It was announced this week that Ministry of Health was going to officially change the definition of Covid death statistics. The international standard is for anyone dying with Covid 19 within the previous 28 days to be added to the total. New Zealand started the year with a total death rate of less than 60, under the standard definition, and it is now getting close to 2000. The health bureaucrats make regular revisions, usually to add more on, but now want to change the definition to reduce the numbers overall based on people dying from Covid, rather than with it. The daily death toll was over 30 twice this week.

The main news about the health ministry has been all about Ashley Bloomfield, the outgoing Director-General, who has become a media celebrity due to Covid. The so-called news stories have been about him having to restrict his leaving party attendance and activities, as the Omicron outbreak worsens again. Even a serious news outlet like The Guardian ran the trivial story about Bloomfield’s party, although they do like puff pieces about Ardern and her hapless ministries. No one seems to have asked Bloomfield, a Pfizer vaccine evangelist, why the Covid death toll is so high. He has pushed the Pfizer drug continuously, including third and fourth doses, despite overwhelming evidence of its complete and utter failure to provide immunity. His shape-shifting academic friends and epidemiologists have another narrative, that the vaccines may not provide immunity but do prevent serious disease. Bloomfield has claimed that the Pfizer drug provides ‘protection’ for adults, and children get lifelong immunity from it.

Now that he is leaving he is trying to defend his drug advocacy in the media, despite the fact that ‘fully vaccinated’ people in their thousands contract the virus every day, and over a hundred die every week in New Zealand. Bloomfield is the master of selective information releases – and omissions – that suit his pro vaccination narrative. When unvaccinated people were the problem their deaths were always publicised on an individual basis; now that many vaccinated people are dying, their cases numbers are never released, even though it is obvious that the vaccine did not ‘protect’ them however many times they got injected. Bloomfield now states that there are no ‘excess deaths’ at the moment, though there may have been some in March. This is a cynical way of saying that the death toll is not statistically significant, i.e. the same number would have died anyway during the winter, whether it was from Covid or the flu. He even seems to suggest that the lockdowns and border control extended the lives of some people. As I said last time, this is just another way of saying that older people dying is not newsworthy.

A similar approach has applied to vaccine safety, as I have highlighted previously, the health ministry accepts reports of deaths linked to the Pfizer vaccine, but does not accept causation. Since most of the deaths seem to be among older New Zealanders it is deemed ‘unlikely’ to be caused by the vaccine, or is just a coincidence, because older people always have other medical conditions. The Medsafe committee have a pre-determined outcome because for them vaccines always have to be seen as safe and effective, even when there is evidence that they’re not. So, despite the fact that Medsafe accept reports of death and serious medical conditions caused by the Pfizer vaccine, their investigations always seem to result in an ‘unlikely’ verdict. However, they also use the excuse that the deaths and serious conditions are not in excess. As stated previously, the Medsafe committee did not provide a report last month, for the period to the end of May; perhaps they had too many staff isolating with Covid, or they just wanted to catch up a bit.

Anyway, they published a report in mid July which stated that there had been 11 more reported deaths from the vaccine, and that the new total was 176. This seems to have been revised down to 171, as they had added an extra five, but since they are not excess or actually caused by Comirnaty who cares. Nine out of the 11 new deaths are in those aged over 60. I was expecting the total reported serious conditions to go up again, including the numbers for myocarditis and pericarditis to get over 931, but as it turned out this hasn’t quite happened. The significance of the 931 figure is that this is what they claim is the background rate of hospitalisations, so anything over that would be an ‘excessive’ number. However, in the previous safety report (#43), Medsafe did an analysis of myo/pericarditis cases, based on a sample of only 443, which they claim are the ‘serious’ ones. This simply showed that most of the myocarditis cases were in younger people, aged less than 40, and most were also male. Their other table indicated that most serious myocarditis cases occurred in the first few days after the injection, despite some indications from the known cases that they were not picked up immediately. The point is that only myo/pericarditis seems to be accepted as a death caused by the vaccine, and only in a young person.

The health bureaucrats may be able to fudge the statistics, and deny that anyone significant dies from taking the vaccine, but they can’t claim that it is effective any more. There have been over a million cases of Covid this year, and their policy of testing has collapsed, so the exact number is not even estimated. The death toll has risen exponentially, and the very people who were told that a third dose would be the best protection against Omicron are the main category who are dying: senior citizens. In the new statistical sleight of hand, the bureaucrats can fudge causation just like they do for vaccine safety. Nevertheless, most of the media no longer report the Covid toll on a daily basis or question the lack of hospital care: either for serious Covid cases, or the patients who are having medical procedures postponed, or the people not being seen at all. This health disaster is Bloomfield’s legacy, along with his obsession with a vaccine programme that has totally failed. Of course, he was never big enough to admit it failed. Presumably he’s moving into lobbying work for big Pharma companies, and so continue to push vaccines that don’t provide any immunity, or ‘protect’ the most vulnerable from ‘serious’ illness.