An article that all media, experts, GPs and MPs need to read

In an April 13 2022 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) “Covid-19 Boosters — Where from Here?” Dr. Paul Offit MD starts with the obligatory praise for mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, but then abruptly switches to a very serious note of alarm about the continued use of boosters.

NEJM has been at the nexus of positive Covid-19 publishing. Its editorial board has the advantage of reviewing a broad sweep of Covid studies. The fact that they decided to publish a blunt warning is highly significant. The message for governments, medical professionals, and medical media commentators and explainers cannot be ignored or underestimated.

The editorial raises a number of questions:

“Unfortunately, studies did not stratify patients according to whether they had coexisting conditions. Therefore, it was unclear who among the younger age groups most benefited from an additional dose.”

In summary, boosters are not very useful for younger people who are healthy. This doesn’t sound very serious, but the NEJM went on to discuss the implications.

The continued universal use of boosters, in a misguided attempt to eliminate Covid, ‘will limit the ability of booster dosing to lessen transmission.’

The consequence, NEJM warned, are problems whose full extent and eventual outcomes are unknown:

“Boosters are not risk-free, we need to clarify which groups most benefit. For example, boys and men between 16 and 29 years of age are at increased risk for myocarditis caused by mRNA vaccines.”

“And all age groups are at risk for the theoretical problem of an “original antigenic sin” — a decreased ability to respond to a new immunogen because the immune system has locked onto the original immunogen….This potential problem could limit our ability to respond to a new variant.”

Original antigenic sin refers to the known possibility of ADE—antibody dependent enhancement of an illness. In essence, the immune system antibodies produced as a result of vaccination can in combination with new variants enhance the capacity of Covid to cause serious illness.

This possibility arises because of the innate capacity of the Covid virus to adapt when faced with a highly vaccinated population—a known viral evolutionary pathway.

The editorial concluded with a message for governments:

“…educate the public about the limits of mucosal [mRNA Covid] vaccines. Otherwise, a zero-tolerance strategy for mild or asymptomatic infection, which can be implemented only with frequent booster doses, will continue to mislead the public about what Covid-19 vaccines can and cannot do.”

Facing Reality Is Proving Hard for Our Government

Is an editorial in a foreign medical journal cause for alarm? Yes, when it is the NEJM, the most conservative of medical journals, known for its unflinching support of modern medical orthodoxy.

Our worst enemy is complaisance and inaction. This was exemplified for me by a reply from an MP this week who says:

“I do get some comfort from the fact that smallpox and polio vaccines, do appear long term to benefit humans, and from my general reading there is hope and belief that the COVID vaccine will do the same….the vast majority of scientists involved provide me reassurance that the vaccine is safe and that the alternative of not vaccinating is simply not an option.”

In other words, he says there is no alternative except to carry on boosting, precisely the problem that the NEJM was warning against, which is leading down a road to a very uncertain and possibly very dangerous future.

As I travelled south towards Wellington yesterday, I passed kilometres of stationary cars going north stalled by a couple of traffic lights in Otaki. The $3.5 billion spent on the transmission gully motorway has delivered no improved travel time because the planners were perhaps not thinking far enough ahead and carried on regardless (and btw for the motorway enthusiasts after Otaki comes Levin, so should bypasses be the first priority?).

Do we carry on vaccinating against polio and smallpox every few months?—NO we do not. This one fact should have been sufficient to alert our MP that something is different about mRNA technology.

Who are the medical experts advising our MPs, watering down the published Covid medical research results to the point of banality? Is our $64 billion spent on Covid so far well spent?

Calling a Medical Emergency in New Zealand

We know that both mRNA vaccination and Covid infection carry as yet unquantified long term risks of heart disease. Are we ramping up our capacity to treat heart disease? Apparently not.

A correspondent in Palmerston North writes that she has been referred to a heart specialist by her GP, but the specialist replies he is too overwhelmed with cases to see her and refers her back to her GP. When is this Covid buck passing going to stop?

Heart disease is the number one killer in New Zealand. The apologia being trotted out by the media that myopericarditis following vaccination will turn out to be mild in the longer term without actual supporting research does not amount to a credible medical policy.

We keep hearing anecdotal reports of our hospitals overwhelmed with cardiac cases. Are the reports real? The government is not publishing data, so we are left in the dark. Is the government failing to look or are they deliberately concealing information?

The situation is similar in the UK, information about alarming rises in cardiac cases is too hot to handle, so is it being covered up? Some data is coming out from individual hospitals. The NHS trust in the small UK seaside resort of Blackpool responded to a freedom of information request last week. Their cases of heart failure are up 400% on historical averages. Yes, 400%.

Who Can Turn the Ship Around?

We all have relatives or friends still insisting that our hospitals are full of the unvaccinated, that no one who is vaccinated has ever died, that the unvaccinated are endangering everyone, that international studies prove the vaccine works perfectly, and so on…

All of which are remote from reality, yet without honest government and media messaging, polite rebuttals with references to actual data are met with outright denial and condemnation.

Only the government and mainstream media are in a position to convey the sober NEJM assessment of boosters to the public. Otherwise, the public will remain stuck with boosters or bust misinformation. Continuing to publish misleading information about hospital statistics or myths that only mRNA vaccination of 100% of the population will stop the pandemic (as Stuff did this week) will only make it harder to institute reliable policies.

Mark Steyn of GB news called out the UK government Thursday this week with official UK statistics showing that boosted individuals are twice as likely to suffer infection, hospitalisation, and death compared to the unvaccinated, partially vaccinated and doubly vaccinated lumped together. This raises the possibility that Antibody Dependent Enhancement is already taking hold.

We are heading in that direction too, possibly just a few weeks behind, New Zealand statistics highlight increasing vulnerability of the boosted as each week goes by. This point is reinforced by increasing reports of multiple reinfections among vaccinated populations.

Time to Call a Medical Emergency

This is a call for an energetic, robust and focused response to an evolving medical situation. A preparedness to consider and entertain views that were dismissed as unthinkable a few weeks ago.

Don’t trust my word, trust the New England Journal of Medicine which has sounded the alarm because our situation may be about to get much worse if the government continues to do and say as it has been so far.

Please forward this message to those in need of this officially sanctioned warning.

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If you are a science writer in search of material, your best bet is to review a few of yesterday’s mainstream media pronouncements reporting government vaccine experts. You could find enough public misdirection to keep you writing for a week.

Among yesterday’s four Covid advice articles in Stuff “Kiwis suffering health issues after Covid-19 vaccination want to be heard, but it’s complicated” raised the art of mixed messaging and gaslighting to new heights.

It started off well, raising the case of someone in Wellington debilitated with pericarditis, unable to even go for a walk, hang up washing, or vacuum, but it rapidly went off the rails. The lady is described as anxious to get her booster for the good of the general public.

We were reassured by Stuff that the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC) insurance scheme had only accepted 987 claims for vaccine related injuries, a supposedly unconcerning rate of 0.009% of doses (possibly 50 times higher than any prior vaccine).

77 of these accepted ACC vaccine injury claims are for myopericarditis. The others were for other serious conditions. Then we were told there have actually been 783 people who have reported incidents of myopericarditis following vaccination to Medsafe.

In my book this implies that only 10% of myopericarditis claims have been approved by ACC. You didn’t have to read far before Dr. Nikki Turner Director of the Auckland University Immunisation Advisory Centre weighed in with the advice that some adverse reactions to vaccination such as heart palpitations could be due to anxiety about needles.

These people should be treated with compassion, she said, (but presumably refused an insurance claim).

It gets worse, Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa with his recently minted Ph.D., formerly a pro-democracy spokesperson from Sri Lanka, and now described by Stuff as an ‘independent’ (?) researcher employed by the NZ Government-funded Disinformation Project, was quoted as describing people seeking compensation for vaccine injuries as having been instrumentalised by anti-vax groups.

He is quoted as telling Stuff that New Zealand is a high trust society involved in a broader struggle as it tries to get to grips with the erosion of social cohesion and trust. Something that our institutions have failed to keep up with…The culprits are anti-vax groups.

(Note the language: ‘broader struggle’, ‘erosion of social cohesion’, ‘culprits’, …., is Hattotuwa or Stuff actually talking about New Zealand here?)

“..I don’t think the health agencies, institutions, and ministries fully appreciated the instrumentalisation of the content they were putting out” Hattotuwa says.

In other words, Dr. Hattotuwa appears to be advising the government to put out less information about the pandemic in case it is misrepresented—a form of government censorship of scientific information.

Such statements no doubt could be misconstrued as encouraging our government to become a more secretive and authoritarian state. Is this our Kiwi future—I hope not.

Thank God that Dr. Nikki Turner disagreed:

“I’m very much in favour of us as a country learning how to do critical appraisal and understand science, not just assume that people can’t figure it out.”

So why isn’t Dr. Nikki Turner publicly debating vaccine safety? Instead in the article, she labels anti-vax misinformation as an industry that should be called out. So no public debate then, just a cancelling fest from the safety of an ivory tower.

Distinguished immunologist Dr. Graham Le Gros executive director of the Malaghan Institute and head of Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa told Stuff that:

“NZ has a good system for reporting events possibly related to vaccinations and a high level of engagement from the public and healthcare professionals”

Since my involvement with writing about the science of the pandemic, I have been writing to Government scientists calling for mandatory reporting of adverse events subsequent to vaccination as is normal in vaccine trials. Medsafe says that only 5% of events are reported in NZ. Dr. Ashley Bloomfield has specifically refused to countenance this step.

Dr. Le Gros makes my point for me, saying:

“it will take ten years to assess all the risks of the vaccine—as is the case with all new vaccines”.

So have I missed something? We are rolling out to the public a vaccine using completely novel biotechnology the true extent of whose risks, we are assured by one of our most senior scientists, will not be known for ten years. Yet we will not be requiring mandatory reporting of adverse effects???

The article in Stuff fails NZ because it cherry picked examples of people suffering severe effects from myopericarditis and even one family of a teenager who tragically died, all of whom say the show must go on—no one should be discouraged from vaccination.

The majority of the 706 (at least) people with myopericarditis who have not been given a voice or compensation might disagree.

Tomorrow I could look at the implications of the opinion piece in today’s Stuff which calls on Jacinda Ardern to virtually guarantee these admittedly risky and hugely ineffective vaccinations are taken by all New Zealanders right down to the very young.

How one wonders—back to the coercive mandates whose supporting legislation Jacinda Ardern says she plans to keep in her back pocket?

A paper published on April 5th in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Protection by a Fourth Dose of BNT162b2 against Omicron in Israel” is raising eyebrows in the scientific world because of its deficiencies.

Dr. Vinay Prasad is an American hematologist–oncologist and health researcher. He is an associate professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. His work has coined the term medical reversal whereby more careful trials of a drug show that its earlier approval was flawed.

Dr. Prasad, who is not an anti vaxxer by any stretch of the imagination, has aired his concerns about the latest Israeli paper on Omicron and boosters in a YouTube video titled: Israeli Data for the 4th Dose | How Good Is It? | Make Bourla Earn His Pay.

In essence, Dr. Prasad is concerned that there is a potential for inherent bias as the group of subjects in the Israeli study who took the fourth booster was self-selected rather than randomly assigned.

In other words, he was asserting that any assessment of vaccine efficacy published in a leading journal like the NEJM should use the gold standard of scientific proof, rather than inferior methods known to allow confounding effects to creep in.

Dr. Prasad pointed to the current $100 billion of annual Pfizer revenue and asked: Why isn’t Pfizer conducting randomised controlled trials to assess the efficacy and safety of boosters rather than applying political pressure to bypass scientific concerns? He said this was debasing scientific standards.

Dr. Prasad also pointed out that the actual data underpinning the results of the Israeli study were inconsistent with the known trajectory of immunity development and therefore with the study’s conclusions that the booster was helping.

So precisely how could self-selection in the Israeli study invalidate results? Dr. Prasad suggested one possible mechanism: those volunteering for fourth boosters might be more healthy individuals.

We ask: How could this happen? There are a number of ways.

For example, let us take seriously the commonly voiced proposal that the Covid-19 spike protein is essentially a toxin. A toxin capable of causing the heart and organ inflammation, neurological effects, and the potentially damaging immune system storm associated with both Covid infection and vaccination.

As with any toxin, some individuals will have greater and others lesser reactions to the toxin depending on a whole range of individual physiological circumstances.

As the series of inoculations proceeds from first to fourth jab, those individuals having a greater adverse reaction to the shots will be weeded out by self-selection. Those experiencing more unpleasant reactions to the spike protein toxin will naturally decide to forgo further injections as the vaccination series unfolds.

Since both the Covid virus and the vaccine expose the physiology to the spike protein which accounts for a significant part of the Covid aetiology and symptomatology, those more tolerant of the toxic effects of the spike protein will have lesser symptoms following Covid infection.

The net effect of this on the results of the Israeli study is clear, those volunteering to receive the fourth booster will appear to be gaining benefit from the booster because they have self-selected for greater tolerance.

As a result there will be a tendency to see a slightly lower rate of hospitalisation and death subsequent to receiving the booster, precisely the result of the Israeli study. As the efficacy of the booster on the viral component of Covid wanes this effect will dissipate.

Dr. Prasad’s point is clear, the only way to sort out what is actually happening is to conduct a randomised controlled study where subjects are assigned to vaccination and the matched control group receives a placebo.

Pfizer has the money to do this. So why aren’t they? Possibly because a randomised controlled trial may uncover some potentially serious issues for Pfizer.

Without a carefully designed randomised controlled study, results are subject to the vagaries and inconsistencies of national data collection policies:

• Is Covid data collection mandatory, (in most countries including NZ it is not)?

• How carefully are records kept?

• How are Covid hospitalisations defined (for example are pregnant mothers in hospital to give birth who coincidentally test positive for Covid recorded as a Covid patient)?

• How are Covid deaths recorded, how long after a positive test and whether they had other health conditions?

Let’s look at the New Zealand current deaths data which illustrates these points:

Proportion of covid deaths by vax status (dark colours) with Proportion of total population in each vax status (light shades)

Shows all deaths ASSOCIATED with covid: ie from any cause within 28 days of a + test. (Unfortunately, the MoH does not release the vax status of CONFIRMED covid deaths)

If you read this graph at face value you must conclude as follows:

During the last month boosted individuals have become more vulnerable to death from Covid that they were at the start. Both the vaccinated (excluding the boosted) and unvaccinated groups have become less vulnerable to death through Covid. The increasing vulnerability of the boosted group over time is consistent with the Israeli study. One possible interpretation of the figures is as follows:

The level of natural immunity (due to prior infection) is rising among the unvaccinated as a greater percentage of this group catch and recover from Covid, whereas the more mRNA injections you have had appear to inhibit the acquisition of natural immunity.

However few safe scientific conclusions can be drawn from this table. The New Zealand Ministry of Health does not release sufficient data and the numbers are small. We do not know how many of these deaths were with Covid and how many because of Covid in the various vaccination categories.

We can however segway to figures from the UKHSA. Up until the end of March the UKHSA conveniently provided the case-rates per 100,000 individuals by vaccination status in their vaccine surveillance reports, and the following table has been stitched together by online UK publication The Expose from the case-rate tables found in the Week 3, Week 7 and Week 13 Vaccine Surveillance Reports.

As you can see from the above, the case-rates per 100k have been highest among the triple vaccinated population over these 3 months, except for the 18-29-year-olds in the week 3 report only, and the under 18’s in all 3 months.

However, as in New Zealand, the trend is clear: triple vaccinated individuals are becoming more vulnerable and not exhibiting the acquisition of natural immunity in every age category.

A sufficiently well planned and executed randomised controlled trial with a long duration would reveal what is going on, but neither Pfizer or government health agencies are moving in this direction.

In fact health agencies like the UKHSA are publishing less and less data, possibly because the data is suggesting alarming longer term health consequences of mRNA vaccination.

The lack of complete data at this point actually confounds the issue because it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out what adverse health effects of Covid are due to infection and which to vaccination. If the supposition that the spike protein is a toxin is right, both will have similar effects to varying degrees.

The action point is clear: mRNA vaccination is not working and could be dangerous. In the absence of reliable clinical assessment, and in the presence of concerning data, the use of mRNA vaccines should be paused.

This article is available to download: Where Did the ‘science’ of the Pandemic Go Wrong and How to Put It Right? (PDF)

World media and government science advisors acknowledge the limitations of the regulatory process for mRNA vaccination.

We shouldn’t understate the naivete of the New Zealand government, media, and scientists during the pandemic.

The tabloid-style stories of severe Covid outcomes, the authoritative voice of Dr. Anthony Fauci (who has financial conflicts of interest), the allure of the word vaccine, and the exaggerated death toll in foreign lands, all combined into a convincing call for immediate and coercive action.

Yet behind the stories, the highly profitable pharmaceutical PR system was running at full steam playing on the fear factor. New Zealand fell head over heels in love. Love knows no reason and that was certainly the case here.

New Zealand is a long way away from the rest of the world. We have a tradition of proud independence and self-sufficiency, but we rolled over and played follow the leader. 

No one in a position of influence struck a note of caution, especially not our Prime Minister.

We instituted the largest public borrowing program in New Zealand history and spent it on a US mega corporation with a poor safety record and a history of punitive malpractice judgements.

The government instituted saturation advertising of vaccine safety and efficacy, and then followed up with mandates, sackings and social exclusion. Our media shouted down those few asking questions.

Times Have Changed

The prestigious and conservative Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has aired concerns about poor regulatory decisions at the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) about booster shots. They join a growing international chorus of highly qualified and influential voices.

On April 3rd in an opinion piece entitled “FDA Shuts Out Its Own Experts in Authorizing Another Vaccine Booster” Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine writes:

“The FDA last week authorized Americans over 50 to get a fourth Covid vaccine dose. Some of the FDA’s own experts disagreed, but the agency simply ignored them.”

Eric Rubin, editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (arguably the world’s most influential medical journal) and a member of the FDA advisory committee on vaccines told CNN last month:

“I haven’t seen enough data to determine whether anyone needs a fourth dose”.

Dr. Cody Meissner, also a member of the FDA vaccine advisory committee and chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital agreed saying:

“the fourth dose is an unanswered question for people with a normal immune system”

A third member of the committee, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia went further. He told the Atlantic magazine that he advised his 20-something son to forgo the first booster.

The WSJ article described the effect of boosters as fleeting, mild, and short-lived.

Two top FDA officials, Marion Gruber, Director of the FDA Office of Vaccine Research and Review and her deputy Paul Krause, quit the FDA in September last year complaining of undue pressure to authorize boosters and a lack of data to support their use.

Unbelievably, the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) rubber stamped the FDA decision to approve a second booster without even convening its panel of external independent vaccine experts.

Safety Testing of mRNA Vaccines is Inadequate, Incomplete, and Biased

The Wall Street Journal article sounded a note of alarm saying that neither the CDC nor the US National Institute of Health (NIH) had made a priority of studying vaccine complications.

Moreover, their VAERS data collection and analysis process is incomplete and inadequate. In other words, the safety investigation to date of adverse effects of mRNA vaccination is incomplete and potentially misleading.

The central question raised by the Wall Street Journal opinion piece is why wouldn’t the US regulators wish to undertake accurate and complete investigation of adverse effects of mRNA vaccination?

Have pharmaceutical interests been able to influence decision-making at the FDA to their own commercial advantage at the expense of safety considerations?

A leading authority the British Medical Journal agrees, on March 16 it published an article entitled The illusion of evidence based medicine in which it said:

“Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia.”

The Lessons For NZ Are Obvious

We have stifled debate and slavishly followed FDA advice. Now there is a need for reevaluation and debate. We have travelled a long way down a one way street, but it appears to be a dead end.

The triumphant articles published about a survey of vaccine resistant people born in Dunedin was a low point in uncritical NZ mainstream media publishing. We have to regain an objective voice.

A paper published on April 5th in the New England Journal of Medicine found that any measurable protective effect of the fourth inoculation (which in any case, it found, is very small in absolute terms) disappeared after just 8 weeks.

Moreover, a paper in the Lancet on April 8th admits that boosters carry a risk of additional side effects.

Both these papers skirted the obvious safety questions in favour of weak praise for vaccine orthodoxy. In contrast, the Wall Street Journal article asked the important question:

Who is actually getting serious about measuring the extent of adverse events, rather than continuing to urge uncritical acceptance of a largely ineffective vaccine?

So far New Zealand media have steered clear of questions. Dr. Ashley Bloomfield has refused to institute mandatory reporting of adverse events following mRNA Covid vaccination and he has excelled at denying vaccine exemptions to those injured by the first shot.

Silence is no longer tenable, in actuality it never was. Questions have to be asked. No ifs or buts. Overseas media outlets of the thinking kind are waking up.

If we can’t face debating rationally with our critics, we are a nation drifting onto the rocks of ignorance and prejudice.

Time for us to wake up.

Is there a myocarditis time bomb affecting athletes or is it disinformation?

Are anti vaxxers ignorant people who suffered childhood abuse?

Adverse effects of mRNA Covid vaccination affecting athletes is not a sacred cow in the fact checking world.

Throughout 2021, multiple attempts were made to debunk persistent reports that an unusual number of athletes were suffering cardiac events that might be related to mRNA Covid vaccination.

The main theme of these fact checking efforts was denial—athletes were not at risk and cardiac events were not happening.

In 2022 this dialogue is evolving because the numbers are growing and harder to ignore. According to an investigative report by OAN, a pro-Trump online US news site, 769 athletes suffered sudden health events between March 2021 and March 2022 with an average age of 23 years.

For example in February, fifteen despairing players withdrew from the Miami Open. Yes, that is 15 in one tournament. No doubt anti-vaxxers who were locked out of most sporting events, whether they were participants or spectators, during 2021 called out from the parking lot thank goodness some people are still counting.

Of necessity in the face of mounting numbers of injury reports, the fact checking dialogue has hesitated on the brink, but on February 1st of this year, the Washington Post still labelled stories of adverse effects of mRNA vaccines on athletes FALSE.

Their story relied heavily on a discussion of a single Danish footballer Christian Eriksen who suffered a cardiac arrest on June 12 2021 just before half time. The circulation of the apparently false story that Eriksen had been vaccinated was attributed by the Washington Post to a shady far right group in Austria seeking to influence their upcoming election. The pro-vaxxers cheered from the stands.

Dig deeper and the story gets more murky. Few if any of the participants in this argument on both sides have verified hard facts to hand. There are a number of people making strong statements based on the certainty of belief.

The Washington Post, who had probably realised by February that it was quite possible that an unusual number of athletes were unexpectedly falling to the ground, decided to finish its article by asserting that the sporting collapses must be due to Covid not Covid vaccination. Again no hard facts about actual athletes, just a polarised muck throwing event.

Data Collection Is the Right Way Out of This Counterfactual Maze

As a scientist, I realise that what is lacking here is reliable data. Why is it lacking? Here is the nub, the authorities are so sure they are right about the safety of vaccines, that they are refusing to collect data.

New Zealand has refused to institute mandatory reporting of adverse events following mRNA vaccination and other countries are in the same boat. We don’t have a lot of data to go on because it is not being collected. Sporting bodies are not counting either, or perhaps they have lost count or looked the other way.

Delving into the world of psychology, I can only find this unsettling. Why wouldn’t we collect data? Why aren’t we allowed to ask questions without being shown a red card? Why isn’t the Ministry of Health counting and publishing up to date medical data on the frequency of cardiac and thrombotic events of all types?

There are stories in the popular press (actually not so popular these days) reporting recent excess cardiac events as due to ‘holiday heart syndrome’ or the need for young people ‘to avoid strenuous exercise’. Neither of these had been a thing until 2021. Why haven’t the MoH quashed these speculative sallies into obfuscation by publishing data? You tell me.

Are the Vaccine Hesitant in Dunedin Victims of Child Abuse?

The finger-pointing gets worse. One particular ‘wack-an-antivaxxer’ sport recently originated at Otago Medical School. A popular digest of a study of 1,000 people born in Dunedin, NZ in 1972 was reprinted in leading publications around the world.

The article implied that anti-vaxxers suffered from sexual abuse, maltreatment, deprivation or neglect, or having an alcoholic parent as they were growing up. They were also described as low educational achievers likely to suffer from mental illness.

I am a little sceptical by nature, so I noticed that the reports in the popular press were based on an article in a publication called The Conversation, which has received support during the pandemic from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Conversation describes itself as both devoted to academic rigour and seeking to explain science to the general public. Curiously their article about the Dunedin survey only contained a single quantitative piece of information—13% of the respondents were vaccine resistant.

No other quantitative information was provided to support the extreme characterisation of the vaccine hesitant in the article.

I tracked down the actual study entitled “Deep-seated psychological histories of COVID-19 vaccine hesitance and resistance”. Seven of the ten authors were based in the USA. One of the authors disclosed that he is funded by the US CDC.

The survey completed in April 2021 actually found that 13% of the respondents were vaccine resistant and 12% were vaccine hesitant. So fully 25% of the respondents were vaccine hesitant to varying degrees.

I then rapidly came across an old friend used to distort information: absolute differences versus relative differences.

Of those willing to vaccinate (note the word used is willing, not necessarily keen), 62% had at least one Adverse Childhood Event (ACE). Of those hesitant or resistant to vaccination 73% had at least one ACE. 62% vs 73% is not a large difference in absolute terms.

Based on this small difference, Professor Richie Poulton, a Dunedin-based co-author of the study was quoted in the Otago Daily Times as saying about the vaccine hesitant and resistant responders:

“The childhood experiences of those surveyed ranged from sexual abuse, parental neglect, poverty, to isolation and lack of achievement in school. They covered the whole suite of difficulties you can think of that might impinge on a person’s good development. Their personality became … very stress reactive – they saw danger or threat where there essentially was none”.

Now you probably did percentages at school, do you think Professor Poulton’s comments accurately reflect the difference between 62% and 73% exposures to at least one ACE? Because I certainly don’t. A significant percentage of both groups experienced ACEs growing up, but they had different opinions about vaccination.

Wouldn’t it be more productive to ask: why do we have such a high rate of ACEs in NZ? Is our mental health service under funded? Is our education system failing us? Is support for families sufficient?

I went further down the pages examining results of a battery of ‘questionaires’. I found that although there were measurable differences between the two groups: ‘vaccine willing’ and ‘vaccine hesitant and resistant’, their average scores were well within the standard deviation of the mean standardized score for each test.

This means most people responding to the survey were actually relatively average people. The vaccine hesitant and resistant were being falsely characterised as ill-educated social deviants. This sounds like victim blaming. So much for the academic rigour and capacity to explain science that The Conversation proudly aspires to.

Unpicking the Messaging is Really Important Here. It involves psychological manipulation

You can see where I am coming from can’t you? Were the media comments about the study an unsupported and false attempt to discredit the unvaccinated and categorise them as outcasts and misfits without the necessary intelligence to think for themselves?

The small differences between the two groups were insufficient to justify this black and white condemnation widely shared around the world’s media.

There were some differences in educational attainment. 35% of the vaccine willing had a BA degree or higher. 15% of the vaccine hesitant or resistant had a BA or higher.

However, the Dunedin results may be misleading regarding the influence of education. A study in the USA found that people with a PhD were more likely to be vaccine hesitant, implying that a decision to not vaccinate may possibly be encouraged by the development of high level critical thinking.

In the mainstream media articles, Professor Poulton pleaded with us to feel pity for the unvaccinated, because of their supposed difficult childhood (which was in fact not so different from that of the vaccinated).

Was he simply lowering our opinion of the unvaccinated by playing upon stereotypes? Subtly hammering home the current NZ mainstream media messaging that only right wing extremists and selfish antisocials remain unvaccinated.

Did he realise that the unvaccinated are legitimately concerned about the vaccinated because they have been unwittingly exposed to serious but as yet unquantified medical risk?

As I am aware that Covid mRNA vaccine adverse events are running at 30-50 times higher than any previous vaccine, I would ask different questions of the data:

• Were those willing to be vaccinated being misled by the inadequate content of their education?
• Do prior adverse experiences provide good reason to be more cautious in future?

What do you think?

The Immunisation Advisory Centre at the prestigious University of Auckland (incidentally partly funded by pro-vaccine interests) reassuringly says:

“Confirmed cases of myocarditis are rare…More than 80% of reported cases of myocarditis following mRNA Covid vaccination have recovered quickly with rest and commonly used oral anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen.”

Are you reassured by this, or have you looked at the Medsafe adverse event data where 18,000 mRNA vaccine recipients reported chest pain and shortness of breath—symptoms admitted by the Immunisation Advisory Centre to be indicative of myocarditis?

Have you concluded, like me, that as many as 80% of cases of myocarditis among the vaccinated remain unreported and untreated? A ticking time bomb, of which professional athletes represent only the tip of the iceberg.

Bickering without accurate data is a waste of time. If you refuse to look, you will never see.

The question is how long are our health authorities going to continue to look the other way and refuse to start counting accurately, appropriately, and retrospectively?

How long before government and media messaging becomes respectful and objective?