Midwife Anne Sharplin spoke to Paul Brennan on Reality Check Radio with two other midwives, Melanie Levinson and Sarah Gilbertson, about malpractice charges against the unvaccinated NZ midwives who delivered babies the day after the vaccine mandate came into force.
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Despite Pfizer’s own admission that the vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 transmission, and indications of mRNA related stillborn and neo-natal deaths plus trial data on miscarriage, premature birth, cardiac arrest, toxic breast milk and spike protein crossing the placenta, the ban against unvaccinated NZ midwives still stands, as does the blanket ban on vaccine exemptions.
Anne is a founding member of the NZ College of Midwives formed in 1990 between midwifes and the NZ Home Birth Association to improve the standard of care available for women choosing to give birth at home.
Anne’s 42-year professional midwifery career culminated – and ended – in what she describes as the “difficult day” of 16 November 2021 when unvaccinated midwives who worked after 15 November 2021 were charged by the Midwifery Council with medical malpractice. They were deemed deficient because they had not received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Those of us who chose not to take the vaccine by that date…got the email telling me I was unfit to practice and a danger to public health.
Now, the incongruity of that has been shocking, actually, and I just speak about that because it’s madness.
They day before, I met all the requirements, we all did, we all met the educational and the professional requirements of being a midwife in NZ and for myself, I was a senior midwife in NZ, an educator and a mentor.
The NZ Midwifery Council still considers the mRNA vaccine safe during pregnancy.
This vaccine is considered safe to use in pregnancy, based on two premises: firstly, that there is no known physiological mechanism by which the vaccine is likely to cause problems with pregnancy, and secondly, from large-scale surveillance, data does not indicate any safety concerns.
NZ Midwives
But promising vaccine safety from behind an office desk did not equate to what Anne experienced in the field.
In October when I was practicing, a month before we were mandated, I did a locum clinic in rural Waikato for a midwife who needed leave. That morning I saw seven women, six of those women…the vaccine had started to be rolled out…six of those women had had the first community vaccine.
Of those six women two of them had been to A&E for breathlessness and heart palpitations – and that was dismissed – two others had started bleeding directly within a day of receiving that. Now, one young woman looked at me beseechingly and said ‘I don’t want to have the second one.’
At that stage we were under some illusions, or hopes, that we as practitioners, because we have prescribing rights etc, that we could dispense exemptions. But of course, that was quickly taken away and doctors were not able to and only Ashley Bloomfield was able to [grant a vaccine exemption].
So, the best I could do was document in their notes the very clear causal effects that they were experiencing. Now, I just comment on that because I have been a midwife for a very long time and I have never ever had that experience where two-thirds of women experienced severe health problems and it was clearly linked to the vaccine.
Anne Sharplin
The Midwives Handbook for Practice contains ten standards providing up-to-date information and support for midwives.
The second standard is devoted – there’s a whole page of it – to ‘the midwife upholds each woman’s right to free and informed choice and consent throughout the childbirth experience’.
Now, also the second bullet point says ‘We facilitate women to make decisions without coercion’.
The Covid response from the Department of Health was to go a step further in not only denying the right to all NZ citizens to make informed choice, and give consent or not without coercion, but as we know they ran roughshod over the Bill of Rights.
Anne Sharplin
The weight of irrational fear driving health decisions broke the NZ health system.
How many midwives did New Zealand lose as a result of the vaccine mandate? It was only admitted through question time in the House: last year Te Whatu Ora Health NZ disclosed a 24.2% midwife vacancy rate as of 31 July 2022.
Would New Zealanders have so easily broken with tradition and swallowed spurious claims of experimental vaccine safety if the Medical Council of NZ, the NZ Midwifery Council and parliamentary opposition had all done their jobs and an inquisitive and unbiased media had asked the right questions? Women in the USA were not so easily fooled when money changed hands.
Early in 2021, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology accepted an undisclosed amount of money from the US government (HHS WH) as part of the COVID-19 Community Corps Program.
From that point forward, ACOG broke with traditional practice on experimental and novel therapies being contraindicated, and with federal dollars in hand, moved to a wholesale endorsement of COVID-19 vaccination with no assurances on short or long-term safety.
Throughout the campaign, enthusiasm for vaccination was tepid among gravid women with <20% at any time having accepted a vaccine. However, the sharpest decline in rates of uptake occurred in the gravid and by summer of 2022, fewer than 2% were getting vaccinated.
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