This is the Ministry of Health in central Wellington, just up from the Parliament, and commanding a position above the urban motorway. It used to be the scene of press conferences on Covid and presumably the centre for the response. But, it now seems that the academic experts were always leading the more aggressive aspects of the Covid restrictions. As the so-called experts like Michael Baker announce that there is now a fourth wave of Covid, based on health statistics, not only are the statistics in question. But so are the underlying basis for the recommendations to vaccinate again.

A lot has changed over the last little while. Ardern and her histrionics have gone, and so have many of her failed policies. But still we have Baker and co appearing in the media, and are given an unmediated opportunity to pursue more restrictions that the new Hipkins ministry doesn’t really have the stomach for. Certainly not anything that seems coercive. Ardern may have gone but the legal cases resulting from her vaccine mandates continue. This doesn’t matter to the likes of Baker, he always thought that that the recalcitrant anti-vaxxers should have been injected by force. But this would have been a breach of the Bill of Rights, and the right not to accept specific medical treatments, even if it was recommended.

Of course, it has always been assumed that the Ministry of Health had explicitly approved of the use of the Pfizer drug, Comirnaty, and that it should be classed as a vaccine. But new research into the legal cases by blogger Thomas Cranmer (a pseudonym), indicates that the Ministry officials were less than forthcoming about their actual views on vaccine safety and efficacy from the beginning. Cranmer argues that the expert evidence of Dr Bloomfield, and colleague Ian Town, was essentially misrepresented. In fact, the Ministry of Health and Medsafe only ever gave a provisional approval to the use of the Covid vaccine, and this was due to the lack of statistical data coming from Pfizer, about safety and efficacy.

It is worth quoting the key paragraph from Cranmer’s recent blog post which claims that Bloomfield and Town never gave a clear risk assessment of the vaccine. This had four aspects: a) that the duration of the vaccine protection had not been established beyond 2 months; b) that there was limited evidence of protection against severe disease; c) that there was no long term safety follow-up information; and d) vaccine prevention of asymptomatic infection and disease transmission has not been established.

Given the extraordinary nature of these arguments, and the legal impact of fudging them, let’s look at each in turn. The fourth one is not in doubt, it is perfectly obvious that the vaccine has not stopped the transmission of the virus, and people know it. That is why around 1.5 million doses have recently expired, in spite of the expert advice, because ordinary people know it is not working. The third point is extremely important, because officials were aware from the start that Comirnaty could cause serious heart disease like myocarditis, especially in younger people. This explains why the Medsafe safety reports were made weekly to begin with, although the reporting has now ceased completely. Meantime, the second point is also incredibly significant, since it makes clear that the efficacy of the vaccine was always in doubt, and required evidence that it prevented severe disease. Of course the academic experts have always claimed that the vaccine provided the best possible prevention of severe disease, and they produce the studies to prove it, when the actual evidence has been that thousands of boosted people have died in the last year. But the real insight is in the first point, that the officials knew that the vaccine was only worth 2 months ‘protection’, at best, and it obviously doesn’t provide life-long immunity.

Of course, the Ministry of Health officials have authorised advertising which claims that the vaccine does provide life-long immunity, at least for young children. And there has now been a long list of distortions and manipulation of statistics, which now mean that the Ministry’s data cannot be relied upon. When the death toll rose rapidly last year, from around 50 in January to over 2000 in July, the Ministry changed the definition of a death with Covid, to thereafter be counted officially for deaths from Covid. This implied that the Ministry officials could determine cause of death without a formal medical examination. Strangely, for the reports of death caused by the vaccine, assumed to be mostly heart disease, officials like Bloomfield have never accepted causation. The reported deaths remain at 184, as of November 2022, and only 4 of the ‘likely’ cases have been referred to the Coroner. A key part of Cranmer’s blog post is the evidence from Dr Town which highlights the risk of myocarditis from having repeated injections. This is what actually led to the decision to have 6 month intervals for boosting.

It is still hard to reconcile the nature of this advice with the resulting policies, including the coercive mandates and the general assumption of vaccine safety and efficacy that have never been conclusively established in scientific evidence. Yet we were continually told that the policymakers were following the science at all times. It is now clear that they were following particular scientists with an agenda, and doubts over the veracity of the scientific evidence only had a small role in moderating policy; while so-called experts, who have never admitted any safety issues, continue to advocate for mandatory policy.

The situation in New Zealand was even more extreme that in Australia, it would seem. It turns out that the officials there had been aware of the likelihood of vaccine injuries, and they appear to have a process for individuals to make claims (for those that have survived serious heart disease). This was discussed briefly on Sky News Australia, on the Sharri programme, when Sharri Markson was talking to a former official Dr Nick Coatsworth. Although it seems that Coatsworth is far more moderate than his trans-Tasman extremist experts, he still made the extraordinary claim that, despite a few thousand vaccine ‘injuries’, the vaccine is still ‘safe’. Really? How many have to die from vaccine injury, or the virus, before evidence would be there for vaccine failure. Using a utilitarian argument for continued vaccine boosters, which don’t stop the transmission, has problematic ethical implications. So it doesn’t matter if a few thousand die along the way, as long as the vaccine is seen as being better than nothing.