Podcaster Annie McCubbin, whose husband lists AstraZeneca and Sanofi as his former clients, has launched an extraordinary attack on the covid-vaccine injured, disrupting a memorial and inviting “Snarky Gherkin” to mock them on her podcast Why Smart Women.
The pair made unsubstantiated claims about bereaved mother Raelene Kennedy and villified the Forest of the Fallen, set up by volunteers to acknowledge those harmed by the covid gene-vaccines, as “grief farming”. Link here.
The June 30 podcast capped a month-long campaign by the pair to humiliate those who shared their stories of gene-vaccine injury.
Here’s a breakdown.
ATTACKING A MEMORIAL
People injured by the covid gene-vaccines were censored heavily from 2021 to 2024, leaving them isolated and alone.
There are now more than 144,000 injury reports and over 1000 death reports logged in Australia’s safety monitoring site, the Database of Adverse Event Notifications.
That is more than every vaccine in history combined.
Forest of the Fallen sprang up to acknowledge them.
It was devised by a Tasmanian mum: a silent memorial for those damaged by the jabs who have been bullied, ignored, gaslit and dismissed.
The power of silence
The stories sway in the wind, each one a person killed or injured by the covid gene-vaccines.
It’s not a coroner’s report. It’s a way to help people share their stories at a time of intense state oppression.
Annie McCubbin and The Gherk want to crush those voices, and so they set about deliberately sabotaging it.
Below is a video of Annie McCubbin approaching a Forest of the Fallen memorial in Dee Why on Sunday, May 24.
McCubbin is seen aggressively photographing the memorial picture of Barry Schultz, a doctor from Adelaide who died 18 days after his first Pfizer jab.
Volunteer Rosemary Marshall who helped set up the display challenges McCubbin, calling her a “serial pest” and “friend of the Gherk” before telling her to go speak to the relatives of the injured.
After the altercation, McCubbin derided the display on her podcast with The Gherk, who has been attacking the stories of the injured on Facebook and Substack.
INSULTING A GRIEVING MOTHER
Raelene Kennedy has been fighting an endless battle to have the death of her daughter Caitlin Gotze properly investigated.
Caitlin, 23 and healthy, fell ill immediately following her second Pfizer jab and never fully recovered before dying six weeks later. The coroner blamed her death on asthma.
Annie McCubbin and The Gherk discussed Caitlin’s case on their podcast.
They did not name her, but it was obvious to anyone familiar with the story exactly who they were talking about.
The Gherk claimed one of Caitlin’s siblings and the sibling’s friend, both unnamed, had said they were “gutted” and that Caitlin’s death was being “used”.
He claimed “the mother” (Raelene) had been an “anti-vaxxer”, while Caitlin had been “pro-vax”, implying the family was against her efforts to seek justice for her daughter, who would have disapproved.
Raelene was devastated. She immediately wrote a clear response on her Substack, link here.
“Many of the claims made about my daughter, my family and myself are false, unsupported by evidence, and directly contradicted by documentary records in my possession,” she wrote.
Raelene was traumatised by the insinuation that her family was against her.
“Of particular concern is the repeated assertion that the speaker was contacted by siblings and friends of my daughter and that those individuals provided information contradicting my account … The implication conveyed to listeners is clear: that family members and close friends reject my account and support his.”
Raelene said she had spoken to her family and no such contacts occurred.
The pair had not even contacted Raelene to get their facts straight, she said.
Raelene told Cafe Locked Out that instead she had reached out to them on Facebook and Substack, but they blocked and ignored her. Link here.
McCubbin’s podcast wasn’t The Gherk’s only attack on Raelene and Caitlin.
On June 1, a week after McCubbin disrupted the Forest of the Fallen memorial at Dee Why, The Gherk wrote a Substack on them. Link here, archived here.
In it, The Gherk discusses myocarditis and makes medically ignorant claims.
As Dr Paul Oosterhuis told Cafe Locked Out, it is clear he just doesn’t understand the science. Link here.
For example:
“But myocarditis has a pattern. It usually appears within a relatively short window after vaccination, often within days,” The Gherk wrote.
This is untrue.
One signature of mRNA vaccine damage is that it produces tiny focal points of scar tissue in the myocardium, too small to be diagnosed, which can interfere with the electrical signalling needed to beat the heart, as Dr Oosterhuis explained.
When high-intensity exercise stresses the heart months or even years later, those foci can short-circuit it. It doesn’t have to be within days and it doesn’t have to be young men or teenage boys.
There are plenty of people walking around with ticking time bombs in their chests now, thanks to Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA covid jabs.
Caitlin had some symptoms of myocarditis, as noted by the coroner and one of the expert reports, but The Gherk and his hatchet crew claimed on Facebook that “The suggestion that her heart was enlarged or inflamed is not substantiated in any released findings”. Link here.
They couldn’t get their facts right. All they had to do was talk to Raelene.
Caitlin was a healthy 23-year-old Queensland woman who loved horses.
At her age she had zero risk of severe covid but she was forced to take two injections to keep her Queensland racing job.
After her second Pfizer mRNA jab she was so ill that she couldn’t get out of bed for four days. She remained sick off and on until she died six weeks later, at work.
Caitlin went to the hospital with shortness of breath. The hospital assumed it was asthma but did not do the tests that would have revealed a vaccine injury such as myocarditis: no d-dimer, no troponin, no ECG. They ignored her eosiniphil levels at 20 times normal which suggested a severe immune inflammatory response from the jab, and they didn’t look at other potential causes, as Raelene says here.
They assumed it was asthma and gave her asthma drugs.
The Coroner’s report attributed it to asthma, but Raelene disputes this finding, because the hospital and the coroner were too quick to exclude the gene-vaccine from consideration. She wants them to investigate the Pfizer jab thoroughly as a potential distal cause of the chain of events that ended in Caitlin’s death.
Raelene wants justice for her daughter.
This is perfectly reasonable: Caitlin was healthy prior to the medication.
DISHONESTLY SUBMITTING FAKE STORIES
“The Gherk” boasted on McCubbin’s podcast that he had deliberately submitted fraudulent stories to discredit the Forest memorial.
“I and a few others have submitted quite a few of these fake stories,” he told Annie McCubbin.
“We’ve got two through that we know are completely made up, and they’ve used fake medical terms. I will reveal them at a later point.”
“The Gherk” said he had done this to see if there was a rigorous vetting process, and concluded there wasn’t.
Forest of the Fallen takes its stories from published accounts in mainstream media, and from Jab Injuries Australia volunteers.
The volunteers aren’t perfect but they do their best with the time they have.
There are ambiguous cases with vaccine injury, and some might be mistaken.
But the vast majority of more than 500 stories are from unacknowledged people who know very well what has injured them, and who will never qualify for compensation. The government gave the vaccine-manufacturers legal indemnity and restricted the compensation scheme to 10 narrow conditions.
For every one that is mistaken there are hundreds more unacknowledged and real stories of injury out there.
Every time the display is set up, people walk through and talk about what happened to them and their friends. The injured are everywhere. They are people you know.
Rosemary Marshall interviews them and puts them online, which is why Big Pharma wants it shut down.
TOBACCO “DOUBT TACTICS” DESTROY THE INJURED
The Gherk’s influence ring exploits the fact that its very difficult to prove medical causality in cases of vaccine injury and death without testing for the distinctive vaccinal spike.
This is done by pathology staining of tissue samples called immunohistochemistry. This process is described for autopsies here, archived here.
It is reasonably straightforward to do this, but it is not done in Australia, because the authorities don’t want to know. They want plausible deniability and doubt, since they are responsible for the problem.
This is the same tactic the tobacco industry used to pretend that cigarette smoke did not cause lung cancer. Link here.
They looked the other way to not see evidence, and falsely spread doubt about harm, deploying brownshirts in front groups to push public opinion.
The Gherk’s ring set up a Facebook page called “Forest of the Fallen Laminated Lies” to discredit, mock and cast doubt on the stories of the injured.
For example, they attack the commemoration of 40-year-old Damien Engler.
The Queensland father-of-four had no prior history of heart problems.
He was found dead in his bathroom with an enlarged heart the morning after his Moderna booster.
His story, shared by his mother Lin Jennings, has been stamped “inconclusive”.
The “Laminated Lies” Facebook page concludes, without expertise, that there’s no direct proof that the vaccine was to blame.
“The claim hinges entirely on timing and emotion, with no diagnosis tying the death directly to the vaccine,” they say.
They call it “medically murky” before casting about for any other possible idea that could replace the most obvious suspect.
“The most likely explanations? An undiagnosed cardiac condition. A seizure-related event. Medication interactions. Maybe even a combination.”
Maybe it was the tooth fairy.
How do you think his mother feels on reading that. She knows very well. That’s why she told his story.
“If new evidence comes out, we’ll reconsider... but until then, this is grief searching for a villain,” said The Gherk’s gang. Link here.
Prove it or it didn’t happen.
That is the tobacco industry tactic of injecting doubt.
Yes, heart attacks happen.
But The Gherk and his gang are lying about the burden of proof.
New, provisionally authorised products are not given the presumption of innocence.
It’s not for the family and victims to prove that the product was the cause.
The burden is on the new, poorly tested product, to show that it was not the cause.
When someone drops dead the morning after a novel injection that was not properly safety tested, every effort is to be made to investigate the product as the only factor that changed.
This did not happen for the covid gene-vaccines.
Doctors and coroners looked to the proximal cause and blamed it on that, ignoring the distal cause, the vaccine injury, that ultimately led to the death.
In almost every case you could blame a vaccine injury on something else, which is what The Gherk’s hatchet-page does. They insult almost every victim with a red stamp “highly likely false”
For those who were injured, having it acknowledged has been an impossible battle.
Government propaganda and censorship surrounding the covid gene-vaccines discouraged doctors from speaking up, as Dr Kerryn Phelps described.
This included direct license threats by AHPRA and the Medical Boards against healthcare professionals who voiced concerns.
The situation was so bad that in 2022 a break-away medical union, the Australian Medical Professional Society (AMPS), held a “Stop Medical Censorship” tour across the nation, as President Christopher Neil described here.
CoVerse, a group representing the injured, repeatedly told of how doctors would treat symptoms without acknowledging the gene-vaccine injury.
It has been incredibly difficult for the vaccine injured to get a definitive diagnosis. Sometimes it takes years.
CoVerse describes it as “medical abandonment” and the injured face an uphill battle for any awareness of the problem. Link here.
Despite this, The Gherk and his goons demand scan results, discharge notes and extensive documentation for every memorial page, otherwise they conclude it’s all “classic anti-vax tropes”.
If only they had set the evidenciary bar that high for their own unscientific claims.
The Gherk told a credulous McCubbin that covid has a higher rate of myocarditis than the jabs, without any reference to the peer-reviewed studies that show the exact opposite, such as the large-scale retrospective cohort study that said:
“We did not observe an increased incidence of pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection.” Link here.
DEFINITIVE PROOF HAS BEEN SABOTAGED
There are two definitive ways to quantify the covid vax damage. Both were sabotaged.
The first is in the safety arm of the placebo-controlled, randomised control trials.
Both Pfizer and Moderna destroyed their safety testing in December 2020 by unblinding the trials and destroying the placebo group even though the trials still had years to run.
There is no safety testing if there is no placebo group.
All you are left with is post-marketing surveillance, and that’s murky. You can always blame it on something else - which is what The Gherk and the TGA both do.
You can’t tell if there are more heart attacks and neurological problems in the placebo group than the control group after five months, or a year, if you destroy the placebo group at 2 months. There’s nobody to compare it to.
These trials were rubbish anyway because they tested a product made by a different manufacturing process than the one the public got, which makes a huge difference in biologics.
The second way to tell the carnage is by comparing the all-cause-mortality figures in the vaccinated versus unvaccinated, stratified by age. That’s easy to do. The Health Department just needs to pull statistics from a couple of different agencies, de-identify it and put it out. Not hard. They haven’t done it in five years despite multiple requests.
The rational conclusion is that they don’t want to know.
Very helpfully for the government, The Gherk doesn’t want you to know either.
Why might that be?
ANONYMOUS AND THEREFORE DISHONEST
There’s no way to know if “The Gherk” has a conflict of interest such as ties to Monash or Melbourne universities who profit from the RNA industry.
He may be a subcontractor to a government department with a history of suppressing dissent such as Health or Home Affairs. They have an interest in defending the unsafe products they promoted.
“The Gherk” is anonymous, so there is no way to tell whether he has financial connections to the billion-dollar vaccine industry, a PR firm or a political party.
He may be employed by one of the many Big Pharma funded NGOs, lobby groups or research institutes such as Medicines Australia, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Burnett Institute, Wellcome Trust or Gates Foundation.
Anonymous sources are not accountable.
That’s why journalists are not supposed to use them.
Anonymity is only for whistleblowers exposing crimes at severe personal risk, not for political headkickers.
The Gherk has about 65,000 followers on Facebook and about 15,000 on Substack, which indicates he is a professional, perhaps a cog in Permanent Canberra’s machine.
Which reminds me of CookerWatch. We can judge them by what they do. Their function is to break apart people who organise against the powerful. They ensure that Australian democracy is as phony as a three-dollar bill.
Annie McCubbin’s podcast, however is named and known.
It is sponsored by COUP, a company she co-founded with her husband, David, an actor who works with senior executives as a “corporate dramatist”, teaching them to perform for an audience.
COUP runs training workshops for big corporations.
David lists vaccine-makers Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Merck as his former clients, along with Bayer which has a pharmaceutical division. Link here. Archived here.
Annie’s podcast defends and promotes the products of these companies, and the government policies that bulk-buy and mandate them, by attacking vaccine critics.
Neither Annie nor David responded to requests for comment on whether their ties to these Big Pharma clients are still current.
Questions submitted to Annie McCubbin
Questions submitted to The Gherk
Questions submitted to David McCubbin
Public response by Annie McCubbin and the Gherk uploaded to Annie McCubbin’s Facebook page overnight Monday 6 July / Tuesday 7 July
UPDATE: 10 July 2026
On reflection I think there are three lessons to be taken from this episode:
What Annie McCubbin, Australian Skeptics and The Gherk don’t understand, is that what they are looking at is not widespread public lunacy, but evidence of the complete breakdown of Australia’s drug safety system. This is what it looks like.
Australia’s system is largely dependent on voluntary, poorly advertised self-reporting. The public doesn’t know, and doctors aren’t paid for the extra time to do it. This became crucially important in 2018 when the law was changed to allow provisionally approved products on the market. These drugs had not passed all the testing required for full authorisation. They were given a black triangle on the box to remind everyone to report injuries. It was never advertised, so the public didn’t know.
The covid panic broke this system entirely with a combination of truncated and bogus safety trials, government propaganda, fear marketing, public-private tie-ins for government, and licensure bullying of doctors.
Australia’s drug safety system has been completely broken by years of corporate lobbying and this is the result.Forest of the Fallen volunteers realise that there are malevolent people who will try to sabotage their displays such as Snarky Gherkin. Also, there are genuinely mistaken people, people who make up stories for attention, for fun or because they have mental health issues. They exist - remember Belle Gibson?
Volunteers need to make effort to weed these bad actors out, because they damage the credibility of the injured.
It’s never going to be perfect, and most injury cases are ambiguous due to the factors discussed above.
It’s inevitable that some bad actors will slip through, simply because volunteers don’t have the time and resources. This does not reduce the importance of the memorial, which is a much-needed acknowledgement for the many people who have been injured by the covid gene-vaccines.Culture matters. The drug cartel has spent decades cultivating a culture of vaccines as a “miracle of science” that cannot be questioned, with critics of the covid gene-vaccines dumped on the scrapheap as “antivaxxers” and “cookers” despite being correct about “The Science”. People pretending spoons stick to them, for example, feeds this propaganda, and is most likely started by PR firm black ops, acting for those who profit.
For decades, the drug cartel has cultivated a collegiate relationship with Health Department bureaucracy including the drug regulators supposed to police them.
The TGA’s annual budget was roughly $15 million, and most of their costs were recovered from industry on a fee-for-service basis. By contrast, Pfizer and Moderna made US$100 billion off the worldwide sales of their gene-vaccine alone. The largest in history.
The problem is not the government, which is supposed to work for you. The problem is the government is dwarfed by these corporations. For decades the public’s organs have been gutted, infiltrated and subverted by a giant mafia drug cartel. Break the corporations into smaller competing businesses (as Roosevelt did to Standard Oil) and there might be a chance that the government returns to its normal functioning.
The drug cartel has paid front groups and individuals to interface with the media, where time-poor journalists make use of seemingly “independent” experts and talent given freely on press releases. Professors Paul Griffin, Robert Booy, charity activists Catherine Hughes, Kate Vines. Journalists need to start googling who is funding the talent, their organisations. What boards are they on. Organisations like the Immunisation Coalition are front groups. Then there are the research organisations, who cheer-lead the industry that funds them: Burnett Institute, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. The universities are all feeding at the RNA trough particularly Monash (Moderna factory) and Melbourne. You think you’ll get critics when you use their media contacts for a story?
Journalists are the gatekeepers of culture and this is their failure. I’ve documented two episodes of this: RSV and Whooping Cough.
Forest of the Fallen is a handful of volunteers doing their best to help with the resources they have.
Media professionals, by contrast, have been letting us all down for years.I have turned comments off now, because I don’t have the time to moderate. Apologies, but you can understand why. I know the error message will say “comments for paid subscribers only” - it’s a glitch with the system. This Substack is written free and in the public interest, there are no paid subscribers.
REDACTED: Weird AI cuts to public Covid Inquiry submissions, grieving mother's story entirely blacked out
Public submissions to the Commonwealth Government Covid-19 Response Inquiry have been bizarrely censored by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
COMFORT: Gene-vax injured and bereaved find support for Sydney court appearance
“It felt like no-one was listening,” said Ian Lees, of Springwood in the lower Blue Mountains.
Big Pharma's new weapon is pretending to be the victim. They may even make anonymous social media profiles to abuse themselves so they can claim they get dearh threats and vitriol online. That means we must be super polite, never leave rude comments or give them any ammunition. The politest ones win. I may have to turn off comments on this story in future so apologies in advance if so
The name is spelled wrong. Should definitely be “The Jerk”.
Rules for thee - they are making public comment too. Why are THEY not also expected to provide full disclosure?
These people are pigs.