Many of you have written and asked about the current prevalence of genetically modified foods and the potential health risks. An up to date answer to this question comes as a huge surprise even to the team at the Hatchard Report. Today’s article lists the affected products, and discusses the history and industry pressure which created a regulatory framework lax enough to allow the genetic engineering of the preparation and content of most supermarket foods.

Food processing aids, enzymes, additives, flavours and colours were originally derived from natural plant and animal sources, With the rise of mass production in the food industry these were required in greater quantities to ensure that industrial-scale fast continuous processes turned out products of uniform appearance, taste and consistency. As a result, food industry chemists invented batch fermentation techniques whereby naturally occurring bacterial strains such as lactic acid bacteria (LAB) facilitated the necessary cell replication and proliferation at a mass scale.

More recently batch fermentation has become dominated by genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs). 

These GMMs are designed to tailor and accelerate the fermentation processes. A 2023 paper entitled “Bioengineered Enzymes and Precision Fermentation in the Food Industry” reports:

“Enzymes have been used in the food processing industry for many years. However, the use of native [naturally occurring] enzymes is not conducive to high activity, efficiency, range of substrates, and adaptability to harsh food processing conditions. The advent of enzyme engineering approaches such as rational design, directed evolution, and semi-rational design provided much-needed impetus for tailor-made enzymes with improved or novel catalytic properties. Production of designer enzymes became further refined with the emergence of synthetic biology and gene editing techniques and a plethora of other tools such as artificial intelligence, and computational and bioinformatics analyses which have paved the way for what is referred to as precision fermentation for the production of these designer enzymes more efficiently.”

Ostensibly, these genetically modified processes are supposed to be more efficient and produce purer products however these routinely differ in critical ways from their natural counterparts. As a result, the food industry pushed very hard for the GMM processes to be unregulated and unidentified on food content labels. For example a 2022 article entitled “Recombinant DNA in fermentation products is of no regulatory relevance” deceptively suggested that fermentation products produced via GMM techniques are “more sustainable”. It stated: “There is no meaningful rationale for using recombinant DNA for regulatory classification of fermentation products.” It argued that too much regulation would de-incentivize innovation in industrial biotechnology, and introduced instead a concept called “proportionate regulation”, which amounts to little if any regulation. In the end, their view has prevailed around the world. The role of GMMs in food production has escaped identification on labels. 

The scope of the revolution in GM food production beggars belief. 

The list of everyday products now produced with the aid of genetically modified microorganisms is seemingly endless and includes the following.

• Amylases: which catalyse the hydrolysis of starch into sugars, aimed at improving the quality and shelf life of bread and other baked goods
• Proteases: which hydrolyze proteins, used in meat tenderisers, infant formula, and to improve the flavour of milk and cheese
• Pectinases: which hydrolyze pectin, used in juice clarification and fruit pulp treatment
• Transglutaminases: Cross-link proteins, which are used in meat and fish
• Galactosidase: Reduces viscosity in grain legumes and lupins, which are used in animal feed
• Glucanase: Reduces viscosity in oats and barley, which are used in animal feed
• Invertase: Hydrolyzes sucrose to produce invert sugar syrup which is used in baked goods, candies (including chocolates, truffles, toffees, marshmallows, taffies, and caramels), sweetened beverages (including soft drinks, iced tea, etc.), frozen treats (including ice cream and sorbets), beer and commercial kombucha
• Lactase: Hydrolyzes lactose and whey to develop products free from lactose for lactose-intolerant people. It is also used to produce frozen yoghurt 
• Lactic Acid: used in the production of cultured butter
• Lipase: Supports lipid digestion in young animals, and is used in cheese flavouring and dough conditioning
• Citric Acid: used in stock cubes, commercial citric juices, jams, preserves, canned tomatoes, wine, ice cream, sorbets
• Xanthan Gum: a stabiliser and thickener which is used in fruit juices, salad dressings, sauces, gravies, gluten-free products, low-fat foods and vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free processed products
• Amino Acids: The human body needs 20 amino acids to function properly. Synthetically produced copies are added as flavour enhancers
• Monosodium Glutamate MSG: A flavour enhancer commonly used in Chinese and Asian foods. Also used in instant noodles, potato chips, hot dogs, lunch meats, pepperoni, bacon, pastrami, sausages, salami, chicken, beef, salmon, mackerel, scallops, crab, shrimp, canned tuna, frozen pizzas, crackers, deli meats, etc.
• Aspartame: Artificial sweetener used in diet drinks and other products labelled as sugar free
• Vegetarian Rennet: produced by Pfizer and others, used to make 75% of cheese world wide
• Vitamins: like riboflavin (B2) added to flour, and a great many other vitamins which are used in a very wide range of foods including milk alternatives like almond milk, etc.
• Beta-Carotene: just one of the many engineered colours now used in a huge range of foods including margarine, cheese, fruit juices, baked goods, and dairy products. Also used to enhance the colour of processed meats like bacon, spam, corned beef, and sausages, vegetarian meat substitutes, pet food, and tomato ketchup.
• Vanillin: a synthetic vanilla flavour used in ice cream, baked goods, chocolate, aromatherapy, coffee, alcoholic beverages, perfumes often falsely identified as ‘natural’ on the labels.

I’m going to stop there and take a deep breath. The full list would run to thousands of products. Virtually all of the above are produced overseas and imported into NZ where they are widely used in food production. What can you say? All of them are processed foods, but many of them are found in the cupboards of even the most ardent natural food advocates. Is this a done deal with no turning back? Even the organic industry has accepted that additives produced using GMMs can be used in organic products as long as no GMMs are present, but the industry doesn’t have the resources to test compliance. 

Universal genetic contamination ignored by lax regulatory authorities

A paper published in 2021 entitled “GEMs: genetically engineered microorganisms and the regulatory oversight of their uses in modern food production” lays out the regulatory framework (or lack of it) very clearly. Foods produced via processes using genetically engineered microorganisms do not need to be labelled as GMO. They fall under Generally Recognised As Safe (GRAS) categories. It has been presumed by regulators that the genetically modified microorganisms used during batch fermentation will not be present in the final products. However, the latest research shows this to be a false assumption.

Recent research has found that residual GMM contamination is present in virtually all products produced via batch fermentation using genetically modified microorganisms. A study published in 2025 in the journal Food Chemistry: Molecular Sciences is entitled “Metagenomics-based tracing of genetically modified microorganism contaminations in commercial fermentation products. It reports on a well-hidden and seldom mentioned dirty secret—namely genetic contamination, saying: 

“Genetically modified microorganisms (GMM) are frequently employed for the production of microbial fermentation products such as food enzymes. Although presence of the GMM or its recombinant DNA in the final product is not authorised, contaminations occur frequently.”  

It found GMM contamination in all 16 biosynthesised food enzymes it examined including the very concerning presence of antibiotic resistant genes, thus highlighting possible public health risks of biosynthesis. The GMMs used in batch fermentation are catalytic bacterial engines specifically designed to accelerate and maximise cell proliferation. Their presence equates to a possible theoretical risk of malignant cellular growth and interference with beneficial microbial processes in the gut. We have used the term ‘theoretical’ only because no one has been required to research their real life health outcomes.

A paper entitled rDNA Traces in Fermentation Products Using Genetically Modified Microorganisms (GMMs) spells out the EU policy on such contamination. Apparently to side step the issue, GMM contamination is classified as a ‘residue’ which does not need identification on labels because it is not an ‘ingredient’. An argument which qualifies for the double speak of the year award. It is presumed to be covered by other food legislation designed to protect purity. In fact there is virtually no regulatory effort to test for GMM contamination. In practice, foods produced using GMMs are presumed safe and remain untested. Regulators have given up and bowed to industry pressure. All of these players are fully aware that if GMM processes were identified on labels many consumers would be rightly very cautious and exercise their preference for traditional ingredient sources. The biosynthetic industry wishes to avoid this at all costs as it pushes ahead with more and more genetically modified food substitution.

Our entire food chain has been polluted with GMMs

As a result, genetically engineered bacteria have been rapidly and secretly introduced into the increasingly globalised food chain on a false presumption of safety unsupported by any testing of health outcomes. GMMs are not genetically similar to naturally occurring foods nor can they be presumed safe, they contain artificial sequences of genetic instructions potentially capable of interfering with immune processes key to the maintenance of good health and they are now present in foods across the entire spectrum of supermarket processed and packaged goods. It is well known that even very minor changes in genetic structures down to the level of single codons can critically affect health, but industry, government and regulators are determined to turn a blind eye to the potentially serious risks to health.

We already know that processed foods are at the heart of a burgeoning public health crisis, causing rising rates of cancers, heart disease, inflammation and auto-immune conditions which have suddenly accelerated in recent years. Conversely, as I explain in my book Your DNA Diet, fresh foods from natural sources promote better health outcomes. The biosynthetic revolution is replacing these natural sources using genetically engineered processes. Since 1990, the use of biosynthesis has gradually accelerated in foods, medicines, and the environment. Over the last five years it has become ubiquitous and all but unavoidable for working people. 

To avoid GMMs make an effort to find fresh food sources, go to your local organic supplier or farmers market. Cook at home using traditional methods, do your research, and cooperate with neighbours. Local networks are becoming increasingly important.

The summary point to make here is the novel genetic nature of the contamination. These are not minute traces of potentially toxic chemicals such as pesticides, they are active sequences of genetic instructions capable of interfering with the fundamental basis of our health. In other words, they are prime suspects in the search for the causes of the current tsunami of ill health. Incredibly, our NZ government, rather than tightening up on consumer safeguards and labelling, proposes to completely ignore the warning signs and go full monty on biotech deregulation.

LAST CHANCE TO HAVE YOUR SAY

We are at a crossroads where decisions made will affect us all for generations. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee this weekend by Monday February 17th. There are many reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. We have published suggestions for a submission template, but you can make your own submission of any length. Even just saying that full disclosure labelling of gene edited origins including food ingredients produced via genetically modified microorganisms needs to be mandated will make a significant point. The more submissions that are received, the more it can become clear to the government that we care about our natural foods.

Be warned, MPs are telling their constituents that clear labelling of GMO content will continue as before. This is not the case, the word ‘label’ appears zero times in the Bill, yet it replaces earlier legislation. The Bill will exempt most CRISPR products and all GMMs from any regulation or control. We should not accept politicians misleading us whether intentionally or not.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks. To protect this, we need to stand up and be heard. Keep using your voice at this critical time.

… and Sold to an Unwitting Public.

Last chance to have your say. Submissions close on Monday 17th February

A year ago Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Laureate co-inventor of CRISPR gene editing technology announced a ground breaking project to edit human and animal microbiomes in the gut, promising to cure diseases like asthma and Alzheimer’s and also ameliorate climate change (???) by altering the metabolic processes of animals and humans. Now today the NZ government is proposing to deregulate such biotechnology experimentation including gene editing of microorganisms.

The government is naively and deceptively telling us not to worry because biotech researchers are increasingly and falsely identifying their work as ‘natural’. The NZ Gene Technology Bill will remove any requirement for identification, labelling or regulation of most CRISPR products. The misguided and false assumption of the Gene Technology Bill is that novel CRISPR gene editing is creating an engineered biosynthetic pathway of microbial hosts capable of achieving so-called green synthesis of complex natural substances.  

In other words, corporate giants will be able to replace foods, additives, flavours, processing aids, supplements and over the counter medical interventions commonly sold to the public with cheap biosynthetic alternatives. Under the terms of the Bill, this replacement of traditionally derived natural substances and foods will effectively be unannounced. Manufacturers and distributors will be able to deceptively label their synthetics as ‘natural’ in bold, displayed on the packaging without any need to inform the public of the substitution. 

What does this mean for us? Is it safe? Is this proven technology?

Doudna struts her message on the TED Talks stage telling us that “the essence of being human is our ability to solve problems”. With overwhelming American bravado and self-belief she assures us that her work “will absolutely create solutions to the big problems of disease and climate change”. The sceptics among us might say that the essence of modern technology has been the ability to create unexpected problems. So who is right here?

Doudna announces that she now has the ability to not just use CRISPR to edit the genetics of individual organisms but “to edit and control entire populations of tiny microbes living inside humans known as microbiomes”. She goes on to explain that the CRISPR techniques she is working on can target and edit one type of bacterial genetic structure in an entire microbiome all at once without affecting all the others. In this process, CRISPR is designed to target a particular gene in one type of cell. Forgive me for thinking that this might be music to the ears of whatever dark powers are currently designing bioweapons.

Up until now, Doudna continues, it hasn’t been possible to know how the hundreds of thousands of unique bacterial genotypes living in the human body function, but the field of metagenomics has provided a tool to allow us to figure out what species are present and what they are doing. Together, metagenomics and CRISPR have created a new field of science called precision microbiome editing. Doudna then goes on to say she will be able to prove the new tools are safe and effective and create a transformative future free of problems like climate change and disease.

What’s not to like?

Firstly as we have been reporting (see here and here), CRISPR is not the ultimate precise technique that Doudna claims nor has it been successfully curing genetic diseases as she also claims, let alone changing the weather. The results are patchy, a very very small number of people have benefitted in the short term so far, at an astronomical cost, and diseases supposedly cured are routinely reoccurring at high rates. Moreover, the rate of serious adverse side effects is very high and can be life threatening. Chromosomal rearrangements found at the edit site following CRISPR gene editing are mutagenic and potentially harmful.

Another inherent feature of CRISPR editing is the routine creation of Double Strand Breaks (DSBs) in DNA which then need self-repairing. In fact, DSBs are very common in human cells due to natural environmental factors like ultraviolet radiation and they are self-repaired tens of thousands of times a day with virtually 100% accuracy. BUT a 2018 paper entitled Kinetics and Fidelity of the Repair of Cas9-Induced Double-Strand DNA Breaks found that “repair rates following CRISPR editing are variable and often slow. Furthermore, repair of the DSBs tends to be error prone” raising further questions about CRISPR gene editing safety and fidelity. In fact there is only a very superficial equivalence between genome editing and what occurs “naturally.” How breaks in DNA are reversed appears to be different and much less efficient and complete if caused by CRISPR gene editing

A paper published in December 2023 is entitled CRISPR-based gene editing technology and its application in microbial engineering. Written at the same time as Doudna’s talk, it does echo a certain amount of optimistic hope, but it certainly doesn’t share Doudna’s level of certainty and self-promotion. It strikes a number of notes of caution. It discusses attempts to develop CRISPR technologies which avoid harmful DSBs but notes their limitations. 

It reports that microorganism and microbiome gene editing will be used to produce gene modified probiotic food additives, synthetic isoflavones and vitamins (formerly extracted from plants), soil additives and industrial microorganisms to aid the batch production of gene altered products in cell fermentation factories including synthetic foods, feeds, environmental biological products and medicines. 

The article reports there are already several outstanding issues that remain unaddressed. For example, CRISPR Cas9 proteins can be cytotoxic to the host—adversely affecting cell functions. Recently, biotech pioneer Feng Zhang’s team reported a programmable protein delivery system that uses a virulent injection system derived from bacteria. This delivery system can overcome many natural cell protective barriers, such as host cell walls, cell membranes, and the cytosol. Gene editing techniques such as this are highly invasive with highly mobile and potentially long lasting effects. 

For example, a team of researchers at Yale have found Covid spike proteins circulating in the blood of people over two years after mRNA vaccination, raising concerns that genetic sequences may have permanently integrated into their DNA. In other words, the effects of gene editing, once initiated, are hard to shut down. These include toxic off-target effects of the CRISPR-Cas system. This is a significant concern because techniques for efficient detection of off-target events are still unavailable. Technologies for precise and timely shutdown of the CRISPR-Cas system activity are also absent, leaving the host vulnerable to the negative impact of external elements.

Metagenomic research demonstrates that synthetic foods are highly contaminated with toxic genetic sequences known to pose a danger to public health 

At the core of the Gene Technology Bill is a schizophrenic dysfunctional attitude to health. A miasma of confusion has been hung over the issues with talk of as yet non-existent far-fetched benefits and cures. On the one hand we constantly read articles pointing out that ultra-processed foods are at the heart of our public health crisis, causing cancers, heart disease, inflammation and auto-immune conditions. The articles urge us to go green, eat more fruit and vegetables, and cut down on the packaged supermarket foods. On the other hand, the government is proposing that gene edited synthetic foods, arguably the ultimate invasion of our traditional food preferences, should be allowed to be sold not just without identification or labelling but with the deceptive moniker NATURAL tacked on. How crazy is that? You tell me.

A study published in 2025 in the journal Food Chemistry: Molecular Sciences is entitled “Metagenomics-based tracing of genetically modified microorganism contaminations in commercial fermentation products. It reports on a well hidden and seldom mentioned, yet huge problem with foods produced through biosynthetic batch cell fermentation—namely genetic contamination, saying: 

“Genetically modified microorganisms (GMM) are frequently employed for the production of microbial fermentation products such as food enzymes. Although presence of the GMM or its recombinant DNA in the final product is not authorized, contaminations occur frequently.”  

It found GMM contamination in all 16 biosynthesised food enzymes it examined including the very concerning presence of antibiotic resistant genes, thus emphasising the public health risks of biosynthesis. The important point to make here is the genetic nature of the contamination. These are not minute traces of potentially toxic chemicals such as pesticides, they are active sequences of genetic instructions capable of interfering with the fundamental basis of our health. In other words, they are prime suspects in the search for the causes of the current tsunami of ill health. Incredibly, our government proposes to completely ignore these warning signs and go full monty on biotech deregulation

LAST CHANCE TO HAVE YOUR SAY

We are at a crossroads where decisions made will affect us all for generations. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by Monday February 17th. There are many reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. We have published suggestions for a submission template, but you can make your own submission of any length. Even just saying that full disclosure labelling of gene edited origins including food ingredients produced via genetically modified microorganisms needs to be mandated will make a significant point. The more submissions that are received, the more it can become clear to the government that we care about our natural foods.

Be warned ,MPs are telling their constituents that labelling will continue as before. This is not the case, the word ‘label’ appears zero times in the Bill, yet it replaces earlier legislation. The Bill will exempt most CRISPR products from any regulation or control. We should not accept politicians misleading us whether intentionally or not.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks. To protect this, we need to stand up and be heard. Keep using your voice at this critical time.

… but Not the One Our Government is Busy Promoting

The New Zealand pandemic experience potentially offers huge lessons for the world because our population was vaccinated BEFORE COVID-19 infection took hold. This was because our borders were rigidly controlled during 2020/21 and any break out infections were rapidly tracked down and isolated. This means the effect of Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccination can be studied in New Zealand in isolation from any confounding factor of COVID-19 infection. Moreover, as a result of our border policy, New Zealand largely avoided the more severe Alpha and Delta strains.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share and as an audio version.

However, successive Labour and Coalition governments working with the medical authorities have largely distorted the data and the narrative to paint themselves in a favourable but grossly distorted light. The myth that New Zealand pandemic vaccination policy saved New Zealand from the worst of the pandemic has been widely promoted on the national and world stages. 

The Gene Technology Bill now seeks to promote New Zealand as a country so insulated from the wider world that genetic experimentation on the whole population can ‘safely’ and ‘profitably’ take place. 

The evidence shows the result will be neither safe nor profitable. The government has decided to put the whole nation at risk for the sake of their grandiose but ultimately disturbed and destructive ambitions.

The efforts to hide the devastating effects that the vaccine had on everyday Kiwi lives and health continues. Scientists at Otago University have just published a paper in the journal Brain, Behaviour and Immunity entitled “COVID-19 may Enduringly Impact Cognitive Performance and Brain Haemodynamics in Undergraduate Students“. This paper is receiving significant international attention. Its conclusions are being widely reported. The study of 94 Otago undergraduates found:

• Cognitive engagement induced distinct prefrontal haemodynamic (blood flow) patterns post COVID-19 indicative of that known to be suffered by adults four decades older as a result of ageing.
• 40% of the undergraduate students self-reported persistent brain fog due to COVID-19.
• 37% of the undergraduates exhibited impaired cognition up to 17 months post-infection as measured by psychological tests with the suggestion that this could be impairing their executive brain function.

The authors concluded: “These results provide new insights into the potential neuropathogenic mechanisms influencing cognitive impairment following COVID-19 infection”.

In fact, the authors committed a grave scientific error/omission that had the effect of completely hiding and/or distorting the possible conclusions that could be drawn from the results. Because of Otago University vaccine mandates and New Zealand government policy, all of the subjects in the study were fully COVID-19 mRNA vaccinated BEFORE they participated in the study and BEFORE they became infected with COVID-19 at any time. This crucial fact was not reported by the authors. 

75 (80%) of the subjects had had a prior COVID-19 infection confirmed by a PCR or RAT test. The remaining 19 (20%) were automatically categorised as a COVID-19-free group. The authors suggestion that COVID-19 negatively affected cognitive ability is significantly undermined by their own finding that: 

“On average, the covid-19 group did not perform worse on the cognitive tests than the non-covid group.” 

In other words, the authors accepted that the COVID-19 group were suffering from cognitive decline but ignored the fact that the cognitive status of the COVID-19-free group was apparently similarly impaired. This finding is a classic scientific indicator of a hidden causal factor shared by both groups. COVID-19 vaccination was shared by both groups but ignored by the authors. In doing so, the authors also ignored prior results that COVID-19 vaccination affects psychiatric status such as a 2024 study of 2 million health records entitled “Psychiatric adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination: a population-based cohort study in Seoul, South Korea” and public data on declining behaviour and attainment in educational settings some of which we discuss and/or refer to in our article “Steep Rise in Autism Cases“. 

Moreover, the very high rate of cognitive decline found in students also undermines the promoted public narrative that COVID-19 vaccination is protecting people from the most serious effects of COVID-19. From this perspective the results are damning for the COVID-19 vaccine whichever way you interpret them.

The pattern of omission evident in the Otago article has been repeated again and again in an effort to hide the negative effects of COVID-19 vaccination from the New Zealand public. The practice of averaging the very low mortality rates in 2020, when we had no COVID-19 and virtually no seasonal respiratory infections, with subsequent years in order to minimise the apparent impact of COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccination on mortality is a case in point. 

We conducted a time series analysis of publicly released weekly data of mortality among the over 60s and COVID-19 vaccination rates during the 2021 COVID-19 vaccine rollout (before COVID-19 reached our shores). We found a positive causal relationship between COVID-19 vaccination and all cause deaths at a one week lag during the COVID-19 vaccine roll out period (t(33) = 1.74, p = 0.045 one-tailed). Statistical tests showed the results cannot be plausibly attributed to spurious regression due to non-stationarity. The analysis found that vaccination was associated with 434 additional all cause deaths during the week immediately following vaccination among individuals aged 60+. Although there is some temporal unreliability in New Zealand data reporting, the finding is significant.

In other words, a careful examination of the effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccination prior to any exposure to COVID-19 infection whatsoever, indicates that sudden unexplained deaths were already happening and particularly affecting those over 60. This kind of data, free of any confounding effect of COVID-19 infection, is unique to New Zealand and should have resolved any remaining doubt about the serious risks of COVID-19 vaccination. Instead the government conspired with the media and the health service to promote a false narrative that their COVID-19 vaccination strategy was both safe and effective. 

In fact, Medsafe did not follow up the vast majority (almost all) of the thousands of reports of COVID-19 vaccine injury submitted to CARM, our pharmacovigilance system. They are still omitting to do so today. Instead, pretending without evidence that COVID-19 vaccination has only a very limited range of generally mild adverse effects that can only be ascribed to vaccination for a short time following the jab. In other words, the assumption that no adverse effects emerging over a longer term are plausibly related to COVID-19 vaccination. An assumption that is widely recognised in standard scientific literature to be false.

New Zealand is not alone in distorting the evidence and ignoring the obvious. The UK Telegraph headlines today “I’m a doctor – this is how I’d bring the NHS back from the brink“. The article asks what has happened to the NHS which was formerly hailed as heroic during the peak of the pandemic? It now has a waiting list for treatment currently standing at 7.5 million and 54,000 people a month waiting more than 12 hours in emergency departments. A story very similar to that of our health service. Five frontline medics are asked what they would do to fix it. 

A surgeon says “We need surgical hubs to speed through the waiting list” which involves 6.3 million people waiting for 7.5 million procedures.

An ED medic says “We need 10,000 more beds to cut A&E wait times”.

A dementia expert says “We need to diagnose more dementia cases”

A GP says “We need thousands more family doctors.”

A cancer doctor says “The NHS needs a cancer plan backed by millions of pounds”

All of them fail to ask “Why are there so many more health emergencies involving cancer, dementia, heart disease, etc. than before the pandemic?”

Despite the tsunami of illness, the health authorities in New Zealand have continued to refuse repeated requests to dig into their data records and compare the health outcomes of COVID-19 vaccinated populations with non-vaccinated populations. 

The cause of the COVID-19 vaccination health disaster is not difficult to apprehend. mRNA vaccines are designed to efficiently cross the protective cell membrane and repurpose the cellular functions. They do so in billions of our cells and the effects have been found to persist for longer than a year. Life begins with a single cell whose structure and function necessarily has a functional correspondence with the physiological systems that subsequently develop from it. Crucially these include our cardiac, digestive and immune systems which protect us from serious illness. It is not too far of a reach to realise that disruption of the function of billions of cells implies disruption of fundamental physiological and psychological functions on a grand scale. Such concerns have been examined and evaluated at our GLOBE website.

The Gene Technology Bill currently before Parliament, which will essentially deregulate biotechnology experimentation including novel procedures that invade and edit the cell like mRNA vaccination, is a direct offence to the duty of care the government owes to the people. Many of you have been meeting their local MPs and expressing your concerns. Some have relayed to us the outcomes. 

When shown evidence of COVID-19 vaccine adverse effects, as reported in the Pfizer March 2021 Post Marketing Report, one MP expressed horror, saying it could have happened to him. He reported that the only information the government leadership had shared with MPs so far described the Bill as “an unprecedented economic opportunity”. He plans to ask questions, so that was a win.

When asked, another MP, who apparently had a hand in promoting the Bill, admitted he had not told his wife, who is known to advocate a natural diet, about the Bill “in order to avoid her becoming anxious”.

The Hon. Shane Reti who is in charge of the Bill refused to meet “Because he is a Minister”.

ACT representatives have apparently been well schooled to defame me incorrectly as “a nut job with a dodgy PhD”. Thus deftly switching to ad hominem, thereby bypassing any need to address concerns seriously or look at recently published science. This amounts to a childish anti-science outlook.

In another report, we heard about a National representative dismissing concerns “as outdated fear mongering” without being prepared to discuss the issues or look at the evidence.

As many resort to knee-jerk, uninformed mud slinging, clearly all your efforts and submissions have rattled the cage. We need to keep this up. We have to use our voice. Everyone’s well argued efforts at a common sense and science based approach are starting to hit the mark. Particularly, concerns about the potential economic impact of an open gene technology policy on our agricultural export markets and prices are hitting home. Coalition MPs have been schooled to think that Gene Technology is an economic miracle in the making, they had better think again. The evidence points to a catastrophe that we have been carefully reporting and referencing for weeks. Ignoring the evidence amounts to a wilful act of misplaced faith which ignores the public good and will ultimately destabilise our nation.

The Gene Technology Bill will completely exempt most gene altered products from any kind of scrutiny, regulation or labelling. We are at a crossroads where decisions made will affect us all for generations. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by February 17th. There are many reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. We have published suggestions for a submission template. Write to your MP. They need to be thoroughly quizzed on this egregious Bill.

We would also like to suggest that you can meet with the local franchise owners of Pak’nSave or New World supermarkets and talk about the need for accurate labelling and traceability of gene altered foods which is being abandoned against consumer preferences.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks. To protect this, we need to stand up and be heard.

We have arrived at the crossroads of our lifetime

There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that we are at a crossroads. New Zealand legislation is in progress to deregulate biotechnology experimentation. If passed, the general public will become guinea pigs in a raft of diverse projects. Unlabelled gene edited foods will fill our plates and affect our gut unannounced.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share and as an audio version.

The mainstay of our economy—high quality agricultural products—will be downgraded to bargain basement GMO-tainted products subject to overseas consumer suspicion and likely trade barriers. The scope of medical interventions and prescriptions will be broadened to include treatments and drugs with unsustainable costs that pose higher risks to patients with uncertain long term outcomes. This post examines the fundamental problems with biotechnology and suggests causes of known adverse effects.

Incredibly, by seeking to pass the Bill, the government is prejudging the outcome of Phase 2 of the Royal Commission on Covid-19 which is scheduled to address safety issues of novel biotech medical interventions introduced for the first time in New Zealand during the pandemic. Nevertheless, we should examine in detail the claim of the government that the removal of our traditional precautionary approach to medicine and agriculture will somehow benefit the nation and move us forward into a so-called bright technological future.

According to the government, biotech experimentation promises that diseases caused by single gene mutations can be positively ameliorated by CRISPR gene editing, while mRNA vaccine types and other methods of cell modification are believed to offer hope to cancer sufferers. Two weeks ago we published an article lifting the lid on the poor results of such procedures to date entitled “The Big Debate: How Many New Doctors Will NZ Need if the Gene Technology Bill is Passed?“. Nevertheless we have to admit it might be possible for the layman to pass a harsh judgement on anyone who attempts to question or hold up medical progress.

So why are we at the Hatchard Report still so firmly concerned about gene technology? Are we denying an opportunity for people to get well? No.

An article in the UK Guardian last week announced Groundbreaking’ sickle cell disease treatment approved for NHS use in England‘. The NHS has approved treatment of sickle cell anaemia patients with CRISPR treatments developed by Vertex technologies called exa-cel at a projected minimum cost of NZ$3.6 million per patient. The article claimed that “Clinical trials had found one-time gene therapy exa-cel offers a ‘functional cure’ in 96.6% of patients”. There are 15,000 people in the UK suffering from the disease which causes debilitating blockages in the venous blood system known as vaso-occlusive events. So with that astounding rate of reported success, even with the huge price tag, who would want to stop its roll out?

It is always best to refer back to the results of the actual clinical trial to verify the details. They were published by the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2024 under the title “Exagamglogene Autotemcel for Severe Sickle Cell Disease“. In all, 44 patients have received the treatment over a four year period, which is designed to reactivate fetal haemoglobin production by inserting short genetic sequences in the erythroid enhancer region of a patient’s own haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) using CRISPR gene editing. In the trial’s terms, ‘success’ was strictly limited to meaning that a patient remained free of vaso-occlusive events for any 12 month period following the procedure. The study did not report any assessment of, or changes in the very extensive range of other symptoms commonly associated with sickle cell disease.

The study only reported follow up of 30 out of the 44 patients (2/3 or 68% of the participants). Of these, 29 experienced a period of 12 months free of hospitalisation for vaso-occlusive events in contrast to their previous history of regularly occurring severe episodes leading to a claim of 97% success. However this figure is deceptive, 6 patients did in fact experience severe vaso-occlusive crises after exa-cel infusion. Inexplicably, 4 of these were excluded from the analysis. Their inclusion would have dropped the narrowly defined success rate from 97%, as naively reported by the Guardian, to 84%. All of which leads to the suspicion of a PR promotional tactic touting deceptive headline efficacy percentages, much as happened during the COVID-19 vaccine roll out.

Crucially 42 (95%) of the participants experienced severe adverse events at grades 3 or 4 following the infusion of exa-cel. A grade 4 adverse medical event is a life-threatening or disabling event that requires immediate medical intervention. The most common of these experienced by exa-cel patients were:

Stomatitis (in 55% of the patients) which is inflammation of the mouth’s mucous membranes causing painful sores that make it difficult to eat, drink, or swallow, 

Febrile Neutropenia (in 48%) which is a medical condition where a patient experiences a fever alongside a significantly low count of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell crucial for fighting infection. This is considered a medical emergency requiring prompt diagnosis and treatment. 

Decreased Platelet Count (in 48%), also known as thrombocytopenia, which can increase the risk of bleeding, especially from the mouth, nose, and gastrointestinal tract. In severe cases, it can be life-threatening. 

The other severe adverse events experienced by patients included anaemia, abdominal pain, lymphocyte count decrease, gallstones, pruritus (skin itch), constipation, headache, nausea, chest pain, pneumonia, arthralgia, deep vein thrombosis, loss of appetite, weight loss, and back pain. In 20 patients these events were judged especially serious, but incredibly the authors concluded that none of these could be positively related to exa-cel infusion. At least one patient died partly as a result of the busulfan chemotherapy which is a required adjunct to exa-cel treatment.

There are an estimated 15,000 individuals in the UK suffering from sickle cell disease. Due to the cost of the procedure, the NHS will only be able to fund 50 patients a year, less than the 300 new babies born with the condition each year. Given the huge cost, the very low bar set for so-called success, the absence of long term evaluation and the high rate of adverse effects, it is virtually impossible to justify the expense or the risks. Especially when the NHS is faced with a funding crisis, hospital overcrowding, long delays in specialist treatment and massive ED wait times. See for example this UK Telegraph article ‘Corridor care used to be seen as unacceptable – now it’s the norm’. Much the same as the situation here in New Zealand where FSA (first specialist appointment) wait times for example are still rising steadily despite government efforts, whilst ED nightmare waits have become ordinary. 

Our conclusion: the money might be more wisely spent elsewhere in the health service to the benefit of a much larger number of people.

You may say this is just the beginning. Every new technology has its teething issues. Shouldn’t we be listening to the Trumpian bombast of the billionaire tech moguls or the futuristic internet prophets calling us to embrace our transhuman AI biotech future. To this we reply ‘look back in anger’ on the five wasted years of the pandemic with its economic mayhem, social isolation, and excess deaths. Just remember that ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put humpty together again’. COVID-19 with its biotech origins could not be contained, prevented, recalled or remediated. It spread without limit and has become an enduring part of the ill health landscape. 

This is still going on around the world and here in New Zealand today. An article in Newsroom entitled “Cardiac and mental illnesses fuel surging benefits bill reports Jobseeker beneficiary numbers continue to rise to record levels in spite of a government overhaul aimed at shifting more people into employment. Numbers claiming benefits due to disability or ill health rose by 16% in 2024, now costing double that in pre-pandemic 2019. The article reported:

“Psychological or psychiatric conditions are the most common issue among those in the ‘health condition or disability’ bracket, with 46,920 claiming benefits last year for issues like depression and anxiety. The biggest five-year uptick is in cardiovascular disorders, which have risen 54.9 percent since December 2019 with 4194 claimants off work due to heart and blood vessel problems last year. The largest representative age group of health-related benefit claimants in 2024 was 25-39-year-olds, but the 18-24 year-old group had the largest five-year proportional increase in numbers, at 58 percent.”

Why? The answer brings us to our main reason for grave concern about biotechnology safety. This relates to fundamental principles, some of which we discussed in our article at GLOBE last week entitled “The Future of New Zealand is Written in the History of Biotech Mutation“. We can state our concerns succinctly: 

Gene editing by definition crosses the cell membrane and redefines genetic processes known to be fundamental to our physical health and mental well being.

A study published in November 2024 entitled “The Role of Cells in Encoding and Storing Information: A Narrative Review of Cellular Memory” concludes 

“Multiple studies have demonstrated that memories can be encoded and stored in cells. Evidence suggests that these memories can then be transferred between individuals through organ transplantation….but there has been a noticeable lack of research focused on cellular memory, and more rigorous investigations are needed to uncover how cells participate in memory and the extent to which these processes influence human behaviour and cognition.”

‘Lack of research’ is a gross understatement, more properly, the role of awareness in biotechnology has been deliberately excluded from study. What does this mean for us? Memory plays a crucial role in forming our thoughts and behaviour. The outcomes of previous actions and experiences imprint themselves in our cells as memories. When faced with similar circumstances they float to the surface of awareness and determine our responses. In this way past experiences control present choices and determine the future.

Memories are considered by everyone to be a private space. It is almost unthinkable that routine medical procedures being urged for all might disrupt them. In reality, our consciousness, our state of mind is intimately entwined at every level with our internal cellular structure and external cellular networks. Genetic interventions, which cross the cell membrane, invade our personal space in ways that are not understood or acknowledged.

At its most fundamental level, awareness has a 3 in 1 structure. Knower, knowing and known are linked together. These emerge from the totality of awareness, our BEING. The holistic quality of being awake necessarily implies an observer, process of observation and object of observation—the 3 in 1 structure of awareness. It is no accident that the cell also has a three in one structure. The WHOLE cell comprises the nucleus, the cytoplasm and the membrane. The DNA in the nucleus is a silent observer of the complex processes in cytoplasm which connect to the protective membrane, the gateway to the extracellular world. Awareness and cellular structure are two aspects of the same fundamental 3 in 1 reality.

The determining factor in this arrangement is the HOLISTIC nature of BEING. Being or awareness sits at the fulcrum point of life. BEING is able to express itself through the precise structure of the cell. The cell has a history just as the whole organism has a history. This history is the personal record of BEING expressing itself in an individual life. It includes the cultural and genetic history of the family, referred to as whakapapa in Maori culture. This is the golden pathway of individual evolution created and guided by the universal BEING. 

The experience of deep meditation or ecstatic spiritual insight reveals that BEING is a field of BLISS. It is truth, intelligence and bliss in a unified field of pure awareness. It is the deep field of universal silence which quietly guides and nurtures individual life. This is the truth of Michelangelo’s depiction on the Sistine Chapel ceiling of God imparting the spark of life to Adam. The Creator, having created, enters into life. The Kingdom of Heaven is always within. All this insight, experience and expression is quietly and precisely supported and enabled by the physiological and genetic structure of individual human life.

Biotechnology experimentation and gene editing is putting someone’s else’s creation into the midst of our path of individual evolution. Not only can it disrupt memory and thereby alter our future thoughts and actions, as is known to happen following organ transplants, but it can disrupt our capacity to connect with the source of life itself. It can disconnect the individual from the flow of the bliss of life.

People these days are often reluctant to open up about their spiritual and cultural experiences and insights. If you feel that is outside your approach to life, just evaluate your personal experiences of the effect of gene technology during pandemic years. If these were limited or unclear, refer to the hard facts of scientific findings. All these factors point in the same concerning direction.

Considering that 90% of our eligible population received an mRNA vaccine which repurposed internal cellular genetic functions, is it any wonder that 46,920 working age people in New Zealand are unable to work because of “psychological or psychiatric conditions”  including depression and anxiety as the latest Ministry of Social Development’s figures show? 

This view is confirmed by a 2024 study of 2 million health records entitled “Psychiatric adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination: a population-based cohort study in Seoul, South Korea“. It found: “The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than the no vaccination group.” and concluded: “special precautions are necessary for administering additional COVID-19 vaccinations to populations vulnerable to psychiatric AEs.” which should include, according to the authoritative Harvard Medical School, well over half of the world’s population who will suffer mental illness during their lifetime.

Dr Luke Bradford, medical director at the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners blamed the astounding sudden rise in mental illness on ‘societal behaviours’ including unemployment. Since society is composed of individual behaviours, this does sound rather like a puzzling misleading circular argument devoid of any explanatory power.

An even greater puzzle is the response to Newsroom by Louise Upston, Social Development and Employment Minister, who said reforms made to the benefit system in August last year are “delivering results”. I suppose she just forgot to mention these were the wrong kind of results. It does make you wonder whether some government ministers would be better off opting for a disability benefit themselves. 

The lessons of this article are clear. At one end of gene technology disruption lies the introduction of gene altered and synthetic foods which cut off the supply of nature’s intelligence to our digestive system. The Gene Technology Bill is proposing to remove all regulation, precautionary testing and labelling from this sector. We won’t know what we are eating or its potential effects. At the other end even more powerful effects of genetic medical interventions will disrupt our health and well being. Who wants to buy into this nightmare?

In the continuing vein of government disinformation and double speak, there is an all court press in progress to suppress public discussion of the Gene Technology Bill. Facebook and Instagram posts on the subject are being throttled and censored. Political representatives are pouring scorn on concerns, describing them wrongly as “outdated fear mongering”. No corroborating evidence offered.  If you want to be sure to receive up to date information subscribe to the Hatchard Report. Unlike the government, we publish scientific references and engage in open public debate. We are not afraid to ask questions.

The Gene Technology Bill will completely exempt most gene altered products from any kind of scrutiny, regulation or labelling. We are at a crossroads where decisions made will affect us all for generations. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by February 17th. There are many reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. We have published suggestions for a submission template. Write to your MP. They need to be thoroughly quizzed on this egregious Bill.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks. To protect this, we need to stand up and be heard.

In the 1980s, I bought a Casio handheld programmable calculator and amused myself writing routines that solved algebraic equations, but I soon realised that calculators turn off the thinking process.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share.

The ubiquitous use of calculators in schools has since created generations of mathematically deficient graduates. Predictive text, AI assisted writing, and the decline of reading is now doing the same for language. To some extent we have adapted to these concerning side effects of technology, but what if some technology could prevent us from thinking straight? What would be the consequences? Or more to the point, is it already happening?

In November last year we published an article “mRNA Vaccines, Cognitive Dissonance and our Future Prospects” in which we reported on rises in cancer incidence and the public warnings being sounded by leading UK oncologists about the role of mRNA vaccines. There has been some push back. Apparently some medical authorities are in denial, they say there is no cancer epidemic taking place. What does the latest data tell us: Yes or No?

Last night I wanted to know how many people were developing cancer in Sweden because there were no lockdowns in the country. It is an interesting question for us because recent media reports of sudden cancer tragedies have been blamed on lockdowns which, according to a widely reported narrative, delayed appointments for check ups and tests at hospitals. Let’s be clear about it, delays could not actually ‘cause’ cancer, only, as the Lancet reports, complicate treatment and affect outcomes.

In our article “The Big Debate: How many new doctors will NZ need if the Gene Technology Bill is passed?”, we reported official UK figures revealing a 50% rise in bowel cancer in 2022 among working age people. Despite this, Professor Pat Price, oncologist and chair of Radiotherapy UK, offered this blanket rebuke to those concerned enough to ask why: “Covid vaccines aren’t causing cancer”. Vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris here in New Zealand agrees. She wrote an article in October 2024 for the Global Vaccine Data Network, which she co-directs, entitled “‘Turbo Cancer’ and mRNA: The myth that defies biology and physics” which warns:

““Turbo Cancer” is a term loosely thrown around by conspiracy theorists to describe supposedly aggressive and fast-developing cancers seen post-vaccination, but remember it’s a theory in search of facts, and the facts just aren’t there.”

Petousis-Harris’ offers the same blanket argument as Professor Pat Price, “Vaccines protect against cancer, they do not cause it”. Whilst acknowledging that COVID-19 vaccines employ a novel biotechnology, Harris dismisses any suggestion or theory that they could trigger cancer, instead saying “Vaccines of all kinds have been used for centuries and so far, none have been associated with an increase in cancer risk.”

Harris’ killer argument was supposedly contained in US data from NIH National Cancer Institute, Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program which she presents in a graph. Deceptively, Harris’ graph has the year 2022 tacked onto the x axis, but the SEER data actually ends in 2021. A clever trick straight out of the false advertising playbook. In common with a lot of other countries, including New Zealand which stopped publishing cancer data in 2020, the US has inexplicably delayed the publication of key health data. The Swedish data I found clarifies what is going on.

Cancer typically takes years to develop, so what happened in 2022?

Sweden didn’t have lockdowns and they are continuing to publish annual cancer incidence data. Google AI Overview informed me that 69,621 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in Sweden in 2017 and then somehow got stuck and started imagining that there were also 69,261 cases in 2016 and 2015. It wasn’t too much of a problem because I never rely on AI suggestions. I go back to the source data. Table 1 has the official numbers of new cancer cases in Sweden by year published by Socialstyrelsen, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare.

Compared to the average of the pre-pandemic years (2015-2019) when figures remained relatively stable, cancer incidence jumped by 10.9% in 2022 and pushed slightly higher in 2023. In all, it appears there were approximately 20,000 additional cases of cancer over the two years 2022 and 2023 more than you would expect from the historical trend. BUT it wasn’t due to lockdowns, they didn’t happen in Sweden. So what was the cause? The timing of the rapid increase is indicative and certainly favours COVID-19 vaccines. 87% of Sweden’s population over the age of 12 received at least one COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. It is possible that COVID-19 infection also played a role but far less likely as COVID-19 had its most severe impact in 2020. In any case, the exact relative importance of these two possible factors doesn’t influence an important implication of the figures, both COVID-19 vaccines and likely COVID-19 itself came out of biotechnology labs and exposed our internal cellular biology and immunity processes to novel bio-engineered genetic structures.

If COVID-19 vaccines are at fault, as some senior UK Oncologists like Dr Angus Dalgleish and Dr James Royle think, (who btw are not conspiracy theorists, a term that is often used to shut down legitimate discussion about valid concerns) the timing also indicates that the speed of post mRNA vaccine cancer development qualifies for the epithet ‘turbo’.

I wonder whether Professor Pat Price, oncologist and chair of Radiotherapy UK, or Helen Petousis-Harris, associate professor in the Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care at the University of Auckland, have given any serious thought to the cause of rapidly rising cancer incidence? Causality is not rocket science. The gold standard involves identifying the timing of new elements or sudden changes in diet, behaviour, environmental exposure or medical interventions.

The Swedish data clears up one point, it wasn’t lockdowns. In fact that explanation was never plausible. Delays in testing do not cause cancer, they merely delay treatments which might affect mortality, but not incidence. The figures for 2022 indicate a sudden very large unprecedented rise in cancer incidence. As a result, the list of usual cancer suspects doesn’t apply. In 2021 over a short period of time whole populations did not suddenly begin to eat vastly more junk foods, avoid exercise altogether, ban breastfeeding, or purposely add pesticides to their meals, but almost everyone did get COVID-19 mRNA vaccinated in a hurry.

The Biotech paradigm is collapsing

Biotechnology knows next to nothing about the interaction between consciousness and genetic structures. Consciousness is a subject virtually excluded from biology. Yet there are sound reasons and a number of experimental results which suggest a deep connection that relies on the uniformity of genetic information and structure among our 37 trillion human cells. How gene therapy might affect that connection is the great unknown of the genetic era. It can only be ignored to our great peril, and make no mistake it is being ignored and denied by those anxious to save their skins

Denial is a rather concerning medical response to a cancer epidemic. Doctors are sworn to do no harm. They should be reaching for the emergency button. The right kind of research at this point would involve comparing the health outcomes of the vaccinated with the unvaccinated over the relevant time periods. Any doctor should know this, it is taught in medical science 101. Hiding the data seems criminal. The entirely false certainty projected by the so-called fact checking of social media, the complicity of mainstream media and the AI driven endorsement of widely held yet false opinions is only adding to the isolation of ideas from facts. As a result some among our tribe of experts have stopped thinking straight, clutching at straws rather than give up outdated paradigms and preconceptions from the pre-biotech era. Ultimately the data does not lie, but apparently some people have decided to sleep easily with deception.

Despite the difficulties, uncertainties and challenges of the last five years of the pandemic, incredibly, our government has decided to deregulate biotechnology experimentation. This course creates serious risks that will negatively affect us all including a risk of developing cancers. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by February 17th. There are many reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. We have published suggestions for a submission template. Write to your MP. They need to be quizzed on this egregious Bill. They are trying to get this fast tracked during the holidays.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks.

Currently, there are 19,350 doctors in New Zealand; that’s one for every 264 people. According to Hon. Judith Collins, our Minister for Business Innovation and Enterprise (MBIE), we are all going to live longer and enjoy better health as a result of the massive deregulation contained in the Gene Technology Bill.

In this article, we are going to examine this claim very carefully. If passed, the Bill will change New Zealand irrevocably, we need a deep dive and a proper debate.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share.

Gene technology in our healthcare system is going to require some extra highly skilled doctors, but how many and how much will it cost us? High profile billionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson, 47, boasts that he only ages 8 months every year. So that is something we could all aim for. Bryan spends just $2 million a year on his health, he has 30 doctors and recently increased his pill intake to 91 pills a day. So the aspirational ratio is about 30 doctors for every person. We could probably accept a few less than that, but we might not live quite as long as Bryan. Probably best to go trial and error. Start with a modest 10 doctors per person and see how long we can all live. A lot of farmers will need to retrain and we might need to import more food. Most people would be doctors.

Joking apart, gene technology is insatiable when it comes to doctors and costs. The astronomical salaries of experts, expensive equipment, CRISPR patent fees and the constant need for testing associated with personalised genetic therapies all add up. If you think that the $10,000 estimate your builder gave you for a veranda renovation is too high, you might baulk at the multi-million dollar costs for your individual gene renovation. But don’t worry, the government is determined to foot the bill on our behalf. A clause in the bill REQUIRES that New Zealand automatically adopt any old gene technology as long as any other two countries have approved it. If it all works out, it is going to be like new dance moves in the 80s, everyone will be doing it. However published science shows this might just be a ridiculous dream, it is time to wake up.

Now let’s get serious.

We need an open public debate with published evidence not just misleading PR hype of the type the government is currently pumping out without supporting evidence. For example let’s look at an article in the prestigious journal Nature entitled “Four Success Stories in Gene Therapy“. Nature is absolutely in favour of genetic experimentation, so this recent article should contain the very highest level of evidence that Collins should be presenting to the public for debate.

Collins is very excited about using CAR T cell therapy to treat cancer in New Zealand. According to Nature, CAR T cell therapy costs about NZ$820,000 per shot. 85% of patients go into initial remission but only just over half of them are still in remission at the end of the first year. CAR T cell therapy is not without risk. It can cause severe side effects, including cytokine release syndrome (CRS), a dangerous inflammatory response that ranges from mild flu-like symptoms in less severe cases to multi-organ failure and even death. The article reports that with a combination of newer powerful adjunct drug regimes and vigilance, a TEAM of attending doctors can try to work out how far to push treatment without triggering CRS.

Currently there are about 30,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed in New Zealand each year. From the glowing publicity being pushed out, I suppose Collins wants us to believe that all of them will benefit from CAR T cell therapy. In which case the cost would be $25 billion, a figure that exceeds the current total cost of all healthcare in New Zealand.

So let’s for a minute remember the goal here—HEALTH and specifically less cancer. A report published in the UK Daily Mail based on official cancer statistics is entitled “Under-50s bowel cancer epidemic exposed: Shock figures reveal the exact age group for whom rates are growing quickest“. Bowel cancer rates have been on the increase for some time, but the latest UK figures published for 2022 show that the incidence of bowel cancer among men in their early 40s increased by a staggering 57% between 2019 and 2022. Women in the same 40-44 age bracket saw an increase of 50%. According to the article doctors are completely baffled and seemingly unable to identify a cause.

I know what you are going to say, but forget it. Despite the obvious temporal coincidence between the sudden dramatic rise in cancer and the pandemic, doctors have been quick to reassure us. Professor Pat Price, oncologist and chair of Radiotherapy UK, admitted the unprecedented rapid growth in bowel cancer rates among young people presented “a serious public health challenge,” but she added: “It’s also critical to dispel misinformation. Covid vaccines aren’t causing cancer” (no evidence offered). Phew, I was worried there for a minute. Instead the article offers this theory: “Experts believe poor diets packed with more ultra-processed foods, obesity and a lack of exercise could be responsible for the alarming cancer trend.” Let’s assume this is correct.

The article also reports that New Zealand has the second fastest growth rate of bowel cancer in the world, just behind Iceland.

If that is the case, shouldn’t our government be prioritising an education programme on lifestyle, exercise, healthy diets, fresh foods, etc.? Why would we want to pass a Gene Technology Bill, which allows even more tinkering with traditional foods without any labelling, traceability, safety testing, or liability for inevitable mistakes? It’s a real puzzle.

Studies show education about lifestyle changes would be a very cost effective approach whose effect sizes simply dwarf the meager and inconsistent results of biotechnology reported so far. Multiple studies show lifestyle changes including diet and exercise have a beneficial effect of reduced cancer incidence. Cancer is the number two cause of death after heart disease. A meta-analysis of nine studies entitled Association of Vegetarian and Vegan Diets with Cardiovascular Health: An Umbrella Review of Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies and Randomized Trials found very large effect sizes including a 29% risk reduction for cardiovascular disease (CVD). It reported a 14% reduction in CVD mortality and a 32% reduction in Ischaemic heart disease (IHD) mortality. One of the studies evaluated showed a significant 39% risk reduction for stroke incidence. It doesn’t stop there, we have reported extensively on the effects of meditation not just on cancer (one insurance study showed a 55% reduction in cancer incidence among practitioners of Transcendental Meditation), but also across the board of disease categories. None of this will require more doctors and very little expense. It could put our national health back on track. It should be a no brainer, instead we have the Gene Technology Bill.

So what else is the Gene Technology Bill promising us?

The Bill commits New Zealand to use all of the gene therapies of the future. CRISPR gene editing is another of Collins’ favourites that she is promising will revolutionise public health. There are ten thousand single gene mutation heritable illnesses so far identified by science. The so-called promise of CRISPR theory is that all of these should eventually be reversible via a single gene deletion or replacement. So what does the Nature article say about the best and most exciting results from the use of CRISPR so far?

Two of these diseases are sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. At a recent conference, Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics announced the results of a clinical trial of beta thalassemia and sickle cell patients treated with CTX001, a CRISPR-Cas9-based therapy. In all, 22 patients have received the treatment over a number of years at a cost of NZ$5 million per patient all of whom initially experienced increased levels of haemoglobin and reduced pain. After one year, only five of the patients had any residual beneficial effects. Vertex paid an additional NZ$85 million in patent fees for the licence to use CRISPR gene editing techniques involved in the treatments.

In summary: improvements are patchy at best, the costs are astronomical, the side effects are very serious and any benefits mostly don’t last very long.

Clearly these results are not going to bring about a revolution in New Zealand healthcare outcomes nor are they conceivably affordable for any but the mega-rich or a small number of beneficiaries of multi-million dollar New Zealand government grants presumably selected through a bruising lottery process. They are more likely to bankrupt our healthcare system and distract from viable proven paths that really could improve public health outcomes.

So what is the extent of the problems with CRISPR gene editing?

Is gene technology a healthcare revolution that has become affordable and actually works as Collins hypes? Or is it permanently just around the corner out of reach as it has been for the last 70 years? Or just perhaps, has something else gone terribly wrong as we know happened with biotech during the pandemic to everyone’s cost?

Well first of all, CRISPR gene editing is not as precise as Collins’ and MBIE PR claim. A paper in Nature published in October 2024 is entitled “Gene editing of NCF1 loci is associated with homologous recombination and chromosomal rearrangements” The paper describes attempts by scientists using CRISPR gene therapy to treat deficient chronic granulomatous disease, which is a rare inherited genetic disorder that prevents white blood cells from killing fungi and bacteria. It causes a primary immune deficiency associated with functional defects in neutrophils and macrophages. Mutations in any one of five different genes can cause this condition.

The study’s results reveal a central problem with CRISPR techniques. Most of us imagine that genes are somehow as solid and understandable as the world around us, made up of specific distinct identifiable objects which can be swapped if one becomes defective. Rather like changing a tyre when you have a puncture. Many genetic models or theories, and certainly all popular explanations pretend this is the case. In fact as you reach the very very small time and distance scales of DNA, you have reached an area completely foreign to the waking world of experience. The study revealed that many genes appear almost indistinguishable from one another or homologous. We can imagine that the situation is similar to repeated use of identical sub routines in a complex computer programme, but scaled up by a factor of one trillion. As a result, the CRISPR gene scissors begin to cut up, rearrange or delete other genetic chromosomal structures which were not the intended target, causing unintended consequences and health problems.

This is not because CRISPR has been incorrectly or inaccurately programmed or targeted, but rather the inevitable result of a fundamental property of matter at small time and distance scales—increased similarity in structure and function. The law of least action is in play. At this scale of matter, universal fields, quantum properties and unification play a greater role. Everything begins to look and behave in a confusingly similar fashion. CRISPR gene editing tools are based on the destructive properties of bacteria and when faced with an array of similar targets the derived CRISPR tools revert to type and embark on some random destructive cutting and pasting.

Because genes control all the functions of our physiology from the most fundamental level, the capacity for serious adverse effects is enhanced. This is one important reason for the mind boggling costs and high doctor to patient ratios of gene technology. A lot can go wrong and often does.

As we have reported extensively at GLOBE, in the microscopic physical world, consciousness plays a vital role. The observer enters into physical theory in multiple ways. In fact it plays an essential and leading role in triggering the outcomes of events at the atomic scale. DNA has holistic functions which are closely connected to its ability to support awareness or consciousness, including, in humans, self-reflective states of mind. No one in biotechnology understands how this delicate miracle of life happens, but like a bull in a china shop they are apparently determined to wreak havoc and see what eventuates.

The self-belief in the biotech community and the capacity for exotic experimentation are only matched by the determination to avoid any kind reasonable requirement for labelling, safety testing, containment or difficult ethical questions. Another requirement of the nascent biotech industry is freedom from any sort of liability and the permission to patent genes and genetic processes.

Judith Collins’ Gene Technology Bill concedes all of this to the bioscientists clamouring for the freedom to experiment on us.

According to Collins, New Zealand will become a world leader in biotechnology experimentation. Certainly we will end up to our detriment as guinea pigs subject to the most permissive regulatory regime in the world, where a government appointee will decide everything for us from what goes into our breakfast cereal to what goes into our pills, without any requirement to inform us on the labels, not even in the small print. Collins is repeating safe and effective and wants to push the Bill through with little or no public debate, but where is her evidence? According to current scientific assessments it is not safe or effective. Biotechnologies are dogged by poor results, serious risks and unaffordable massive costs. So is it Hey Ho and off we go with the Coalition into the brave new world of unrestrained gene editing, or do we, as we do in our personal lives, exercise some common sense. We just have one parting question for Minister Collins. Did she do her homework or did the dog eat it?

In this article we have covered just a few points. There are a lot of concerning provisions in the Bill. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by February 17th.

There are many reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. We have published suggestions for a submission template. Write to your MP. They need to be quizzed on this egregious Bill. They are trying to get this fast tracked during the holidays.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks.

Judith Collins is promising us an economic miracle if only she can deregulate biotechnology. According to Collins, gene technology research using CRISPR will be a money spinner. She is absolutely right, but it won’t benefit New Zealand.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share.

CRISPR techniques are subject to patents. They can be licensed for use by academic laboratories, but if you want to commercialise a product produced using CRISPR it comes at a cost, a huge cost. For example, in 2023, Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, Massachusetts, secured approval to sell its CRISPR-based treatment for sickle-cell disease only after paying $50 million in up front fees to a licence-holder authorised by the Broad Institute, a genomic-research centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that holds the patents. It seems that any CRISPR money spinning largely takes place in America, which is why US trade negotiators are reportedly demanding biotech deregulation as a precondition of a free trade agreement with New Zealand.

Which brings us to another point. Will the Gene Technology Bill benefit public health as Auntie Collins tells us? Examples of benefits of gene technology are a rare animal indeed (disasters abound), but one has had its share of headlines recently. Gene therapy treatments for sickle-cell anaemia cost about NZ$6 million per person and they involve bone marrow transplants. The mortality rates after bone marrow transplants reported in the published literature range from a massive 74% to 10% depending on a number of factors including the pre-existing health of the individual. The massive costs and low survival rates are not going to impact New Zealand’s appalling public health statistics, only our balance sheet.

More and more as every day goes by Collins is beginning to sound like Bernie Madoff, but will gene technology allow us to live longer? You might have come across Bryan Johnson, the billionaire poster child for longevity via gene technology. He has a Netflix series devoted to his quest to live forever. Bryan’s every move is governed by the advice of his team of 30 doctors. According to some reports in glossy magazines, he believes he has succeeded in reducing the age of every one of his organs by upwards of 30%. The Netflix documentary lauds Bryan’s use of immunosuppressant rapamycin which, along with 54 other pills, is supposedly helping him to live forever.

What Netflix did not tell us: Johnson stopped taking the drug because he found the side effects were too severe including a rather icky looking skin rash on his otherwise trim frame along with “soft tissue infections, abnormal levels of fats in his blood, elevated blood sugar and a higher resting heart rate”. Johnson decided rapamycin just might have been making him age faster. His doctors sheepishly admitted they had been encouraging him to take the drug whose “side effects include very dangerous bacterial infections, and things like pneumonia or cellulitis or pharyngitis.” If I was Bryan, I’d change my doctors.

The devil is always in the detail, and there are a great many details about the risks of gene technology that the government has forgotten to tell us about. In 2023, the University of Auckland, to great fanfare reportedly identified a drug alpelisib that helped mice live 10% longer, but the side effects included weaker bones and higher blood sugar—a known cause of diabetes. A drug that helps you live longer is not much use if it makes you chronically sick and terminally ill. Which reminds me of something else.

If you are reading this, you are one of the lucky ones, you have lasted through five pandemic years, but studies show not all of us have been that lucky, including about 30 million worldwide unexpectedly no longer with us. In the light of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Wuhan Virology Lab, listening to Judith Collins lecture us about the safety and health benefits of deregulating biotechnology all helps to cement the Bernie Madoff impersonation. 

In an unlikely volte-face Mark Zuckerburg speaking with Joe Rogan has changed sides. According to Zuckerburg, Biden administration officials “screamed and cursed” at Meta executives to take down posts critical of COVID-19 vaccine safety. Specifically, any mention of vaccine side effects was censored by the US government. Anything, including human lives, that might come in the way of $100 billion US pharmaceutical industry COVID-19 vaccine profits was off the table in the White House. 

In an act of atonement, Zuckerburg has announced that FB posts will no longer be subject to ‘fact checking’. BUT this is only being trialled in the USA. So unfortunately none of this backtracking will have dented the enthusiasm of New Zealand mainstream media to persecute those shining a light in dark places. 

I received a polite email this week from Kiwi journalist George Driver who is an official ‘fact checker’ for Facebook who queried one of my recent posts. According to Driver, he is working hard for Meta “to mitigate misinformation in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.” He queried my claim that the Gene Technology Bill will “bypass the medical choice provisions of the New Zealand Bill of Rights”. He questioned whether the Bill was being fast tracked and required evidence that shows the Bill would remove a person’s right to refuse a medical treatment. I answered as follows and I am sending this out to you because I am not sure what the final outcome will be as far as FaceBook is concerned.

Dear George

Thanks for writing. There are a number of points to consider here. In short:

I. Formerly, labelling of gene altered food was required via HSNO legislation. The Gene Technology Bill effectively rescinds the requirement for mandatory labelling. Thus some gene altered foods will enter the food chain without the public’s knowledge. This not only bypasses public choice but also has implications for individual health. For example it could affect individuals with food allergies.

2. My use of the term Fast Track was intended to mean that the coalition is making its passage a priority. In particular, contrary to usual practice, the public submission process is taking place over the holiday period. This appears to be designed to move the bill forward under the radar. Btw, your final sentence misquotes me ‘was “passed under fast track legislation”? Should be ‘is being’ not ‘was’.

3. The Mandatory wording in the bill is as follows “Mandatory medical activity authorisations: for a human medicine that is or contains gene technology that has been approved by at least two recognised overseas gene technology regulators.” The emergency use wording is as follows “Emergency authorisations: when there is an actual or imminent threat to the health and safety of people or to the environment, for example, threat from a disease outbreak, or an industrial spillage, the Minister responsible for the Gene Technology Act (Judith Collins) will have the power to grant an emergency authorisation.”

The intent of these clauses (which is not made sufficiently clear in the Bill) is mystifying nor is the reason for their inclusion obvious or explicitly justified. The implications of the wording of both taken together are so general that the regulator and the Minister are granted very wide powers which could be used to legally justify mandatory public health measures involving the use of gene technology. This might include environmental and health measures that affect individuals generally. Because these measures involve gene technology, they may not be containable. For example the use of sprays to distribute gene technology can remove choice from the public.

Whilst the regulator will be required to seek public submissions, they are not obliged to act on them. It is hard to see any outcome for this position other that that of a biotech industry facilitator. In fact from Collin’s public pronouncements, this seems to be an intent of the Bill

These are short answers to your questions. IMO the Bill is very poorly worded and too permissive. I refer you to my video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5b2skQADT4&t=432s which includes some references to recent cautionary public statements from highly qualified biotech insiders about safety. Also to the HatchardReport.com where I have written extensively about the Bill. I am happy to talk to you by phone at 094372012. 

FYI I was formerly Director of Natural Products at Genetic ID (now FoodChain ID). Genetic ID provided genetic testing and certification services to bulk food exporters like ADM and Cargill.

You introduced yourself as providing fact checking services for Meta. I understand from media reports that Meta is no longer requiring fact checking. Could you clarify your current role?

Best wishes

Guy

Let’s hope we are not facing a renewed round of cancellation and government fawning from mainstream media on this topic. The cat is out of the bag on the Gene Technology Bill, the only people who will benefit seem to be domiciled in the state of Massachusetts, USA. New Zealand public health be damned.

For more information view our YouTube video “The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know“.

Anyone living in New Zealand today will be aware of how much we, as individuals and as a people, value our identity and cultural values. We know from our everyday acquaintances, colleagues, family members or whanau that we must maintain respect for individual preferences and ideas. We have always known from the beginning that we need the space to live as we believe. This has been a vital part of Kiwi life stretching back to our forebears.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share and as an audio version.

The extraordinary provisions of the Gene Technology Bill, currently before Parliament, threaten to overturn these values. The Bill does so under the radar, deceptively posing as a matter of scientific verity and economic freedom when in fact it will change our way of life for ever. Biotechnology is all about life. It edits life from its most fundamental physical level—our genes.

From now on, a government-appointed regulator will have the power to make decisions about our life, our genetic heritage, for all of us. In one stroke sweeping away concepts of individual rights and choice. As a result of the last five pandemic years, we all know that this can go terribly wrong. Genetic material is highly mobile, it cannot be contained, recalled or remediated. That is not just a scientific fact, but has now become our personal experience.

In contravention of this fact, in an extraordinary step of deception, the Bill proposes that gene technology is so safe that many if not most gene altered foods, crops, microbes, and animals can be released into the environment or food chain without any special identification. For us, this means that novel foods will appear on our supermarket shelves without labelling or anything to distinguish them from what we and our ancestors have been happily eating for eons.

We have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with our traditional food sources for millions of years. Our physiology has co-evolved with the genetic structures of our foods. Multiple large studies show that diets rich in natural gene-based food sources including fruits and vegetables improve health outcomes, prevent cancer and support longevity. The detailed genetic structures involved are important, altering them is a door to uncharted territory. Removing labelling is a provision that involves forced relocation into this unhealthy territory.

To cap this egregious provision, the Bill removes any criminal liability for altering genes. A get out of jail free card for the Frankensteins of our generation.

If that doesn’t rock your boat, think about the vast areas of life that biotechnology doesn’t even begin to understand yet proposes to alter. First among these: our Being. Yesterday I had the tiniest speck of wood, about the size of a pin point lodged in the ball of my thumb, but it had registered its presence and needed to be taken out, the work of seconds. Immediate relief. Awareness ranges effortlessly from the microscopic to the majestic immensity of the Cosmos, yet how our genes support this ability is a total mystery.

One of our most read articles in 2024 was entitled “Can Biotechnology Control Human Behaviour?” It reported evidence that “gene editing, including any sort of editing of the chain of genetic functions within cells, could more or less automatically change our behaviour and psychological profile” in ways that no one currently understands.

Cultures around the world, hold sacred beliefs about the natural order of things, the divine status of human life and the continuity of our ancestral heritage:

• Judeo-Christians believe that “God created man in his own image” and “The Kingdom of Heaven is within”
• Hindus believe that each person is intrinsically divine and the purpose of life is to seek and realise the divinity within all of us. 
• Buddha taught that each one of us is divine in our very essence. 
• Islam considers human life more sacred than the holy Kasbah. 
• Taoism teaches that humans are part of the larger cosmos and should live in harmony with the universe. They believe along with countless other traditions and modern ecological philosophies that all living things are connected in a mutually supportive biofield.
• The Maori Whakapapa of the World speaks of Io Te Kakano—Te purapura i tupu ake ai nga mea katoa o te Ao (the seed from which all things in the universe grow) and Io Te Mauri—Te mea ora i roto i nga mea katoa o Te Ao (The living element in all things created in the Universe)

Only 7% of the world’s population are atheists, among them James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and Richard Dawkins biologist who both reject the sacred views of the vast majority of the world’s population and believe that redesigning the natural order is the destiny of the human race. The New Zealand government apparently follows this path, since they are removing any ability of the public to know what has been altered by gene editing on our dinner plate or in our environment.

Moreover the Bill requires “Mandatory Medical Activity Authorisations”“Emergency Medical Use Authorisations” which grants the Minister responsible for the Gene Technology Bill (Judith Collins) special powers when there is in their opinion an actual or imminent threat to the health and safety of people or to the environment. A provision wide open to misinterpretation and misuse.

The rights and choices accepted as a normal part of everyday Kiwi life were hard won in the distant past. The New Zealand Bill of Rights was an attempt by legislators, not to grant new rights to Kiwis but to set down in stone the principles of natural justice and the constitutional rights that have been generally accepted and followed in our history. These include:

Clause 10 Right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation—Every person has the right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without that person’s consent.

Clause 13 Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion—Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference.

Clause 20 Rights of minorities—A person who belongs to an ethnic, religious, or linguistic minority in New Zealand shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of that minority, to enjoy the culture, to profess and practise the religion, or to use the language of that minority.

Make no mistake about it, the introduction of novel biotechnologies without specific requirements for identification, ethical evaluation, labelling or containment, instead devolving these powers to a regulator, is a very clear violation of all three of these clauses.

The regulator will be required to call for public submissions on each of their future rulings on hundreds of biotechnology projects, but the Bill does not require that they should take specific account of these submissions, merely consider them. In practice, almost no one will have the time to respond to these projects. In other words, of necessity our fundamental rights will be violated on hundreds of occasions and in hundreds of ways that will remain opaque to any scrutiny, assessment of effects or liability. And due to the nature of gene editing, these will remain without any possibility of recall, remediation or redress.

The risks of biotechnology are extraordinary. Of which, Professor Tim Spector OBE, Downing Street advisor and leading expert on gene editing at King’s College London, recently wrote in the UK Telegraph:  experimentation in “labs across the world should face more oversight and be treated with the same seriousness as a nuclear threat.” In complete defiance of this warning and that of many other leading biotechnologists waking up to the risks, the New Zealand Gene Technology Bill is setting out the most permissive gene regulation framework in the world—a clear prescription for disaster that sweeps away our personal preferences and traditional rights, as well as dearly held cultural, ecological and religious values.

The government holds up the prospect of improved public health and economic benefit as its justification, but is there sufficient sound scientific evidence of this? No, absolutely not. Our recent article “Waking Up From the Dream of Biotechnology” reveals the flimsy and unsubstantiated nature of the government justifications for a wholesale change in our way of life and cultural norms.

There are a lot of reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by February 17th. We have published suggestions for a submission template. Write to your MP. They need to be quizzed on this egregious Bill. They are trying to get this fast tracked during the holidays.

We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices, their rights, their beliefs and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks.

Deep in a dream, our quiet consciousness suddenly realises that it is no longer a dream but has become a nightmare. The inner voice screams ‘wake up’ which is the only way out.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share and as an audio version.

The dream of biotechnology is a new age of health, happiness and human achievement. James Watson, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA 70 years ago, was full of hope:

“We used to think that our fate was in our stars, but now we know that, in large measure, our fate is in our genes,…recombinant DNA is likely the safest revolutionary technology ever developed, and we should not postpone experiments with clear benefits for fear of hypothetical risks….I want to see cancer cured in my lifetime” Watson has enthused.

Watson is now in a nursing home aged 96 and cancer is not cured. In fact it has become rampant. Somewhere along the way, did the dream of biotechnology become a nightmare? If so, it is time to wake up.

How did we get here and what does the future hold?

If you ask Google what are the biotechnology success stories, it comes up with slim pickings. First up is a list of patented genetically engineered crops like cotton, soy and corn. These types are paired with proprietary pesticide products. A March 2023 report from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) says a consolidation trend within the agricultural seed industry began when the first genetically engineered traits were introduced to the market in the early 1990s. Since then, more than 200 US seed companies have been acquired or went out of business. The result is a concentration of market share among four seed companies. A June 2023 report by the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) found that when combined, AgReliant, Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta accounted for 83% of corn seed sales and 78% of soybean seed sales in the United States from 2018 to 2020. The trend is continuing, Bayer has just announced the consolidation of a further 10 regional seed brands in 2025. 

This so-called success story of biotechnology is not about more nutritious strains, increased yields, etc., these largely remain the stuff of myth. It is about the profits of transnational corporations who control a concentration of intellectual property (IP) in the form of patented genetics and traits. This has left farmers trapped in an unsustainable cycle of heightened input costs and depressed commodity prices. This is not a route for New Zealand farming to travel. Much of the allure of New Zealand produce is our pristine shores and clean green image. The GE route leads to corporate slavery, trade barriers, public rejection and rock bottom prices.

Next up on Google is a list of biotech startups who promise a lot, but do they deliver? BiomassProtein is a Danish company who invented a process to turn grass into food. Like all such companies they have required massive investment and government funding but have yet to turn any profit or generate public interest. The biomass industry wouldn’t be viable without renewable energy subsidies. In fact biomass projects are not generally sustainable environmentally or economically. Worldwide, governments have so far invested over $48 billion subsidising the biomass industry, much of it related to the dubious application of climate related tax credits.

As you go down any short list of biotech success stories, there is one feature that stands out above all else. The absolutely tremendous promise and ‘promise’ is the operative word. For 70 years, since Watson and Crick’s discovery, a lot of promises have been made and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge without actually generating any power. As we have reported on many occasions, you can make money in biotech by promising a lot, whether you deliver or not is largely immaterial. Along the way, government grants, speculative investment and intellectual property sales can make you into a multimillionaire without actually achieving, curing or selling anything. Third on Google’s list is Fibrotech Therapeutics, an Australian company sold for $75 million in 2019 after ‘promising’ phase 1 trials of a product to treat diabetic nephropathy. No further updates available.

So where does this all go to? There is only one answer to this question, and it is on everyone’s lips—COVID-19. COVID-19 is THE great success story of biotechnology. Not only is it possible to create a totally new deadly disease but also share it through a crack in the lab door with the entire world’s population. And it doesn’t stop there, you can also create, sell and profit from a vaccine which doesn’t work and actually harms a great many people. There is no liability whatsoever if you do so, even if you harm the economy. Learned papers have been written documenting the financial costs of the pandemic rated in hundreds of trillions of dollars and the human cost estimated to top 15-30 million excess deaths worldwide. If this hasn’t dampened your enthusiasm for biotechnology probably nothing will.

It is into this last category that the New Zealand government falls. It has introduced the Gene Technology Bill which contains by far the most permissive legislation of any country in the world. At last New Zealand really is leading the world (perhaps in cupidity and stupidity). Its clauses contain all the pips and whistles most needed by transnational corporates—no criminal or civil liability for facilitators, no labelling of products, foods, and medicines required (the public won’t even know), provision for government mandated approval (yes, it has that magic word ‘mandate” which is music to the corporate ears), ability to fiddle to your heart’s content with the DNA of animals, microbes plants, adults and children, no messy ethics, public watch dogs or testing requirements—simply apply to the one stop regulator for a rubber stamp.

What will happen to us?

A quick look across the ditch to Australia reveals they already have a Gene Technology Regulator. Dr Raj Bhula. He has announced that a period of 30 days of public submissions will be held starting in March before the probable approval of the release of genetically engineered mosquitoes in Queensland.

It doesn’t stop there, the idea of experimenting on Australians is catching on fast. Incredibly, Bhula’s office has just rated the following project at the Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne, as posing “negligible to moderate risk to human health and safety”.

“The initial aim is to evaluate the safety and infectivity of recombinant seasonal human influenza viruses in healthy volunteers. These GM viruses will then be used to assess the effectiveness of therapeutic drugs or vaccine candidates to prevent and control influenza infection.”

The lab is proposing to make gene altered versions of the flu and then test out various genetic drugs and/or vaccines on human volunteers over a five year period. Given the low risk rating by the regulator, the project, which creates new viruses, is likely to be a shoo-in for a rubber stamp. Does any of this sound at all familiar? It should.

Why is our government deregulating biotechnology at a time when the significant serious risks are becoming glaringly obvious even to children?

A little bird has told us the answer to this and it might be surprising—trade negotiations. The powers that be in the US have apparently decided to follow up on the massive profits that their pharmaceutical companies made during the pandemic by asking little New Zealand to deregulate biotechnology. I am not sure ‘ask’ is the right word, but it is the polite term when it comes to trade diplomacy. In a rush of enthusiasm our Coalition government is eager to comply and damn the consequences. If we give in, we will be providing a helping hand to our ‘friends’ in America who will then toddle off to Europe and ask them to follow suit. “See, New Zealand did it, now it’s your turn”. And if there are any projects that the American public, protected as they fortunately are by constitutional rights, believe to be a bridge too far, then New Zealand can step into the breach and pollute our hitherto pristine shores and clean green fields for them. There is a big pay day involved for someone, but not for the farmers or the honest Kiwi public.

There are a lot of reasons to reject the Gene Technology Bill. Find out more by viewing our YouTube video The Gene Technology Bill. What Kiwis Need To Know and then make a submission to the Health Select Committee by February 17th. We have published suggestions for a submission template.

Write to your MP. They need to be quizzed on this egregious Bill. They are trying to get this fast tracked during the holidays. We do not live in a country where people are willing to let others take away their food choices and increase exposure to serious long term environmental and health risks.

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Yesterday, the discovery of a oriental fruit fly in Auckland caused a panic and a ban on the movement of fruit and vegetables. Biosecurity New Zealand said that “if the insect was to establish itself in the country, the horticulture industry would suffer massive economic costs”. At the ultimate core of the problem is the particular genetic makeup of this foreign fruit fly, yet somehow, the New Zealand government thinks that deregulating biotechnology experimentation is a very good idea. Good luck with that.

This article is also available as a PDF to download, print, and share and as an audio version.

Many Kiwis have been writing to their MPs expressing concern about the Gene Technology Bill, which is being rushed through Parliament. A smattering of MPs have begun to reply to critics. How do they match up to science and experience?

Reportedly, Hon. Shane Jones, for example, welcomes the Bill and thinks there will be no problem because in his opinion we have all been eating genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for years with no ill effects (???). Hon. Shane Reti, Minister for Health believes the Bill will improve health, boost the economy and enhance farming. When he puts his Health Minister hat on he shouts that we have a national health crisis that urgently needs fixing. So which is it? Are we all eating or injecting biotech and feeling more healthy than ever before or are we all falling sick and dying in greater numbers? You already know the answer. Our hospitals are overcrowded, health insurers are worried sick and our funeral industry is posting record profits. Apparently, no one in Parliament knows why. 

The Hon. Scott Simpson, National MP for Coromandel, wrote that the provisions in the Bill for Mandatory Medical Activity Authorisations and Emergency Use Authorisations are only there to oblige the Gene Regulator to be ‘efficient’ (???). This he says will “give the public more choice not less”. I think the word he was searching for in this sentence was not ‘choice’, but might have been more aptly ‘prescriptions’.

I am not sure if MPs are suffering from amnesia or schizophrenia, but haven’t we the public just suffered through five pandemic years? Are we now expected to forget about this? Increasingly, international scientific opinion is shifting to extreme caution about biotechnology, precisely because of the probable origins of the COVID-19 virus and the lack of efficacy or safety of the vaccines. 

Here in New Zealand we might have escaped the worst health effects of Alpha and Delta variants because we closed our borders and applied the established principles of quarantine (suffering instead the economic, social and mental health fall out). Despite this, the long term health risks of biotechnology experimentation associated with COVID-19 are still haunting us today in our families, businesses, hospitals and morgues. In fact, policing our borders is precisely what Biosecurity NZ is doing every day to keep dangerous fruit flies and genetic oddities out. The Gene Technology is set to open them right up, the full monty. The wording of the Bill mandates that the New Zealand regulator must reciprocally approve any gene altered medicines and procedures within 30 days of their approval by any two countries overseas. 

At the weak heart of the justifications offered for the Bill is the idea that the risks of biotechnology experimentation are manageable and mostly minimal. Precisely the myth that the pandemic has overturned. Hon. Judith Collins, speaking to introduce the Bill to Parliament referred to gene editing as a “very predictable technology”. Not an assessment that fits at all well with events at the Wuhan Virology Laboratory. Collins summed up:

“A defining moment was the invention of the ability to precisely edit individual genes. The CRISPR process was announced in 2012, and it won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. That changed everything, because it means that we’re not splicing together genes from different species but that we’re editing existing genes. And more medical therapies aren’t just nice to have; it means more effective and safe cancer treatments, and it means greater hope and quality of life for patients and their families.”

As with most things in science, it takes time to verify claimed benefits. The promises of 2012 have not held up to subsequent scrutiny. A paper published in 2022 in the journal Genome Research entitled “Target-enriched nanopore sequencing and de novo assembly reveals co-occurrences of complex on-target genomic rearrangements induced by CRISPR-Cas9 in human cells” found: 

“Extensive genomic disruptions caused by CRISPR gene editing, involving genomic duplication and inversion of the target region, as well as integrations of exogenous DNA and clustered interchromosomal DNA fragment rearrangements. Furthermore, these genomic alterations led to functional aberrant DNA fragments and altered cell proliferation.”

In other words, Collins’ claim of precise fail safe gene editing as a guarantee of safety is just rehashed PR hype and forlorn hope. It is representative of the outdated and incorrect popular science being used by the Coalition to push the commercial gene agenda on the public. Nor is Collins’ level of certainty shared by the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier who invented CRISPR editing. In a 2014 interview reported in Walter Isaacson’s book The Code Breaker Doudna worried:

“Have we created a tool box for future Frankensteins?…Emmanuelle and I, and our collaborators, had imagined that CRISPR technology could save lives by helping cure genetic disease. Yet as I thought about it now, I could scarcely begin to conceive of all of the ways in which our hard work might be perverted”.

This reads a lot differently from Collins’ speech to Parliament. The COVID-19 pandemic has only hammered home concern and tempered the 2012 initial enthusiasm a hundred fold.

In her speech to Parliament, Collins sought to reassure the New Zealand public that the Bill would not force anything on the public saying: 

“They can opt in. They do not have to opt out. They’d have to opt in in order to use them GMOs].”

This was Collins’ deceptive rhetoric at its height. Parliament was being misled. A key change that will affect the public was being kept well hidden. If you search the hundreds of pages of the Gene Technology Bill for the word ‘label’, it occurs precisely zero times, yet the Bill supersedes previous HSNO legislation which required labelling of GMOs. In other words, the public will be required to opt in because they will no longer be able to find out whether they are buying, eating or being prescribed biotech products. This is the dirty heart of the Bill which is being welcomed by academia and industry because they know that labelled products and identified procedures will be treated with caution by the public. Something they wish to avoid at all costs.

The Bill proposes that a government appointed regulator will be able to assess risks on our behalf, but it doesn’t specify how they will do so. Behind this sort of legislative vacuum, is an announced government intention that gene editing and experimentation in New Zealand involving crops, microbes, animals and medicines will be going full speed ahead. The regulator, whoever they are, will be well aware of this and if they want to keep their job, they will know what is expected. In the almost complete absence of guidelines, the regulator will become a facilitator.

So what are the risks? Is there such a thing as ‘low risk’ biotechnology? By definition gene editing crosses the cell membrane and edits the genetic command and control system of the whole organism. The complexity of intracellular processes is staggering and involves trillions of elements. The details are little understood. When it comes to human life, you can’t imagine anything that poses a greater risk than gene editing.

Before the pandemic, despite the lessons of smoking, thalidomide, laudanum, asbestos, etc (it is a long list), widespread use and prevalence of biotech experimentation were wrongly believed to be proof of inherent safety. This is no longer the case. As Professor Tim Spector OBE, a Downing Street Advisor and leading geneticist at King’s College London, put it in a November 2024 piece for the UK Telegraph “Labs across the world [undertaking biotechnology experimentation] should face more oversight and be treated with the same seriousness as a nuclear threat.” The Washington Post chimed in: “The nightmare of a biological holocaust is far from fanciful.”

This is not a field to be entered into with gay abandon and hurrah, like a gambler heading for the gaming tables, as Collins seems to think. Human health and life is ultimately at stake here. We are not exaggerating or doom mongering. This is not the time nor is New Zealand the place to open the flood gates to experimental gene editing. The Royal Commission on COVID-19 Phase II has just started to hear evidence on the safety and efficacy of genetically engineered COVID-19 vaccines. They will report in 2026. Collins and the Coalition want to jump the gun. To cap it all they don’t want the results to be labelled. Parliament needs to act on evidence not rhetoric. It should reject the Bill.

For more information view our video on YouTube “The Gene Technology Bill—What Kiwis Need To Know”.

Please make a submission to the Health Select Committee (deadline 17th February). If you feel you need help refer to our Submission Template.

Write to your MP. There are many articles discussing the issues in more depth with references available at HatchardReport.com and https://GLOBE.GLOBAL