The papers last week were filled with rhetoric which will fuel and exacerbate attacks upon those with doubts about vaccine efficacy and safety.
The New Zealand Herald reported, “Complaint lodged against lawyer and anti-vaccination campaigner Sue Grey” Sue Grey is the lawyer representing the parents of Baby W. A number of complaints have been lodged with the Law Society during the two years of the pandemic asking that Grey be disbarred because of her vaccine-hesitant views. One complainant said:
“I am worried about the damage Grey does to people by spreading deeply concerning conspiracy theories.”.
It is apparently very easy under the influence of pandemic panic to forget that the right to legal representation is a cornerstone of our democracy. Quite apart from Covid, every single case that comes before the courts involves discussion of opposing views and interpretation of evidence. If lawyers holding views opposite to public perceptions were routinely disbarred, we would not be living in a democracy but a dictatorship.
Public Reaction Has Become Hysterical and Detached From Fact
The New Zealand Twitter-verse was overwhelmed last week by attacks on the parents of Baby W, who unwisely chose to appear on Infowars and be interviewed by Alex Jones, infamous for denying the Sandy Hook school massacre ever happened. In the thread Debunking Conspiracies Aotearoa, for example, complaints that Sue Grey and others are unhinged right-wing fanatics intent on bringing down the government are carefully sandwiched between assertions that vaccine injuries reported to Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring (CARM) are fake or inconsequential.
This highlights just how uninformed the New Zealand public is about the extent of vaccine injuries. No doubt, tight manipulation of media content is mostly at the root of this. Should we blame the government alone? No. Whilst there are a lot of heavily pro-vaccine political players on both sides of the parliamentary benches, there are also sponsors and advertisers using their dollars to influence media content. There are high-profile experts who are dyed-in-the-wool vaccine proponents, refusing to debate the issues, requiring sanitised platforms that enable them to assert their views unopposed.
The contrast we are experiencing these days is disconcerting. On the one hand scientists who have had their concerns marginalised are now confined to alternative channels where they are presenting charts and analysing data from scientific studies in great detail to try to get their point across. But if you only watch MSM you are on a diet of so-called experts who have a free pass to appear on national TV and be quoted in print, saying whatever they wish without any requirement for justification. The two worlds never meet.
This has become a problem for the government. Over the course of two years government advice has systematically schooled the public to believe deeply and uncritically in the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccination—a novel form of gene therapy. A vocal segment of the population has adopted this perspective with a depth that borders on fanaticism. Now the data is in, it is not looking good for the vaccinated. They are disproportionately represented among Covid related deaths.
Over a quarter of the eligible population, a significant minority, have twigged that something is up and ducked the boosters. So what is the government going to do?
Is Ardern Trying to Calm Concern About Covid Vaccination?
It was somewhat surprising and also moderately gratifying to hear an attempt at a conciliatory statement from Jacinda Ardern when she gave a Christmas interview looking ahead to 2023. For people who still felt disenfranchised, she insisted that the government’s intentions have “Always been about how we best look after people.” And continued:
“Those who may have very strong feelings about, for instance, vaccines, that might have been their starting point – that was ours too.”
“We always were focused on how do we best look after people – so let’s start from the point we’ve shared and find ways so where we don’t agree, to accept that,” she summarised.
I know you are going to say she didn’t say anything near enough to that which our situation demands. Acceptance of difference resolves little. I totally agree, but could I also detect in these words a tacit acceptance that there is evidence about vaccine harm that needs to be addressed and convincingly resolved through actual published science rather than prejudice?
Ardern’s remarks were definitely not the staunchly pro-vaccine rhetoric that we have come to expect from the government. Are they having doubts? Just possibly. They should be. Might some Labour politicians have read papers in leading journals pointing out that there is a net harm from vaccination for younger recipients, such as this recent article from the British Medical Journal?
Ardern has started the ball rolling by posing a question. None of these parties—National, Greens, and ACT—have made any conciliatory comments. Any political figure who steps out of line, such as Winston Peters, who made comments opposing mandates, has been cancelled and mercilessly attacked. The longer the opposition parties fail to step up to the plate, the harder it is becoming to make the transition. They are increasingly looking like dinosaurs.
Will Jacinda Ardern’s tentative comments do much to curb public hysteria directed against the unvaccinated? I doubt it. Far more clear explanations and discussions of published scientific evidence will be required to calm down the current level of vocal public prejudice. In other words, a genuine moderated public debate.
Highly Risky Biotechnology Experiments Are Quietly Continuing
In truth, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, we have much in common to be concerned about. For example, recent evidence has cemented a lab leak origin of Covid-19, but incredibly we now read in the authoritative Nature journal that gain of function experiments are continuing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
An article entitled “Close relatives of MERS-CoV in bats use ACE2 as their functional receptors” reports that Wuhan researchers have found out how to mutate two bat viruses closely related to MERS CoV to make them more dangerous for humans. Just recall that MERS was far more deadly than Covid. It had a 35% mortality rate. Is that too going to escape accidentally? Why on earth are scientists still making novel deadly viruses in weakly protected lab conditions? Is the Covid death toll not enough for them? No lab is safe enough to contain these risks.
As everyone does, we live in hope of sanity and rational sense. So much decency and reason has been abandoned during the pandemic with little or no justification. The thing that really appalls and worries me is that ongoing biotech experiments and projects are being carefully concealed from view. The world has been subject to manipulation as for example revealed by this article “Emails show Wuhan lab collaborator played central role in public messaging about COVID-19 origins”.
Emails released under the North Carolina Public Records Act document a rare insight into behind the scenes manipulation. EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, helped steer the media and scientific community away from questions about whether COVID-19 could have originated in a lab. Unbelievably, his misleading and disproved views on Covid origins still hold sway with our government.
This is in the past, but even now, new biotech medicines and vaccines are in the pipeline and about to be sprung upon the public. Those developing them and expecting to profit greatly are being very careful to ensure that no independent judges of safety are able to look over their shoulders and comment on what is really going on. Simultaneously the highly funded biotech PR machine is presenting an idealised rosy future free from disease—a carefully crafted fiction. This is anti-scientific.
The biotech lobby succeeded in glossing over risks and harms during the pandemic. Now, they don’t want anyone asking questions about the safety of future biotech products. Governments and investors are blithely handing out funding to almost innumerable incredibly risky biotech projects around the globe.
We Need Calm Heads Accessing Reliable Knowledge, Not Open Conflict
The fiction of biotech safety is being maintained through the diversion of attention. For three years, the public has been unnecessarily polarised. As long as the media continue to stoke fear and thereby ensure sections of the population remain angry with each other, we are lost. Venting anger on one another is not a strategy that can facilitate a way ahead. Conveniently it keeps the misinformed public from asking key safety questions.
Biotechnology involves editing the building blocks of life, our life, our DNA. Changes and inevitable mistakes cannot be recalled; they spread without limit, affecting not only living populations but future generations as well. Slowly but surely, catastrophic danger is creeping up on civilisation.
Faced with this danger, whatever has happened so far during the pandemic, whatever water has flowed under the bridge—united we stand, divided we fall. Together we can eliminate the dangers posed by biotechnology experimentation by calling for global legislation and agreements imposing a ban. Go to GLOBE.GLOBAL for more information.
