Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
So far there’ve been no public hearings for Phase 2 of the Royal Commission into Covid-19 Lessons Learned, although some are due in the next couple of months.
But that hasn’t prevented submitters from telling us what they told the commissioners. This is information we should bear in mind when the royal commission reports in February next year.
Voices for Freedom (VFF), established in late 2020 and often identified in media reports as leaders of the ‘anti-vax’ movement, has had three sessions in front of the commission armed with information and statistics. VFF has also brought in, via Zoom, a number of specialists in various fields ranging from epidemiology, cardiology and vaccinology to psychology, genomics, economics and adverse event reporting.
According to what they’ve made public, their revelations have been at least thought provoking and, at most, explosive.
Epidemiologist Simon Thornley, silenced by mainstream media and the government narrative early on in the Covid era because he questioned modelling from the likes of Auckland University colleague Shaun Hendy, told the royal commission how a pandemic plan already in place was abandoned in favour of an untested elimination strategy.
Economist Martin Lally then submitted that measures designed to ‘save lives’ were wildly disproportionate and economically indefensible. Using the measure of a QALY, a Quality Adjusted Life Year, Lally told the commission a QALY skyrocketed from the usual $60,000 to $800,000 because of Covid-era policies.
The royal commission now has an economist Andrew Sweet as its new executive director while two other economists, Philip Stevens and Dave Heatley, have taken senior positions on the commission secretariat. So Dr Lally’s submission should have hit the (Sweet) spot with these three, bearing in mind that Heatley – then at the Productivity Commission – produced a cost-benefit analysis showing an extension of the 2020 April lockdown cost $740 million more than the benefits.
(Then Finance Minister Grant Robertson dismissed that report, relying instead on Hendy’s work.)
After Martin Lally, VFF showed the commission a montage of politicians and medical experts pushing the message how the vaccine stayed at the injection site in the arm.
But that notion was quickly disavowed via Zoom by Canadian Professor Byram Bridle using Pfizer’s own biodistribution study. The vaccinologist explained the movement of lipid nanoparticles from mRNA injections throughout the body – and the associated risks – had been known since 2015.
VFF’s first session ended with statistics presentations on both adverse events after vaccination and findings on all-cause mortality after the vaccine roll-out across 31 countries. The submissions highlighted patterns that VFF say demand more in-depth investigation.
It’s worth considering the number of deaths in the March 2025 year (37,647) is nine per cent higher than the pre-Covid March 2020 number (34,518). The population increased only 4.7 per cent in the same period.
The second day of VFF submissions included expert opinion from British behavioural scientist David Charalambous on techniques used by politicians and media to influence behaviour during the Covid time. It comes as no surprise that he believes much of the messaging was deliberately calculated.
Then a quite extraordinary claim from American DNA sequencing specialist Kevin McKernan. He says DNA has been found contaminating mRNA vaccine vials and the serious implications and consequences flowing from those findings include cancer and immune system dysfunction. McKernan also reckons the vaccine products released to the public differed from those used in clinical trials and that manufacturing at scale introduced significant impurities.
He closed with the strongest of claims: the Pfizer injection represents liability-free mandates of the largest carcinogen ever released on the population.
There is certain to be significant reaction and pushback to that from others. How the royal commission falls on this matter will be one of their most important findings.
VFF also brought cardiologist and epidemiologist Peter McCullough to the commission’s screen. He’s been warning about the dangers of the Covid vaccinations for five years and, fresh from US Senate hearings, McCullough covered what he calls the known risks of the shots including myocarditis, as well as the suppression of early treatment for Covid such as the off-patent drug ivermectin.
He was emphatic the injections did not save lives and, like every international speaker VFF arranged to be in front of the royal commission, called for the immediate withdrawal of the vaccines from the market.
When VFF went back for their third session they put up two men well-grounded in the politics of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation.
One time Otago University lecturer Ramesh Thakur became for a time a UN Assistant Secretary-General while David Bell was a WHO scientist and medical officer. They both told the commission of the structure, funding and politics of the WHO and what it means for credible public health advice – apparently not much.
The VFF submission also included their own lawyer Katie Ashby-Koppens telling the commission how the government often acted against advice received from their own agencies.
For instance in February of 2021 Medsafe’s own clinical assessment of the Pfizer vaccine reported “there is limited evidence of protection against severe disease”, as well as no long-term safety follow up information and “vaccine prevention of asymptomatic infection and disease transmission has not been established”.
Medsafe told the government all this – yet Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins still went ahead with the roll-out and mandates.
VFF say they were listened to attentively by the Royal Commission.
That in itself is encouraging, but after what VFF have had to say there will surely be a concerted effort from government and the medical establishment to debunk the VFF stance.
The royal commission has an unenviable task to sift through the mountain of written submissions – in the end there were 31,000 of them – plus numerous in-depth verbal presentations.
Although the terms of reference say the inquiry must operate in a way “that does not take a legalistic and adversarial approach” it still has the ability to summon witnesses. That means, if it wanted to, the two immediately previous prime ministers and the previous director-general of health could be asked to appear.
While there are thousands of New Zealanders who believe Ardern, Hipkins and Bloomfield should front up, the still raw politics of the Covid time make it extremely unlikely they will.
But as the VFF presentations have laid bare, there are some significantly serious matters for the previous decision makers to explain.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
