Emergency Powers: [6] Elimination at all costs.

From my April 2022 paper COVID-19 Emergency Powers: The New Zealand State, Medical Capture & the Role of Strategic Ignorance

Chapter 6.

The Department of Premier and Cabinet’s COVID-19 group’s mission, was to

‘to mobilise the collective capacity of government to eliminate COVID-19 while sustaining our economy and social cohesion.’

Elimination ‘focuses on zero-tolerance towards new cases, rather than a goal of no new cases’. Elimination of case infection rate was locked into policy by a very small group of actors early in 2020. The state agenda, ushering regulation towards tighter controls and mandatory vaccination was reinforced by academic papers supporting an elimination strategy, a system of aggressive suppression. In New Zealand, this appears to have been initially suggested in March 2020 by Michael Baker and colleagues. Elimination was theorised to work because of New Zealand’s Island nation status. This was an interesting theory, as coronaviruses circulate and recirculate. Elimination advocates never appeared to be able to extrapolate the inevitabilities of border management 2, or 6 years out; nor the terrible legacy of island populations, two or three centuries ago, when foreign infectious disease, which had heretofore never been endemic, caused significant harm.

A paper from June 2021, published 2022 demonstrated the obsession with elimination, it stated that the ‘probability of elimination steadily increases with vaccine coverage.’ The authors of this paper were experts in mathematics and statistical modelling. But they have been profoundly incorrect at estimating the trajectory of this coronavirus, and they have systematically ignored public health maxims of infectious disease and they have swept not at risk individuals into modelling scenarios, ignoring risk from the vaccine, waning and herd immunity. In the discussion section of this paper they stated

‘children will be crucial to minimising the potential for transmission and reaching the population immunity threshold.’

This is the type of science used to require New Zealand’s population to reach a vaccination status in the 90 th percentile, regardless of individual risk.

The most influential policy document between June and August 2021 was the Skegg Review. (Ed. It is evident from the September 2021 Bills Digest that no review of scientific literature to consider vaccine efficacy & safety 9 months after the initial US release was undertaken). Even at this early stage of the vaccination roll out, before mandates, David Skegg acknowledged the rapid production of Sars-Cov-2 variants and the potential for these variants to be less responsive to the vaccines and for the potential for the variants to evolve to be less damaging. This paper did not consider age stratified risk.

However even the uncertainties in this paper did not deviate the state from the looming mandates that would result in mass job losses due to the public’s refusal to accept a novel mRNA genetic vaccine.

The potential for vulnerable populations to be protected, and for appropriate strategies and technologies to be implemented to ensure these communities were supported and protected, was never publicly encouraged.

More papers shepherding the elimination strategy were released by New Zealand authors. Baker and colleagues’ opinion piece was published; an editorial by David Skegg; a Te Pūnaha Matatini article by Alex James and colleagues. Professor Rod Jackson authored an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald stating that for everyone 1 our of 100 people infected will die of Covid-19, stating that ‘Learning to live with Covid 19 coronavirus is not a viable option.’ Offshore, The Lancet comment pieces by Oliu-Barton and colleagues and Heywood and MacIntyre were published.

None of these papers discussed age stratified risk, nor natural (or herd) immunity. These papers did not draw attention to the principles of infectious disease management, enshrined in the 1956 Health Act, nor contemplated a disproportionate risk to children and young people from lockdown, isolation and vaccination. 180

The well-established positive public health strategies for infectious disease prevention, that Skegg himself, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, criticised as consistent failures of leadership that should have addressed the determinants of health, were conspicuous by their absence. Sub-standard housing, high levels of obesity, poor quality drinking-water and unsafe workplaces, are all complex factors that contribute to New Zealanders’ our health ranking, compared to other OECD countries.

The Skegg Review assumed that vaccines were safe and effective (p.3), however did not conduct a literature review, nor explore the rate of hospitalisation and death by infection rate. The Skegg Review ‘locked in’ a predilection for mandates of frontline workers and erroneously claimed that

‘People who report having recovered from COVID-19 should still be required to be vaccinated, because vaccination provides stronger immune protection than natural infection’.

This was incorrect at time of writing, as there was no scientific evidence supporting this claim, and Skegg must have known this. Natural immunity was always going to produce a broader overarching biologically structural response, because of the design of the technology. The mRNA genetic vaccine did not function similarly to historically-recognised vaccines, the mRNA genetic vaccine relied on immunity derived from a single spike protein which would never have the same broad response as natural infection. There was always going to be a risk that the genetic vaccine would not produce long-lasting immunity, nor be able to meaningfully prevent transmission of infection.

In New Zealand, Dr Simon Thornley and the Plan B doctors were perhaps the most early vocal critics and the most roundly attacked. In a September 2021 Simon Thornley, Arthur Morris and Gerhard Sundborn expressed that they did not consider elimination a sound policy arguing that elimination would always be unlikely and impaired by immunosenescence in the elderly. Thornley emphasised the different risk ratio between different age groups In a late 2021 article where Professor Rod Jackson misleadingly stated there was no ‘trial evidence’ that ivermectin works (there is plenty of evidence, and clinical trials are not conventionally appropriate for multidrug treatments) Radio New Zealand referred to Thornley as a ‘discredited epidemiologist’. The pharmaceutical industry friendly New Zealand Doctor magazine called Plan B ‘dangerous misinformation.’

As early as September 2021, natural immunity was confirmed to be more effective against further infection than vaccine acquired immunity, and this evidence continued to accumulate (and here and here) until Omicron, demonstrate Skegg’s claim was incorrect.

The Skegg Review’s absence of evidence paper, cited one paper which was also pro-elimination, The Lancet comment piece by Oliu-Barton et al.. One of these authors had professional conflicts of interest, as a member of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. It’s startling that no analysis of the scientific literature occurred to provide evidence of the claim. The June Skegg paper was embargoed until August 2021, due to the fact, perhaps, that it was likely to be controversial.

The June 2021 Skegg Review was included in the Bills Digest of the COVID-19 Public Health Response Amendment Bill (No 2) which prompted the November regulatory cascade (Ed. it is not there now).

The historic aim of public health is the promotion of health and the prevention of disease. This is different from medicine which focuses on the treatment and cure of individual patients. Health is more than simply the absence of a disease, it is holistic and open-ended – different groups are differently vulnerable to different factors, and this is why public health stretches across legal, political, cultural, practical and moral considerations. To achieve this, public health historically applied ethical principles, as values, to navigate the nuanced, interlocking and uncertain terrain of social, economic, medical and biological life. Cultural competence also includes the co-creation of knowledge, that allows healthcare professionals insights into individuals’ lived experiences.

To all appearances, New Zealand’s approach to Covid-19 elimination campaign has distorted and eroded historically recognised public health maxims – which include moral considerations and recognise that human health, rights and individual autonomy are interlinked.

But there have been no authoritative ethics-based voices with the expertise and clout to challenge the medical narrative. How has New Zealand arrived here – when only a few – to all ends – recalcitrant academics and doctors appear to deviate from the public ‘rinse and repeat, vaccinate, mask & vaccine pass’ rhetoric?

Continue Reading: [7] Vaccine as (toxic) vector for authoritarian policies here

References in full are on the original PDF at TalkingRisk.NZ