Record road deaths

Covid-era experts baffled … again.

The ABC reported in December that, for the twelve months to November 2023, “1,253 Australians died from road accidents, the third straight year of increasing road deaths … rising to levels not seen in nearly a decade” (The Conversation has since updated this figure to 1,266 for the calendar year proper).  “For much of the past four decades”, continues the ABC, “Australia made steady progress on the road toll - from 2,800 people killed in road accidents in 1989, down to 1,094 by October 2020” but “as the nation emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, the road toll started to increase” and now stands at a noticeably higher 6.3% more than its low point.

Much head-scratching then ensues as the ABC reports that “a significant increase in death rates on roads around the country has experts worried”.  Not just baffled this time but worried, too!  The ‘experts’ are all desperately searching for an explanation for this historically unprecedented spike in deaths on our roads and they have suitably-vetted ‘experts’ on tap who proceed to throw a bunch of darts at the causation board to see what might stick.

They pin most hope on the explanatory cause being that, because people so feared getting Covid on public transport, the car-less amongst them all rushed out and bought motor vehicles and are thus there is now more driving and more fatal prangs.  Drivers may also have lost their driving skills during lockdowns, it is suggested, whilst more drug-taking and other risky driving behaviour is occurring at the same time as fewer RBTs are being conducted to deter the risk-takers.

On and on they go with the possible reasons, none of which are convincing.  Even The Conversation, which is the ABC’s trusty ideological ally, pours cold water on the go-to explanation for the increase in road deaths (more cars on the road as Covid-terrified people have shunned public transport) with a, useful-for-once, analysis that shows that the increase in the number of vehicles during and after the ‘pandemic’ has been only modest relative to the rise in road deaths.  The Conversation adds that lockdowns have also initiated a still-going phase of more people working from home resulting in a reduction in daily commutes and thus fewer cars being on the road.

The ‘flight to the car’ explanation for more road deaths simply doesn’t hold water.  The other explanations, which revolve around a deterioration in driver behaviour and lax policing, are silent on why this phenomenon has occurred right now.  What has caused a switch to be flicked so suddenly in driver psychology and law enforcement priorities?  We are not told.

What the ABC doesn’t report is that what also happened as the nation ‘emerged from the pandemic’ was our immersion into a national Covid vaccination frenzy (this was our path out of the Great Covid Panic after all) and the resultant spike in excess mortality.  The three years of the big vaccine push in 2021, 2022 and early 2023 coincide exactly with the three straight years of increasing road deaths.

Some of the extra deaths the mandated vaccine has caused can be expected to have occurred whilst behind the wheel from sudden ‘medical episodes’ (heart attack, stroke, embolism, aneurysm, etc.) which can be fatal in and of themselves or can be the direct cause of a fatal road traffic accident.  You can get a potentially fatal, or life-incapacitating, adverse reaction whilst playing soccer, playing other sport, being retired from sport, flying an airplane, reporting the news, being in the military, being a social media 'influencer', being in the womb, or engaged in any other human activity from hiking to sleeping in bed, so why not driving?

Hercule Poirot would have cracked this case faster than he did his fastidiously boiled egg for breakfast but as everyone’s favourite private detective puts it  - “if the little grey cells are not exercised, the rust they grow” - and the ABC’s investigatory muscles have wasted away from a Covid-induced coma.  All we get from the ABC and their house-trained experts is anything, anything other than the obvious –  no wonder the silly experts are baffled all the time these days. 

Not that anyone in authority is rushing to publish data showing what might actually be going on out on our roads.  The Australian Automobile Association (AAA), which includes transport groups and insurers, says that state and territory governments are withholding relevant data (including crash causes) and the federal government is doing nothing to make the states cough up the data.  The AAA Managing Director said: “while so much data relating to roads quality and crash causation remains secret, Australia can neither identify the cause of its rising road toll, nor develop the most effective measures to reduce it”.

So the exact role of ‘medical episodes’ in boosting the road crash fatality figures will remain hidden.  Which is just fine and dandy as far as our governments go, given their role in injecting the drivers of Australia with a rushed, experimental, toxic and potentially deadly new vaccine whose name can never be spoken in a negative context in those organs of ideological power which gave us a fake ‘pandemic’ and its deadly ‘cure’. 

The ABC notes that the three-year increase in road deaths is happening globally - “all around the world we have seen a similar pattern”, they say, “especially in Western countries and cities designed for motor vehicles", whilst failing to add that the less developed world is not only less car-centric but has also showed more disinterest in the Covid vaccines (lucky them!).

What are the odds that all developed countries, at the same time and in all particulars, saw similar behavioural and policing changes on the roads compared to the odds that the one major change which was identical to them all was an unnecessary, ineffective and dangerous pharma product which has caused a large spike in excess deaths in those countries.  The ABC’s Occam’s Razor needs a damned good sharpening.