-year research project into personalised cancer vaccines that has so far produced results that can only be described as miraculous in extending the lives of patients with, for example, terminal aggressive brain tumours. In doing so, Flinders University and SA Health seem prepared to condemn these patients to almost certain death.
Vaxine has also been forced to terminate the employment of most of their staff and being without laboratories they have had to forfeit $18 million in funding from the US government for pandemic influenza vaccine development and research.
The university has even seemingly been happy to breach the welfare rights of the animal colonies developed over 20 years that are critical to Vaxine’s research by refusing to allow them the care they require.
In doing all this the university is effectively saying that the cancer trials that an ethics committee approved are a waste of time as is all the animal research undertaken over 20 years, and that people who have volunteered to participate in groundbreaking cancer research should instead be denied that opportunity even if it costs them their lives. One of those participants is a doctor. Another is a ten-year-old girl. Too bad, says Flinders University. There is something more important at stake; the destruction of a brilliant scientist and his dedicated research team.
Somewhere Walter Map must be smiling. He knew well the human heart. Eudo, ‘put the worst of men to command the bad, he gave additional authority and power to those who were wickedest in their attacks on the innocent, and promoted over all others those to whom pity was unknown.’
so mich easier to show folks thr didcussion. Drscribing it never worked for me