Children’s Health Defense Australia Launch
Welcome to an exclusive showcase of powerful insights and moments from the landmark launch event of Children’s Health Defense Australia Chapter. Packed with a host of Australian experts offering presentations on a variety of topics that impact our children’s health. Get ready to be inspired, informed, and empowered as you dive into a wealth of information as we distill the wisdom, passion, and transformative ideas that shape our mission.
Join us and discover how we’re driving change for a healthier, freer Australia.
Welcome to Children’s Health Defense Australia
Professor Robyn Cosford
Professor Robyn Cosford was a functional medicine practitioner of over 35 years. As a mother of five, she is passionate about the health of children and the mother- small child relationship in particular. Robyn was grandfathered into Australasian College on Nutritional and Environmental Medicine ( ACNEM) by Professor Ian Brighthope in 1996 and was a researcher with University of Newcastle into the metabolic and stool microbiotica patterns in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Autism and ADHD. It was at this time that she began researching and treating abnormalities in gut microbiome in various disease patterns and patterns of hidden infections. A senior lecturer for ACNEM over many years, Robyn has presented at numerous conferences to medical and non-medical audiences alike across Australia and abroad.
Senator Malcolm Roberts, Meryl Dorey & Greg Beattie
Malcolm Roberts brings to the Senate a thorough, practical and analytical approach to examining issues and is deeply committed to listening and thoroughly researching the facts. During the Covid pandemic Senator Roberts has spoken out about the impact of the mandates and calls for essential freedom and liberties to be restored for all Australians. He rejects a two-tier society based on vaccination status and in 2022 hosted two cross-party inquiries “COVID under question” and “COVID Inquiry 2.0”
Meryl Dorey is a mother of 4 children, the eldest of whom was injured by his DPT vaccine in 1989 and again by his MMR vaccine in 1990. In 1994, after a great deal of medical research and meeting many other families with children who had been injured or killed by vaccines, Meryl worked with health professionals and parents to form a local organisation in the Northern Rivers of NSW called the Vaccination Awareness Network (VAN). Four years later, VAN combined with many other local vaccination information and support groups to form the Australian Vaccination Network (now the Australian Vaccination-risks Network – AVN). In the 26 years since its founding, the AVN has educated, supported and lobbied on behalf of families and health professionals around the country. AVN have networked closely with national and international health rights organisations and oppose any form of mandatory mass medication without informed consent.
Greg Beattie has seven children and five grandchildren. In 1996, he participated in a two-day Human Rights Commission hearing concerning the banning from a government-run child care facility of two of his children. This experience, together with his studies of the roles of various vaccines and advances in public health in the conquest of disease, has resulted in two books: Vaccination: A Parent’s Dilemma (1996) and Fooling Ourselves on the Fundamental Value of Vaccines (2012). Believing that public policy on health should have a solid evidentiary and human-rights basis, he represented the then Australian Vaccination Network in numerous administrative and state and federal parliamentary hearings on vaccination policy. Greg holds graduate certificates in science (applied statistics) from Swinburne University and biostatistics from the University of Queensland.
Professor Ian Brighthope
Ian Brighthope graduated in Agricultural Science in 1965 and then in 1974 graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. The Brighthope Clinics and Biocentres were developed in the 1970’s. They specialised in Nutritional, Medicine, Environmental Medicine, intravenous therapies including chelation therapy and herbal medicine. As chairman of the Australian College of Herbal Medicine, he developed an early interest in cannabis and other controversial herbs. As founding president of Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine (ACNEM) and president for over 26 years, Professor Brighthope pioneered the first post-graduate medical course in nutrition and its related fellowship in Australia. He is now the official ambassador of ACNEM.
Kara Thomas
Dr Chris Neil
Dr Christopher Neil has practiced medicine for 20 years, specialising in cardiology since 2008. Completing his PhD in Adelaide and undertaking post-doctoral research and a fellowship in the UK , he has been committed to clinical excellence in the care of patients with heart failure. Returning to a specialist consultant post in his hometown of Melbourne, in 2013, he focused on developing improved systems of care for heart failure patients, whilst continuing to research in hospitals, mentor physicians in training and supervise PhD students. His passion, however, has always been for his patients and when he saw their health impacted and their rights infringed, he stood against what he saw as unethical and unjustifiable mandates, resulting in his termination in October 2021. He was a co-founder of AMPS in 2021 and continues as the current President.
Professor Gigi Foster
Gigi Foster (BA Ethics, Politics and Economics, PhD Economics), Professor with the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, was born, raised and educated in the USA and emigrated to Australia in 2003. She works in diverse fields including education, social influence, time use, lab experiments, behavioural economics, and Australian policy. Named 2019 Young Economist of the Year by the Economic Society of Australia, she publishes in both specialised and cross-disciplinary outlets, and her innovative teaching was awarded a 2017 Australian Awards for University Teaching (AAUT) Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. She has filled numerous roles of service to the profession and engages heavily on economic matters with the Australian community, as one of Australia’s leading economics communicators, in the media and at live events. She co-founded the think tank Australians for Science and Freedom in 2023 and is an author most recently of The Great Covid Panic (Brownstone Institute 2021, with Paul Frijters and Michael Baker) and Do Lockdowns and Border Closures Serve the “Greater Good”? (Connor Court 2022, with Sanjeev Sabhlok).
Professor Ramesh Thakur
Ramesh Thakur Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, where he was Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. He was formerly Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Educated in India and Canada, he has held full-time academic appointments in Fiji, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia and been a consultant to the Australian, New Zealand and Norwegian governments on arms control, disarmament and international security issues. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Thakur has become one of the leading critics of the Australian government’s actions amid the hasty formation of ‘policy’ as a part of its pandemic response, with numerous articles published in The Spectator and The Brownstone Institute.
Dr Pri Bandara
Dr Astrid Lefringhausen
Dr Astrid Lefringhausen studied biology at University Kiel in Germany, finishing with a Diploma in Microbiology, Doctorate in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at University Kiel in 1996. During this time she was also working as a nurse in Radiology, teaching medicinal microbiology to nurse students at the German Red Cross and work in the Biotechnology research facility of Bayer. Astrid worked from 1996 to 2004 for Qiagen (a Molecular Biology start up at the time), first as a Technical Sales Representative then Export Manager for the Asia Pacific Region. From 2004 to 2012 she worked for Miltenyi Biotec (German Cell therapy and Immunology company). Since 2015 Astrid has been working in the diagnostics industry with Pathologies and Universities across Australia and New Zealand in the area of cell chemistry, immunohaematology. Along with Dr Conny Turni, Astrid published “COVID-19 vaccines – an Australian review” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical and Experimental Immunology, exploring COVID-19 vaccines in Australia; the promises and predictions originally made versus the actual facts, and evaluating the safety and efficacy by way of reviewing the literature and the data from government agencies over the pandemic.
Julian Gillespie LLB, BJuris
Julian Gillespie, LLB BJuris, is a lawyer and former barrister, who wrote the legal opinions and prepared the briefs for proceedings (together with Peter Fam and Katie Ashby-Koppens) before the Federal Court and High Court of Australia, seeking those Courts rule the decisions to extend the ‘vaccines’ to babies 6 months to under 6 years, and to children 6-11 year olds as always being invalid at law, as the Secretary of Health lacked the legal power to make those decisions. This is a new and controversial area of Australian law that Australian courts are still learning how to deal with appropriately. Julian researches extensively on all matters connected to Australia’s response to SARS-CoV-2, sharing publicly his findings concerning the legislative framework for how the Commonwealth and States and Territory governments centrally organised the response to SARS-CoV-2 from Canberra, drawing attention to the fact Australian governments collectively jettisoned years of scientific research amassed for correctly responding to a pandemic, to instead follow unscientific WHO recommendations which favoured big pharmaceutical interests.
