Doctor disturbed by TGA response to senator’s questions on Covid vaccine deaths

Dr Julie Sladden, the author of the following article on deaths linked to Covid 19 vaccines, is a medical doctor, writer, and advocate who walked away from clinical practice, handed in her medical license, and became one of Australia’s most vocal advocates for practitioner wellbeing and regulatory reform.

She has also contributed to The Spectator and The Daily Declaration, and is co-founder of Australians for Science and Freedom.

Dr Sladden is also a councillor with West Tamar Council in Tasmania and stood for pre-selection as a Liberal in the seat of Bass, which prompted an attack by the Australian Medical Association via the ABC, calling her candidacy “untenable” because she questioned the safety of Covid 19 vaccines.

By Dr Julie Sladden
From The Daily Declaration

WHEN the US drug regulator announced it was investigating deaths linked to the Covid-19 vaccine, Australian senator Alex Antic turned to our own regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), to ask why the same scrutiny had never occurred here. The answer, it turns out, is deeply unsettling.

Australia’s surveillance system had logged reports of deaths after Covid-19 vaccination — including deaths in children — yet almost none of those cases were referred for expert causality assessment.

Nearly three years would pass before Australia withdrew its recommendation to vaccinate healthy children.

In September 2025, the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS) uploaded a report summarising Australia’s spontaneous surveillance data for adverse events following immunisation (AEFI) for Covid-19 vaccines administered in 2022.

Although dated March 2025, the report covers the second year of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout — including the first year the vaccines were offered to children aged 11 years and under. The figures are stark.

In 2022, Australia recorded 18,398 adverse event reports following Covid-19 vaccination. Of these, 160 involved a fatal outcome. Six of the reported deaths occurred in children aged 0 to 17.

The report takes pains to clarify that “reporting a death to the TGA does not mean that the vaccine caused the death, or that the individual completing the report considers that the death was caused by a vaccine” and concludes that “safety monitoring continued to demonstrate a reassuring safety profile.”

However, the timing of these deaths complicates that claim. Among children, the median interval between vaccination and death was 4.5 days. For young adults aged 18–29, it was just three days.

This is an important point. When an adverse event occurs shortly after exposure – within a timeframe consistent with known biological mechanisms – it strengthens the plausibility of a causal link and makes coincidence less likely. This principle underpins widely used causality frameworks such as the Bradford Hill criteria.

The overwhelming majority of the 160 reported deaths in the NCIRS Report occurred within a median of less than two weeks following vaccination. This fact casts doubt on the “reassuring safety profile” asserted by the report.

Surprisingly, the report states, “Only one death following a Covid-19 vaccine administered in 2022 was assessed by TGA as likely to be causally linked to vaccination.”

At first glance, that conclusion seems remarkable. It becomes less surprising once one learns that only two of the 160 reported deaths — and none of the six child deaths – were referred to the Vaccine Safety Investigation Group (VSIG) for expert causality assessment.

Why, then, were none of the reported child deaths escalated for expert investigation? The TGA was asked this exact question by Senator Antic during the December 2025 round of Senate estimates.

Responding on behalf of the regulator, Dr Daniel Dascombe, acting principal medical adviser in the TGA’s pharmacovigilance branch, explained that the VSIG had been convened during the early phase of the rollout for specific conditions such as myocarditis and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome.

At that time, he said, the risk–benefit profile of Covid-19 vaccines was still being characterised, and the potential impact of serious adverse events on that balance was unknown.

“As time progressed,” he told Senator Antic, “the safety profile of these vaccines has become better established, and the grounds for establishing a VSIG to look into specific case reports have changed over time.”

However, that explanation did not address the question being asked by Senator Antic.

The deaths recorded in 2022 did not occur years down the track once safety was settled. They occurred during the early stages of rolling out a new vaccine program to children using a novel technology, at a time when “the potential impact of these adverse events on the risk–benefit balance… was unknown.”

Yet the VSIG was not convened in response to any of the reported child deaths, even though healthy children were known to be at minimal risk from Covid, and that death as an adverse event clearly “has the potential to change the favourable benefit–risk balance of the vaccine,” a stated criterion in the VSIG work instruction.

Read more: https://dailydeclaration.org.au/…/senate-covid-vaccine…/