The Medical Council of New Zealand (MCNZ) holds itself as the protector of the public when it comes to all medical interactions between doctors and patients: a supposedly independent organisation that the public can trust. It is indeed a lofty aspiration and one that should be expected to be taken very seriously by the council.
Medical councils around the world were purportedly set up by doctors to protect patients. When doctors were accused of making a mistake or acting unprofessionally, they would be investigated by a panel of their peers.
However, as has sadly become clear, these regulatory organisations seem to answer neither to the public nor to doctors. It is as if they have become an ever-increasing empire for those self-important enough to consider that accountability does not apply to them.
While doctors who were treating their patients in accordance with the standards of the Medical Council, including those of informed consent and unprofessional behaviour, were being sanctioned, at least one person on the council seems to have been ignoring his own council’s standards.
“The vaccine is a zero risk product”
In an affidavit by an MCNZ board member presented in our court case, Dr Curtis Walker, then chair of the MCNZ, was heard to have described the Covid injections as zero risk. This statement is clearly preposterous, illustrating an arrogant and blatant disregard for everything that doctors have been taught and the principles by which they practice.
Zero risk? At no time in history has any medical intervention ever been considered to be utterly safe. Neither Medsafe nor the makers have claimed the rushed novel gene platform is such a magical thing as zero risk. Indeed, in our training at medical school, it was often stated that if an intervention had no side effects, it could not work. Ironically this remark was often targeted at homeopathy, which has both potential unexpected effects and often does seem to work.
It would likely be considered incompetent and unethical for a doctor counselling patients to describe any medication as zero risk and by implication all benefit. A finding of such incompetence by this same council could result in suspension. Any medical student who stated such folly in an exam would immediately fail.
Dr Walker’s arrogance is hard to fathom. Not only did he say that the Covid vaccine was zero risk, but he would joke about tin-foil hatters when the board was investigating doctors who were calling for caution. The affidavit stated that Dr Walker said “Here we go – it’s flat earth time, get your tin foil hats on – we’ve got another antivaxxer in front of us.” And “The vitamin C brigade has arrived.”
While it is acknowledged that Dr Walker may not have directly counselled patients when he made the zero risk comment (although we are told that he used this phrase to try and convince staff to take the injection), he was directing the MCNZ board in their decision making regarding doctors who were counselling their patients and speaking out on the very topic of risk.
How are the NZ public to have trust in their doctors when the head of the authority that regulates them states something so gob-smackingly incompetent as “the Covid vaccines have zero risk”?
Disinformation, he claims but once again he’s wrong
Dr Walker stepped down from his role on the MCNZ in June 2024 to ostensibly continue his usual quiet job in Palmerston North Hospital as a kidney specialist, along with his position on the board of Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand. Dr Walker had been promised to lead the Māori half of the planned apartheid health system by the previous government but the 2023 election put an end to that. Then his term on the Health NZ board ended on 1 July. Whilst he applied for another term, he was not reappointed. It appears that his position was summarily pulled out from under him when the then Health Minister Dr Shane Reti and Prime Minister Chris Luxon replaced the board with a commissioner due to concerns about financial mismanagement.
In response, Dr Walker stated that Prime Minister Luxon’s comment that the board was “not financially literate” was disinformation and strongly disagreed that Health NZ was dysfunctional. Dr Walker accused the prime minister and minister of health of “not having their facts straight”.
But, in yet another example of ‘disinformation’ being proven correct, in a damning report accounting giant Deloitte described Health NZ is as not having the right executive or board level controls for such a huge agency. In what can only be described as a comical Fawlty Towers-like scenario, Deloitte noted that a major issue at Health NZ was its reliance on the use of a single Excel file to manage billions of taxpayer dollars.
Politics over excellence?
How are the New Zealand public expected to trust an organisation that was headed by a doctor who seemed to put his political career above that of the people he is being paid by and supposedly serves?
In his closing statement when leaving the MCNZ, Dr Walker highlighted achievements such as “how the medical profession rose to the challenges of Covid-19” and wished that the “future bring greater advances in medical excellence”.
We have written about the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and Dr Walker’s role in this organisation. He has also been involved in other organisations such as Te Ohu Rata o Aotearoa (Te Ora) and Kidney Health New Zealand.
Further, we wrote to his own board asking that he be investigated and stood down, for conflicts of interest, amongst other things, long before his unconscionable disinformation on the Covid jabs was revealed.
Does Dr Walker really have medical excellence and the protection of the New Zealand people at heart? Or was he driven by political ideology and personal gain and so more obedient to his Wellington masters than his own profession? In Germany for instance the RKI email files proved that its politicians decided on the impositions on the German public – including masking and injecting children – relegating its public health scientists to mere rubber stampers.
Can the MCNZ recover trust after Dr Walker’s reign?
So far, the new council has been silent on news of amyloid blood clots and very high DNA contamination likely to worsen cancer levels (see our extensive open letters of the last few years). Instead it continues to shoot the messengers or, at the very least, tries to asphyxiate them.
NZDSOS is gravely concerned about the MCNZ. It would appear that, along with the short-lived Health NZ board, it is an organisation that has lost its way. Its meaningless rhetoric about ensuring that doctors are competent and patients protected is rubbing salt into the dreadful wounds of the jab crisis it has facilitated.
We might remind the Medical Council that the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act compels the council to defend medical ethics. At least it seems to have rediscovered informed consent now Dr Walker has left.
We do wonder if there is another reason the MCNZ have put out this video on informed consent, of all things. This is the first video on their YouTube channel since 2009. Are they acutely aware of the lack of trust or is it something else?
While NZDSOS is still claiming to the court that the MCNZ acted illegally in its use of the Guidance Statement to control doctors, the council continues to portray itself as the purveyor of medical excellence. How can it still be trusted?
Where to in the future for medicine in New Zealand?
NZDSOS agrees that many in the medical profession rose to the challenges of Covid-19. We did this despite the MCNZ with Dr Walker at its helm. Rather than spouting self-congratulatory word salad, we advise Dr Walker to take a long reflective look at the consequences of his actions. How many people died, amongst them health workers, due to a high-risk product? How many medical professionals lost their jobs or simply walked away at a critical time in New Zealand? What is more important to him – self-interest or we who pay his salary?
The MCNZ is broken and cannot be fixed. The same could be said for the New Zealand health system. A country that is influenced by dubious and corrupted international organisations such as the FSMB and the World Health Organization, that relies on pharma funding to regulate its medications and write its protocols, and censors those who have everything to lose but still speak truth, will never balance its financial, ethical or moral books. It is time to start again.
Let Doctors be Doctors
The sooner that Dr Walker and the rest of the members of the MCNZ reflect honestly on their actions, the less likely the coming reckoning will be directed at them as the truth slowly but steadily comes to light.
The doctors of NZDSOS want to treat their fellow humans in the manner that they signed up for when tentatively they first entered the institutions that were meant to uphold excellence and inspire truth.
Join us in our pursuit of real medicine unfettered by compromised organisations that can no longer be trusted.
This article was originally published by New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science.
