When Policy Catches Up to Truth: ATAGI Quietly Confirms What Got Me Suspended

On 3 June 2025, Australia’s immunisation authorities withdrew their COVID-19 vaccine recommendation for healthy under-18s. I was suspended for saying the same thing two years ago.

On 3 June 2025, ATAGI — the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation — quietly updated its COVID-19 vaccine guidelines. The new advice? That healthy infants, children, and adolescents under 18 years of age should no longer be offered COVID-19 vaccination.

No press conference. No retraction. No public admission of harm. Just a silent policy reversal — confirming what many doctors and researchers had been trying to explain since 2021.

I was one of them.

As a general practitioner in Queensland, I issued medical exemptions to concerned parents who did not wish to subject their healthy children to a vaccine whose long-term safety was still uncertain — especially given the low risk that COVID-19 posed to that age group. I also raised concerns about blanket recommendations for pregnant women, whose unborn babies are far more physiologically vulnerable than a healthy 17-year-old.

For that, I was suspended from medical practice in 2023. While one or two complaints were cited — including concern over my vaccine-related advice — there was no evidence of harm, no clinical error, and no breach of patient care. My “offence” was not misconduct, but professional judgement: I questioned the prevailing narrative, and acted cautiously in line with the evidence as I understood it.

Let that sink in.

If a healthy 17-year-old is no longer considered a suitable candidate for this vaccine, then how can the continued recommendation for pregnant women possibly be justified? There is no coherent scientific or ethical rationale. It’s simply institutional momentum — a reluctance to admit error, even as the consequences of that error accumulate.

The very guidance I was punished for supporting is now being adopted by the same health system that labelled me a danger to the public.

This isn’t just about me. It’s about what happens when good doctors are punished for following their conscience — and when health authorities take years to publicly admit what many professionals knew from the beginning.

The cost of that delay is still being counted: in adverse events, in broken trust, and in the lives upended by mandates, suspensions, and forced silence.

I’ve written a formal letter to the Medical Board of Australia in light of this update, calling attention to the ethical and procedural contradiction now at the heart of their case against me. You can read the full letter here:

📄 Letter to the Medical Board – 6 June 2025 (PDF)

I’ve also cc’d the Tribunal overseeing my case. They deserve to see what’s playing out — in black and white.

If the official narrative now reflects the stance I was suspended for, then the question is simple:

Who will be held accountable for the damage done along the way?

In recognition of the profound harms inflicted — and those yet to be acknowledged,
Dr David Nixon
MB, ChB, FRACGP