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Penny Marie
Mum, Woman, Female. NZ based independent investigative reporter, researcher, writer, coach, truth seeker. Founder of Let Kids Be Kids NZ.
That is the space this conversation with the late Shane Christie now sits in. The coroner’s finding that Highlanders and Māori All Blacks back Connor Garden‑Bachop died of “natural causes” adds a fresh layer of pain – and urgency – to what Shane explained here.
On Feb 10 2026, “A coroner ruled that Highlanders and Māori All Blacks player Connor Garden-Bachop, a 25-year-old father of young twin girls, died of natural causes. Garden-Bachop died overnight on June 16, 2024” – NZ Herald.
Please share this video with your friends on X, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. I have chosen to share this part of Shane’s message on behalf of his rugby fraternity and friends, some of whom I have personally met, who knew why Shane said and did what he did. I hope that this story brings answers, healing, and courage to those who are impacted or harmed by the decisions and policies of others.
When silence hurts
In the coroner’s report, Connor’s sudden death in June 2024 is attributed to a mildly dilated heart causing an abnormal rhythm in his sleep, with no drugs, alcohol, or injuries involved and no suspicious circumstances. On paper, the case is now closed: a loving father of twin girls gone at 25, his passing officially framed as “natural causes”.
But for many in the rugby community, including those who loved Connor and Sean Wainui before him, that term does not quiet the deeper unease. The pattern they see – young, elite athletes dying suddenly – collides with a global backdrop where reports and public anxiety about ‘sudden deaths’ among fit young people have sharpened since the rollout of Covid‑19 vaccination. Even as major cardiac and public‑health bodies say they do not see clear evidence of a spike in athlete cardiac deaths linked to vaccination, the suspicion and grief at ground level have not gone away.
It is into this contested space that Shane’s voice still speaks.
Shane Christie’s unfinished fight
Before his own death, Shane used his voice to push for honesty about risk, safety, and the human cost of professional rugby. In his interview, he spoke softly but firmly about Sean Wainui’s car‑crash death, about Connor’s sudden passing, and about the way vaccination timelines and mandates were handled inside the game.
He did not claim to have all the answers and he did not present himself as ‘anti‑vaccine’ – he’d had three shots. He did, however, insist on something that now feels prophetic: that families deserve to know that every possible factor has been properly examined – including medical interventions mandated or strongly pressured by employers and the state.
Rugby and CTE brain-injuries
Shane was also passionate about pushing for a report to be released by NZRU because he believed its contents could keep players safer from concussion related injuries. In that piece, as in this conversation, Shane emerges not as a crusader looking for a fight, but as a man impacted by a system who isn’t putting player safety first. Shane believed in the power of truth to protect our future generations, and the integrity of the sport he loved.
Rugby, risk, and coercion
Shane described a culture where players were expected to absorb risk as part of the job – from repeated head knocks to medical protocols they did not fully understand. During the Covid era, that culture extended to vaccination requirements that, in practice, often felt less like choice and more like coercion.
He recalled being in managed isolation and effectively told he could not leave without taking an injection he did not feel informed about. The message was clear: comply or stay locked away indefinitely. Around him, other players heard the same thing in different words – contracts that never mentioned mandatory medical procedures suddenly interpreted as if they did, livelihoods and careers on the line if they hesitated.
What happened to informed consent?
The central concern in Shane’s story is not a simple causation claim between any particular vaccine and any particular death. It is the erosion of informed consent: the lack of transparent risk assessment before 2021, the reliance on official assurances later challenged by independent experts, and the sense that when things go wrong, those at the top are quicker to protect reputations than to ask uncomfortable questions.
Global patterns, local pain
Internationally, sporting bodies and cardiology experts have pushed back hard on the idea that there has been a proven surge in vaccine‑related sudden deaths among young athletes. Large‑scale reviews of cardiac arrests and death rates in this age group have not shown the kind of spike that social media narratives suggest, and studies looking at death certificates within defined time windows after vaccination have not found clear evidence of a causal link.
Yet statistics, however carefully collected, do not erase the lived reality of families who have buried healthy young people, or of teammates who go to sleep wondering if the same thing could happen to them. Coroner Mary‑Anne Borrowdale has now formally recorded Connor’s death as a sudden cardiac event in the context of a mildly dilated heart, a finding echoed by multiple outlets from RNZ to international wire services.
For some, that will bring closure; for others, it will deepen the sense that something doesn’t add up.
Unanswered questions on Covid19
Will the Royal Commission Inquiry into Covid19: Lessons Learned, shed any light? Here is a piece from an in-depth chat with Lynda Wharton from The Health Forum NZ on the NZ Government’s failure to be transparent with the NZ public over their contract with Pfizer. The RCI’s report is due out later this month.
Standing together after the whistle
What Shane wanted, more than anything, was for rugby to stop leaving its wounded in the shadows. He wanted NZ Rugby to front up about concussion, long‑term brain injury, and the accumulation of hits that players’ bodies and minds were quietly absorbing. He wanted medical decisions that affected players’ futures – from return‑to‑play protocols to new injections – to be made honestly, transparently, and with full respect for their right to say no.
As Connor’s death is officially filed under “natural causes”, that call feels raw and immediate. It is not a demand for easy answers or a single villain. It is a plea for courage: for families, teammates, administrators, journalists, and fans to sit with complexity instead of hiding behind slogans, to acknowledge both what we know and what we still don’t.
Rugby has always sold us a story about standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder, about never leaving a mate behind. If Shane’s life and death, and Connor’s, and Sean’s are to mean anything beyond the stat sheets, that story has to extend beyond the touchline – into coroners’ courts, boardrooms, and policy tables where real safety and real accountability are decided.
The excerpted conversation with Shane Christie that accompanies this piece is part of that work: not the final word, but a starting point for those who refuse to look away.
Shane Christie On Sudden Deaths, Concussions & The Deafening Media SilencePenny Marie 11 April 2025
This article was originally published by Penny Marie NZ.
