COVID-19 enquiries - Desperately Seeking Openness & Transparency & Fairness.
Doing a weekend job & want to listen to something? How about my interview with Reality Check Radio - Oh and - consider the Peoples Terms of Reference.
COVID-19 enquiry - Feedback Terms of Reference (ToR) March 24 2024.
COVID-19 enquiry - The Peoples Terms
‘Anti-establishment’ media
Jodie’s interview on Reality Check Radio - Inquiry Sessions.
Sniffing the air in early 2020.
The original transcript of the TASA presentation discussed in (4) above.
1. Terms of Reference - Feedback to the COVID-19 enquiry
There’s a deadline, in ten days to submit your thoughts on what should be included in a COVID-19 enquiry. From all appearances (the contact email shows us) - working out what we say and how information is assessed seems to be connected to Department of Internal Affairs operations (who I have called New Zealand’s digital information and censorship Tsar), who manage the governments ID system and digital infrastructure (remember contact tracing?).
This is part of the ongoing failure that we have - large bureaucratic institutions controlling decision-making and policy.
Please consider going to the government website and listing what you consider should be included in a new ToR.
Of course, that risks opening up a can of worms - when did decision-making start going wrong? How could secondary legislation be released mandating vaccines when data globally was amassing that more than suggested that the gene therapy was neither safe nor effective.
2. Terms of Reference - The Peoples’ Terms (COVID-19 enquiry).
As suggestion, a college of minds have worked long and hard to put together an expansive document - called The Peoples Terms. You can sign that document on the Reality Check Radio website (deadline 8 days from now), and I heard that in the first week or so 12,000 people had.
Because they’re the Peoples Terms - I’ve uploaded them here:
Easy! You can download them and look at them - the Peoples Terms page also has a summary document (small orange text).
Then if you wish - you can sign the call for a proper inquiry.
In addition you can send ‘your COVID-19 experience to the consultation:
If you make a submission during the terms of reference consultation, your information will be collected and provided to the Department of Internal Affairs and to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Hon Brooke van Velden.
This information will be used by the Government to determine any changes to the Inquiry’s terms of reference.
3. Those bloody anti-establishment outlets.
Reality Check Radio (and other anti-establishment outlets see p.61-62) have stepped into a space that has long been missing in New Zealand. I have a feeling more business people, PhDs, farmers, tradies, medical doctors and engineers communicate through any of these outlets in one week than they do in one month through Radio New Zealand - who still can’t talk openly about the ethics of mandating healthy people. Like many - I no longer listen to RNZ.
For too long academics, researchers and the general public have been silenced by senior management. Unwelcome editorials, ‘Op-Eds’ would be declined, or held for too long until the event passed, or the editor would claim that the issue had already been covered.
Even as funding declined for investigative journalism, our publicly owned media could have stepped into a space and open up conversations to broader society. In not doing so, they have effectively promulgated a long-term censorship regime that most of New Zealand could not recognise. Unless they were trying to get traction on a political problem (even such a basic issue as junk food and sugar) - they couldn’t understand the barriers to getting a meaningful interview/article out through the establishment media if their perspective differed from government policy.
4. Reality Check Radio are conducting a series: The Inquiry Sessions
I listened to last week’s rather jaw dropping interview with economist Professor John Gibson. He discusses this paper and the surprising lack of interest in ‘establishment media’.
https://realitycheck.radio/the-inquiry-sessions-jodie-bruning-sociologist-trustee-of-physicians-and-scientists-for-global-responsibility-on-her-covid-related-paper-on-the-use-of-manipulated-science/
The interview discusses a short paper presentation which I presented at The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) conference in Melbourne.
I argued in this short presentation that the
‘New Zealand government failed to make a safe space for contested and uncomfortable knowledge. Narrow forms of science and directed data modelling shaped what was publicly known and considered politically legitimate. These processes effectively sabotaged the socio-political and scientific demosphere, establishing a troubling precedent for future public health emergencies.’
As we discussed in the Silenced documentary, the terms of reference for the COVID-19 enquiry were deficient. The quality of decision-making depends on the quality of information - but science stuff was outside the terms of reference!
It’s not surprising, of course the Ardern Labour government would not particularly desire a crunchy review that might not suggest that their decision-making was arbitrary and that they failed to follow democratic norms based on fairness and impartiality. Of course, the leaders of the dominant political parties signed the agreement that they wouldn’t talk to protestors. So, they weren’t likely to support an investigation. People have to push for this.
5. Sniffing the air - it’s a bit stinky!
What made me sniff the air in early 2020, and come to the conclusion that games were afoot?
The knowledge that the elderly and the multimorbid were most at risk, that these people would be on multiple medications, with vulnerable immune systems. They needed vastly more protection than the average healthy people - in different ways - to allow for their different vulnerabilities.
The radio silence on Vitamin D, and later, the corrupt insistence that only randomised control trials would shine a light on efficacy. While New Zealand was ignoring Vitamin D, scientists globally were explaining why Vitamin D could be a useful tool in the toolkit (brief discussion at PSGR here).
I knew from post-graduate studies that pandemic classification need not carry with it a high hospitalisation and mortality rate, but that pandemic status, to the public, implied a high mortality rate. So, my eyebrows kept raising when infection and infectivity was raised to fear-porn levels.
I knew from my own experience in failing to get traction on environmental toxicants in legacy media, that legacy media might not necessarily pitch anything that contradicted the government’s position.
I was writing up my master’s thesis. I knew that health targets were exclusively medical; and that scientists researching health were unlikely to get funding for research that only looked at the drivers of disease. Our health system was trapped by a medicalised culture and bureaucrats would approach the pandemic this way.
Thanks so much. I listened to your RCR Covid Inquiry interview on manipulating science and also viewed the documentary 'Silenced' again. Both are fantastic—Packed with eye-opening information. Excellent for helping to wake people up.
In case it is helpful to some, FlagnFix have done a series on the Covid Inquiry Submissions etc. https://flagnfix.substack.com/p/covid-inquiry-a-quick-simple-guide.