This Is to Their Shame

Was New Zealand’s Covid response effective? This is an important question, because if health officials got it wrong during the Covid pandemic, then they will undoubtedly get it wrong again. 

The scope of the original Royal Commission of Enquiry (Covid-19 Lessons) Order 2022 is limited and did not provide independent commissioners, which the new coalition Government rectified by ordering new commissioners, widening the scope of the investigation and extending the commission’s report and recommendations deadline to February 2026. 

In the meantime, analysis of the Covid pandemic continues in NZ and overseas but, unfortunately, with negligible appetite from the NZ mainstream media for reporting on developments. 

You have to laugh at the media method of determining fact from fiction. It remains exactly as dictated by the Ardern Government, with media taking the previous Government’s position as truth and anything outside of that is labelled mis- and disinformation. 

But media hold no sway over the personal Covid experience or the experiences of family and friends who, despite following the rules, repeatedly caught Covid, with some becoming vaccine injured and some actually dying. 

But we are on to the media nonsense of regurgitated Covid propaganda and we want well-researched facts. Because we’re not getting them, our trust in NZ media has dropped. The biggest drop in trust occurred after the Covid pandemic. 

Falling trust in news in New Zealand recorded by the JMAD survey.  

Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, wrote about the decline of public trust in mainstream media, saying, “our profession is now the least trusted of all”. 

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Guy Hatchard has reported on the Covid pandemic for nearly four years now and this week he appealed to NZ journalists to start paying attention. 

Journalists worth their salt would be asking why the cancer statistics have not been published since 2019? Why are our hospitals overcrowded as never before? Why exactly are we falling ill, what with, and what are the numbers? Why are we frequently off work sick? Why have disability rates soared? Why are young people being affected as never before (see here and here)? Why is there a mental health crisis? Why are mortality stats elevated?

Hatchard Report

Paying attention means media actually doing their job and not taking ‘experts’ at face value. 

NZ took its lead during Covid from PM Jacinda Ardern and her accomplices, led by the Director General of Health Sir Ashley Bloomfield and academic epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker. 

An aside on a particularly obsequious Covid expert, last week Baker predicted a new Covid wave this summer: “a new highly transmissible subvariant XEC” that will increase deaths “from, say, five a week up to maybe 30 or 35 per week. And we’re going to get more cases of long Covid.” ‘Be afraid, be very afraid’, from the man with zero credibility. 

Baker’s problem is twofold. The first is that his claiming that New Zealand led the world in Covid management through restrictions of masking, social distancing and vaccinating backfired on him since his earlier claim and our experience of these measures is that they failed to do what was promised, which was to stop Covid spreading. 

Second, Baker, the academic in his little ivory tower in a cushy government job, is no match against the truth zealots who sacrificed their careers and reputations to pursue the truth. They are men and women of high moral calibre who willingly sacrificed their futures for the wellbeing of humanity and the health of the next generation; Covid subversives, in the form of diligent doctors, scientists, analysts (and the occasional politician), who marched relentlessly forward after discarding the Covid twaddle. In particular, they measured worldwide excess deaths during the pandemic. 

The World Health Organisation determined the parameters of the Covid pandemic with a start date of 11 March 2020 and an end date of 05 May 2023. 

The largest study to date on excess deaths during the pandemic was carried out by Rancourt et al. and published 19 July 2024. The study confirms significant excess mortality over the pandemic period. 

The report challenges the generally accepted conventional explanation that excess deaths were from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and would have been worse but for the vaccine. 

“The variations in excess all-cause mortality rates across space and time, the authors wrote, “allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020–2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death”. 

One hundred and twenty-five countries were included in the survey, but only 93 countries provided sufficient data to provide an estimate of excess deaths from all causes as 0.392 per cent of the 2021 population, or around 30.9 million people. 

The authors claim the Covid vaccines failed to protect us from Covid and were responsible for 17 million excess deaths, being over half of the total 30.9 million excess deaths. 

The authors also say, “[T]he theory that the virus caused the deaths is propped up by mass virus-testing campaigns that should be abandoned.”

The cause of excess deaths was not from the virus but from the public health responses including mandates, lockdowns, harmful medical interventions and the Covid-19 vaccines. 

…nothing special would have occurred in terms of mortality had a pandemic not been declared and had the declaration not been acted upon.

The Defender

Worldwide excess deaths during the pandemic is a fact but the cause of those excess deaths deserves further analysis and discussion. The large Rancourt study is a start. 

NZ media reported negative NZ excess deaths during the pandemic based on government figures, but Waikato University researcher John Gibson claims those figures resulted from flawed methodology. 

“Accurate health and economic data are needed to evaluate policy responses to Covid-19. A potentially comprehensive health indicator is excess deaths. Local commentators highlight an excess deaths series that suggests negative cumulative excess mortality for New Zealand in the first three years of Covid-19 – in other words, fewer deaths than expected.

This flawed measure ignores changes in population growth. Deaths rose in New Zealand from 2015 to 2019 as population grew at two percent per annum. Population growth came almost to a standstill after the border closed in March 2020.

Methods of extrapolating from the past to predict future deaths, to ascertain if actual deaths exceed projections, must account for this sharp change in population growth rates.

Rather than New Zealand being unique, in having negative cumulative excess deaths in the Covid-19 era, cumulative deaths are about four percent above expected deaths (through 2022) once population growth rate changes are accounted for.”

Taylor and Francis Online

Another indicator of NZ vaccine injury is government payments for vaccine injuries through ACC. Voices for Freedom say ACC payouts increased 2213 per cent as of 1 July 2024 after paying out 1696 vaccine-injured New Zealanders a total of $10.6M. 

Despite growing evidence of failed and injurious mRNA vaccines and their unknown long-term health effects (the vaccine is still experimental), NZ health authorities still promote the Covid vaccines as safe and effective and media are silent on the subject. Shame on them!