Matt Lawson is a lone figure dressed in a high vis jacket and with a timber walking stick as he walks along the busy highway north of Tocumwal.
Matt embarked on this mammoth 1,700km walk from Melbourne to Brisbane with zero training.
“It’s been going really good. I have day-to-day little niggles and aches your body goes through, but you’re thinking about what you are doing it for.
“Doing it for the people that can’t get their voices out there kind of spurs you on.
“I made the decision two weeks ago that I was gonna do it.”
Matt’s cause is one that has seen little recognition, in fact, it’s faced blatant suppression.
I asked Matt what his motivation for this mad quest was.
“For me, obviously, you know, in Australia, that the jab rolled out, whether people are for it or against, it doesn’t worry me in any way.
“I started to see people with injuries and getting things into my inbox on all my different social media about people that were injured, from breathing difficulties to heart palpitations, to myocarditis and strokes, and everything you can think of.
“Then, I found the jab injuries Australia page. A guy named Matt runs it, doesn’t get paid, just runs it to tell people’s stories.”
To date, there has been over 138,000 adverse events reported to the Australian Government Database of Adverse Event Notifications in relation to Covid-19 vaccinations in 2.5 years, far exceeding any other vaccination program in the last 52 years of the database.
“I know the compensation scheme that they’ve got in place is really hard for people to fill out the forms. It’s 300 pages. People get started on it, they get rejected, they start again.
“I know a lot of these people have lost jobs because of the injuries they’ve got, a lot of them have lost livelihoods, a lot of them have just lost their ability to be able to go outside and breathe fresh air and do normal things.
“The initial start of the walk was really just to get it out there, get the awareness out there and have the conversations.
“Personally, there’s people I know that have been touched by it as well.
“I figure for me, every conversation I have in each town that I pass through is someone that may not have heard about what’s going on out there.
“If I can give a few people the confidence who might be thinking I’m not feeling well since I got my shots or whatever else to start having the conversations or go check out with a doctor.
“I think quite a few people are embarrassed or they don’t know exactly where to turn if they’re not feeling well after having it and it kind of seems like it’s part luck. Some people get the shot and nothing happens and they’re fantastic, and other people are quite unwell.
A small group had gathered in Finley to welcome Matt as he entered town. The group had erected a ‘Forest of the Fallen’, which is a national campaign displaying the names and stories of vaccinated Australians who died or were injured post-vaccine. A similar display was held in Deniliquin’s Waring Gardens in early July.
You can find Matt’s journey, THE LONG WALK FOR CV J INJURY AWARENESS – MELB/BRIS on Facebook.
This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 3 August 2023.
