Looking back – what would you like the Inquiry to know about your experiences of the pandemic?
Response to the COVID-19 Inquiry 'Share your Story'.
Apologies … I’m talking about COVID-19 again. My response to the Commission of Inquiry.
Question 1 ‘Your Experiences of the Pandemic’.
https://haveyoursay.covid19lessons.royalcommission.nz/
Please note my experience during COVID-19 will largely be outside the current scope of the inquiry established Royal Commission of Inquiry (COVID-19 Lessons) Order 2022.
In 2020 I was researching and drafting my thesis for an MA Sociology (research). With over a decade in research, my scope of interest concerned the patterns and processes by which scientific and technological information is selected and used by governments and their regulators to claim that a technology (which includes a chemical formulation, a biotechnology, etc.) is safe.
This information is normatively provided by the industry with the financial conflict of interest, who has complete control over what information is selected and supplied to prove safety of a product.
What occurs repeatedly is that these patterns and processes fail to account for new knowledge on risk - particularly - risk to pregnant mothers, infants, children and young people. The technologies to monitor and evaluate how risk might occur, never keeps up with the investment and sophistication of the technologies applied in the laboratory to develop and then release a new technology.
Governments for decades, have systematically failed to make a safe space for scientific and technological research that might contradict the claims of the owners of these technologies, and the regulators who exclusively depend on industry produced data, to delineate and legitimate end-points for risk.
My thesis focussed on the difficulty scientists and researchers have in securing financial and other resources to conduct scientific research to monitor, review and analyse whether a technology, such as an endocrine disrupting compound, is safe, particularly over the longer term.
My thesis focussed on the multifactorial nature of environmental factors in driving disease and chronic illness. It looked at the absence of prioritisation globally for this research.
My master’s research confirmed that there is little or no funding pathways for health-based scientific research in New Zealand to assess whether a given technology is harmful over the longer term.
Therefore, I was well placed to consider policy, the production of scientific and technical information, and the importance of independent information that could be produced without financial or political conflicts of interest, and in the national interest.
During 2020-2021 as a scholar at the University of Auckland, I took considerable interest in reviewing the risk profile of COVID-19 as it presented over the course of 2020. I noted from an early stage that New Zealand media did not reflect the nuances of risk that suggested that COVID-19 from the earliest stages only presented a serious risk to the very frail and elderly, and to those with extreme multimorbidity.
However, the media and government communications during 2020, in communicating the spread of infection throughout New Zealand, failed to communicate that most people were not at risk of harm from COVID-19.
My experience of was of watching a government and a media that persistently absented itself from communicating knowledge that contradicted the covid-fear narrative. Therefore, the public would never be privy to government data on infection (or case) fatality rate or even results from seropositivity tests which never seemed to happen.
My experience was of observing a government failure to communicate to healthy young people that they were not at risk and the absence of any ethics committees who might consider the cost and benefit of exposing the healthy population to a new biologic gene therapy. As a researcher in the health sciences, I was astonished that the government and the media had no language for the benefit of increasing immunity from natural infection.
I observed Cabinet papers which could only discuss a ‘safe and effective’ vaccine. I saw that the 58 Gazette conditions placed all power with the industry manufacturer for supplying evidence on safety and efficacy. I noted that Covid Science Updates selectively discussed scientific evidence, but that the information was not methodologically sourced.
I asked questions of the Ministry of Health to find out where the regular reviews were of the scientific literature were filed which analysed the changing risk profile of SARS-Cov-2, as it was always understood that coronaviruses mutate rapidly. This fact had made them unsuitable for vaccine development in the past.
I understood in 2020 that the presentation of COVID-19 could be complex, depending on the health status of the individual, and because of this complex presentation, a wide variety of off-patent drugs and nutrients could be provided to the patient. I understood from my master’s research that comorbidity is common in New Zealand, and that the costs of multiple conditions are multi-scalar.
I was dismayed and ashamed to see that the government never once related nutrition, diet and health status to risk from COVID-19 infection. I knew that elderly, at risk and Maori were low in vitamin D, and that vitamin D status was associated with the prevention of lower respiratory tract infections. I understood that a common risk from respiratory virus was a LRTI infection and pneumonia. However immune preventative nutrients including vitamin C, D and zinc were not discussed. Similarly, common antivirals such as ivermectin were ignored. Ivermectin supports zinc uptake.
The government ignored such factors, which could have led to at-home treatment and which could have resulted in policies to address New Zealand’s chronic disease crisis. Somehow such factors were apparently anti-science, or insufficiently scientific.
Later in 2022 I presented to the Sociological Association of Australia on the process by which scientific information was controlled. The TAGs, the technical advisory groups, had focussed terms of reference. Therefore, for example, the therapeutic TAG would not review the literature on ivermectin or vitamin D, rather this TAG would be reviewing the pharmaceutical company data. Evidence that ivermectin and vitamin D might be a tool was dispensed by claiming randomised control trials were required. These were treatments with a long history of safe use. Therefore, individual case studies or cohort studies were an acceptable form of evidence.
There were no methodological reviews of the scientific literature to assess the changing profile as I said, of the potential for the respiratory virus SARS-Cov-2, to send people to hospital. There were no methodological reviews of the scientific literature to assess the safety or efficacy of the BNT162b2 gene therapy.
This technology was not honestly communicated to the public as a gene therapy that carried a vastly different mode of operation from a conventional vaccine. It was treated as a vaccine, and so there were no carcinogenicity or mutagenicity treatments testing – which should be standard for a biologic drug. Biologic drugs are high risk medication. This was known to Pharmac and MAAC, but never communicated to the public. Biologic drugs have problems relating to consistency and quality control, yet there was never any testing by batch. It is now evident that particular batches carried with them a high death rate.
The TAGs, the Ministry of Health, the other scientific cohorts were never tasked to review age stratified risk and consider the ethics by age and health status.
I discussed this at length in many ways, including as Substack posts, for example: Reframing Risk. RedFlagging it. Regulatory loopholes & Provisional Consent.
I also released three ‘Discussion Papers’; presented at The Australian Sociological Association Conference; and published on media that was not heavily censored. Brownstone Institute was established during the pandemic when academics and public health experts found that legacy, or establishment media, would not carry their concerns regarding the COVID-19 public health response.
I am aware of the barriers of such discussion in our conventional media. I am aware that the capture of information effectively produces a hamstringing of the courts and ensures that judicial decisions are prejudiced in such a way due to the absence of a counterveiling viewpoint that challenge the position of Ministers and senior officials.
Such capture does not serve a democracy well.
Papers for reference by the Commissioners:
April 5 2022 DISCUSSION PAPER: COVID-19 Emergency Powers: The New Zealand State, Medical Capture & the Role of Strategic Ignorance. February 25, 2022. Updated April 5, 2022. Published online: https://www.talkingrisk.nz/covid-19/
August 5th, 2022. DISCUSSION PAPER: Some Notes on the Process of the Passing of Laws in the Time of COVID-19 (2019-2022).
October 16, 2022. DISCUSSION PAPER: COVID-19 IN NEW ZEALAND: Ethics and the Setting Aside of Normative Principles. October 16, 2022. Link to article and PDF: https://jrbruning.substack.com/p/covid-19-in-new-zealand-ethics-and
The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Conference. November 28-December 2 2022. November 2022 Paper presentation Paper 409: Science for Whom? Manufacturing social consent for government policies through the control of science production. Transcript and powerpoint slides available from: https://jrbruning.substack.com/p/tasa-2022-conference-paper-presentation?
Speaker: NZDSOS Truth, Justice and Healing Conference. Eden Park, Auckland, Saturday the 16th of September, 2023. Transcript: Democracy’s Unspoken Foundation: Where is the real fourth estate? https://www.talkingrisk.nz/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/2023-NZDSOS-Conference-Bruning-transcript-September-16-citations.pdf
No more mask mandates, please. The Spectator, July 15, 2022. https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/07/no-more-mask-mandates-please/
New Zealand Used Selective Science and Force to Drive High Vaccination Rates. Brownstone Institute, April 26, 2022. https://brownstone.org/articles/new-zealand-used-selective-science-and-force-to-drive-high-vaccination-rates/
Legacy Media Pushes the Mask Mandate: The New Zealand Case. Brownstone Institute, June 7, 2022. https://brownstone.org/articles/legacy-media-pushes-the-mask-mandate-the-new-zealand-case/
Locking in Mandated Medicine by Short-Circuiting Democracy. Brownstone Institute, November 28, 2023. https://brownstone.org/articles/locking-in-mandated-medicine-by-short-circuiting-democracy/
The ‘Re-Education’ of New Zealand Medical Doctors. Brownstone Institute, January 23, 2024. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-re-education-of-new-zealand-medical-doctors/
Question 2.
Moving forward – what lessons should we learn from your experiences so we can be as prepared as possible for a future pandemic?
That health is individual and that a medical drug as an antidote is unsuitable.
That democracy is contingent upon principles of fairness, transparency and accountability.
That the virus likely was created in a laboratory that was undergoing gain-of-function research, and that the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) requires upgrading.
That people with complex health conditions require complex approaches.
That the principle of Informed Consent cannot be fully given if a drug has not finished trial process, and that the trial process was not sufficiently weighted to review the safety and efficacy for the populations most at risk, the frail and elderly and the extremely multimorbid (with over 3 health conditions each).
That Members of Parliament are insufficiently resourced and independent in judging new laws and legislation and the submission from the public; and from the large bureaucratic ministries and agencies who have a vested interest in the legislation that gives these agencies their powers.
That our science system should not be controlled through New Zealand’s economic agency, the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation.
Healthy people (and children) should not be wrapped into a pandemic law strait-jacket. Conventionally it is understood that healthy people in contracting a virus and developing natural immunity, prevent and slow the ongoing circulation of the virus.
That a gene therapy which instructs the body to replicate an inflammatory and harmful spike protein of a virus that mutates rapidly; which also includes toxic encapsulating products to ensure the technology can enter human cells, is patently unsuitable as a medical treatment, indeed it resembles more closely a biological weapon.
That Māori as Treaty partner were especially failed. The New Zealand government appears to believe that equity exclusively concerns making sure that these populations are injected with a drug that hasn’t finished the trial process. The New Zealand government perhaps understands that health status is dependent on socio-economic status and access to healthy unprocessed foods.
That the World Health Organization is unfortunately, untrustworthy and fundamentally corrupted by their financial dependence on the pharmaceutical industry, and on their relationship with non-government actors with financial conflicts of interest, who use their own financial power to finance and control non-government organisations in order to influence the policies of democratic nation states.
NB: Small sections of this testimonial were removed to fit the 10,000 character limit.
“…as it was always understood that coronaviruses mutate rapidly. This fact had made them unsuitable for vaccine development in the past.”
In retrospect, I should have been much more sceptical of the entire SARS-COV-2 narrative from early on—especially with regard to risk profiles—but the tsunami of fear-inducing, alarmist information from overseas made it difficult to avoid being manipulated. But the quote from you above really does resonate because even based on my very limited knowledge and research at the time, I was highly suspicious of claims that an effective vaccine could be rapidly developed and rolled out. One only needs to look at the history of human coronaviruses and past efforts to develop vaccines to realise that these claims were highly suspect. Then there is the issue of messenger-RNA technology and why this was so heavily pushed as the only viable strategy to protect the population. After that we were transported “through the looking glass” into a world of mass psychological warfare.
I love how substack is censoring my profile photo, my name and my voice.
The censored photo makes people wonder “WTF is that?” which, apparently, is not allowed. So they just don’t let you see it.
Freedom.