Networked Risk. The challenge for New Zealand's C19 Royal Commissioners.
Any response to any future pandemic event must be viewed in context of global power - but also in context of individual risk.
Royal Commission consideration: People’s experiences during the Covid event cannot exclusively inform the Commissioners if the next pandemic is to act in the public interest. Domestic and global sector shifts hold extraordinary potential to undermine human rights and freedoms and pivot states to authoritarianism.
How might we understand this? We can think of traditional health-based risks in any disease event - differs based on age, stage, health status etc. But overlay this with networked global shifts which have potential to corrupt and distort domestic decision-making, and thereby undermine free will, human rights, and domestic sovereignty. I.e. increase risk to you, me and our fellow Kiwis.
UPDATE (23/04/25): My submission to the Royal Commission Phase 2 consultation:
If New Zealanders don’t have a way to talk about the nature of power, the problem of convergence, of how technology can be secretly scaled up, and of the networked nature of power - we will, in the ‘next pandemic’, risk an onslaught of policies, laws and interventions that undermine free will and sovereignty, and leave us sicker and poorer.
This Venn diagram might help to understand the relationships and overlays.
PROBLEM OF GLOBAL SHIFTS: domestic considerations can be undermined.
Global power networks influence governments and can directly influence how politicians and government agencies identify risk, approach an emergency event and identify policy solutions for that event.
Pandemic Industrial Complex: Biolabs expansion & gain-of-function research directly increases the prospect of a pandemic. E.g. this weekend’s WhiteHouse release and this discussion with Dr David Bell.
Policy & Scientific Information controlled & shaped by global actors. Emergency powers are secured based on how risk is represented by these actors. Who asserts whether a medical intervention is ‘safe and effective’. E.g. Pfizers BNT162b2 gene therapy did not prevent transmission, it was a new technology, yet epidemiologists & doctors with divergent perspectives during the Covid Event were dismissed by media, censured by professional organisations. Note bene: we still have doctors in front of NZMC tribunals in New Zealand in April 2024.
Global Actors market consolidation: across fintech, biotech, resources, media & communications & defence increases power in a smaller group of actors. E.g. Equity market concentration.
United Nations: Actors outside democratic oversight (indemnity of officials working for UN organisations). United Nations institutions are not resourced to identify risk by age and developmental stage, by multimorbid status, by season and climate, and how these factors increase or decrease risk from a vector-borne outbreak. United Nations institutions have no obligation to assess the extent of corporate corruption and influence in policy development.
Global Actors as government allies: Co-operate with nation states to influence, integrate, expedite & deploy domestic policy. This policy can be a function of the scientific and risk-based information that these global actors promote. E.g. World Economic Forum’s mission, The Bill Gates Problem, CBDC policy development in New Zealand, Biden White House April 2025 release.
Nation states fast-track laws and abuse powers via delegated legislation. E.g. The Covid mandates in New Zealand involved an automated, stepped process without any update of risk to identify whether the coronavirus risk and the Pfizer BNT162b2 injection risk were risk-proportionate by age and stage. Discussed in the uploaded papers on my previous Substack post.
Digital Convergence: Expansion of control & access to private data by government & industry will accelerate/amplify the potential for governments to identify and stamp down dissent in any future emergency event, regardless of the risk. E.g. this weekend’s 4-part series on NZ-based Byline Babylon.
How the heck do Kiwis navigate all of THAT!????
THE CRITICAL TURN TO PUBLIC HEALTH ETHICS
Our politicians and government agencies must recognise the importance of subsidiarity where social, political and health-based issues are dealt with at the most immediate or local level.
This involves granular high-quality information so that we can protect a baby, a child, a pregnant woman and the aged and infirm. Currently there is no scientific or research agency in New Zealand with the scope and long-term funding to research human health risk over time. If we enter the next ‘pandemic’ with science funding directly controlled by political agencies, it is probable that we will again face lock-step surveillance, mandates and injections.
It is non-controversial that early-life harms can result in a poorer health-based outcomes, and a poorer quality of life for decades into the future (years lost due to disease). Government responses to COVID-19 ignored this. However, if we lack the institutions with the scientific freedom to speak up, political aims will over-ride these important considerations.
However … we have to be wise to creeping authoritarianism. Digital convergence is happening at scale in New Zealand. If corporate science is used to enforce policy, and politicians refuse to update themselves of information that contradicts their established policies, Cabinet can and will use secondary legislation in an emergency to prevent dissent and disinformation, then use emergency powers to access private data which has been consolidated, there is potential for abuse of power at scale.
We can only protect public health in a future pandemic - if we understand the nature of power and take steps to inform and educate, and ensure that the individual is protected including through the prevention of harm.
Of the essence: a language of ethics and justice to protect the individual whomsoever that individual may be. The scientific freedom to research information for the public good.
Normalising issues that were dismissed and ignored in the pandemic by state media, by the government, by the Ministry of Health - is an important step to helping understand why principles and ethics are important overarching guidance.
We are all wonderfully different.
EMERGENCY / PANDEMIC - Domestic, public-good (ethics-based) considerations that were ignored & dismissed in COVID-19:
We must inform, educate and improve access to research to identify the drivers of communicable and non-communicable disease which are more frequently environmentally driven, than genetically driven.
Individual risk - How is individual health and wellbeing best protected? Are scientists and doctors able to talk about risk to an individual from either the vector or any government intervention?
Developmental stage - Different whether infant, child, adolescent, adult, aged, infirm.
Multimorbidity - Risk of hospitalisation & death amplified when an individual has 4+ disease conditions. Policies to lower risk (e.g. Diabetes reversal).
Time of year (nutritional status including vitamin D)
Socioeconomic - impacts nutrition, multimorbidity risk, stress exposures over time.
Family & friends - Isolation cuts life expectancy in half, yet isolation was enforced during Covid-19 without consideration for personal preference.
Disease vector - How does it shift and change in time. Is it viral, bacterial, chimeric? Do we have the scientific freedom to look at its biology and establish whether it has been produced using gain-of-function research?
Short-term risk - environmental exposures can result in acute short-term risks, such as disability, hospitalisation and death.
Long-term harms - Principles and ethics provisions help governments recognise the need to act with caution so that an intervention does not create more harm over time. The solution being worse than the cure.
Civil society and good people in government and academia can help draw attention to the following:
Human Rights - Lock-downs and mandates were enforced during the Covid event and increasing digitisation of government may set the stage for abuse of power at scale in future.
Informed Consent - the NZMC sanctioned doctors who sought to speak up about informed consent. The NZMC ignored its own informed consent policies and did not review the scientific information on hospitalisation and risk by age and stage (including pregnancy risk).
Democratic accountability - when laws are made, the public must be able to see that the laws were fairly and reasonably made. The Health Act infectious disease principles (Part 3A) were ignored during Covid, officials never discussed them.
Sovereignty - Undermined when secret understandings and agreements are made.
Fairness and justice - democracy only works if fairness and justice is upheld by officials who follow transparent, accountable processes, and when processes of complaint and investigation actually work.
The Great Barrington Declaration: The history and propaganda attack on the Great Barrington Declaration (October 2020) which had been drafted and signed by three impeccably credentialled epidemiologists: professor of medicine at Harvard University Dr Martin Kulldorf, professor at Oxford University Dr Sunetra Gupta, and professor at Stanford University Medical School Dr Jay Bhattacharya.
Independent science - Freedom is required for independent public-good research. Who paid for the evidence, who controlled the scope of the evidence, when was the evidence updated, and what does the evidence exclude?
Emergency provisions are dangerous for democracy. Principles (including the freedom of information dissemination) and ethics are in place to prevent the abuse of power. There will always be a tendency for political and financial interests to seek to exploit a situation for their own benefit. When government practices which conventionally enshrine principles, obligations for transparency and accountability, and ethics that are in place to promote transparency and accountability are undermined by emergency provisions, this can set the stage for the abuse of power.
THE DANGER OF NETWORKED RISK: SECRECY AT SPEED & AT SCALE
This Venn diagram gives some understanding of how networked risk can undermine human and public health considerations.
Please reuse/share this image - creative commons. No need for attribution.
[1] The Networked Risks may increase the risk of people in the next global event.
[2] This is why it is important to recognise the interconnection between global shifts that enhance human & democratic risks in the centre of the diagram and human & democratic risks around the outside.
[3] These different risks cross over and interact. Secrecy, the speed of communications and the scale at which technology can be deployed enhance the risk of everyone, from a baby to someone at the end of life.
NZ C19 ROYAL COMMISSIONERS PLEASE CAN YOU:
Take important steps to:
reaffirm the importance of public law principles, public health ethics, and ensure that elected members, government officials and the public and media in general are educated in public law, and public health ethics.
Recognise that New Zealand health policy is over-weighted to medical research for drugs, and medical treatments that treat symptoms, not prevent disease. Recommend that it is time that an environmental public health research institution is developed with long-term block funding, to understand and assess the drivers of disease, the drivers of risk of communicable and non-communicable disease, and to focus on nutrition and non-medical public health protection.
This would serve two functions: to improve policy so that nutrition and non-medical health-based preventative education can be widely integrated into policy so that New Zealanders would be healthier and more productive and enter any pandemic or emergency event at less risk of hospitalisation and death.
To improve the knowledge and skills of scientists and researchers to ensure that in the next pandemic or emergency event, there would be an independent quorum of skilled researchers at arm’s length from government agencies. This would prevent the likelihood that those agencies would be misinformed by institutions with financial and political conflicts of interest, and therefore prevent the abuse of power.
Idle weekend watching: Democracy’s Unspoken Foundation: Where is the real fourth estate?
Brilliant Jodie!
Thank you Jodie for such a well laid out document.