NZDSOS Conference Sept 16, Auckland:

Shedding light on why it's really, really important to understand how government policy might not reflect the independent peer reviewed scientific literature, and what this means for public health.

I’m honoured to join a stellar crew and present at the NZDSOS Truth, Justice and Healing Conference, at Eden Park in Auckland on Saturday the 16^th of September. Saturday (NZD150.00) is a jam-packed day with 6 speakers, a Q&A session with the NZDSOS team, with the event ending with a screening of the film Silenced.

Early bird tickets are available for only 2 more days - until August 31, 2023. Note, while it is a two-day seminar, Sunday is for medical experts only.

Saturday will be an incredible day. I’ll be presenting alongside some exceptional people. Experts in their fields, who had the courage to take a step back and ask questions publicly about how powerful institutions represented risk and the governments’ response to the pandemic. All of these individuals risked their careers, their personal and professional reputations to draw attention to inconsistencies and moral and ethical failures of governments, regulatory bodies, public media and of the World Health Organization. These people have worked tirelessly to draw attention to conflicts of interest and knowledge gaps, and the methods by which governments suppressed information that contradicted their stated position that the mRNA gene therapy was safe and effective.

They talked about harm and risk. They contradicted government policy.

For many doctors who risked public ire, the no-go zone was the corruption of processes of informed consent, a medical principle that ensures patients can individually assess the risk and benefit of medical treatment for themselves. It is in place to prevent the abuse of power in the doctor-patient relationship.

Yet all of a sudden, this principle was over-ridden by the government and by partner organisations because it contradicted government policy. A particularly outstanding example of how professional bodies muzzled doctors’ freedom was the Australian Medical Indemnity Protection Society (without indemnity doctors cannot practice) - who in their 12 Commandments (!) instructed:

Use social media with caution. Be very careful when using social media (even on your personal pages), when authoring papers or when appearing in interviews. Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. This is particularly relevant in current times. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.

The implications of the final sentence? Even if the scientific literature (the evidence-based material) contradicts government messaging you must keep to the government line. Chilling. In New Zealand, the messaging was more veiled. Doctors could use evidence-based messaging as long as it came from the government.

This type of content was expected in totalitarian regimes, but not down under.

Yes. The conference theme of Truth, Justice and Healing is appropriate.

Let’s look at Cambridge Dictionary definitions of these words:

• Truth: The quality of being true.

• True: (especially of facts or statements) right and not wrong; correct

• Justice: fairness in the way people are dealt with.

• Healing: the process of becoming well again, especially after a cut or other injury, or of making someone well again.

To arrive at truth, deliver justice, and indeed, to heal, we have to know. We have to have information that supports, contradicts and challenges. This information then merges together in understanding so that we may judge.

Knowing requires curiosity and autonomy. The facts of a matter are rarely black and white. Facts are often grey, warped, nuanced and interwoven, especially when it concerns the overlapping nature of social, cultural and biological life. When we learn one fact, a question or uncertainty may arise that itself requires resolving.  

Rittel & Webber (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning

Healing from chronic illness, after stress and trauma, and following iatrogenic injury for many, can mimic a wicked problem at the individual level.

Rittel & Webber (1973) elegantly shed light on the problem of open-ended human systems. As towns scaled up, the issue was no longer technical, the systems that were being managed were not close ended, they were uncertain and dynamic.

They drew attention to the role of judgement.

It is then a matter of judgment whether one should try to enlarge the available set or not. And it is, of course, a matter of judgment which of these solutions should be pursued and implemented.

How facts are judged, and truth is arrived at – is a function of the extent to which an individual or organisation are prepared to go upstream and the rigour with which they enquire. This is why medicine is often inadequate for addressing complex health problems. While symptoms may be suppressed in the short term, without addressing the drivers, illnesses and disorders (which normally involve multiple conditions) cannot be healed. As my oncologist friend says, she wants to stop cancer being made.

Such work to understand where biology butts up against environment (and technological emissions and exposures), is a function of value systems, curiosity and resources (which is connect to autonomy).

I spend a lot of time discussing how governments set up regulators for technologies, then forget to provide them with the powers and the resources to look for potential problems.

Governments and regulators want to avoid politically tricky stuff - but the navigation of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity is part and parcel of decision-making in public office. When they avoid this stuff, they pivot to serve private industry.

All too often we see the differential risk to babies, children and young people being obfuscated, and the latest science on developmental risk ignored. These are astounding moral and ethical failures that pervade these institutions.

We saw the same problem in COVID-19. The clearest manifestation was in the absence of methodological reviews of the peer reviewed literature to understand the risk profile of Sars-CoV over time. To identify who was at risk, and then to establish what the scientific literature was saying in relation to the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. No reviews or papers on age-stratified risk were released.

The general public would probably expect that the government would look at Pfizer’s information and then look at the scientific literature methodologically (i.e. not cherry picking) – but this never happened.

When scientific claims are made, but methodological processes are not followed to prevent bias, perhaps we can start to consider that the private industry claims resemble propaganda, so as to secure our consent. Our acquiesance.

Unaccountable totalitarian regimes turn aside from value-laden problems that are complex, uncertain and ambiguous. In COVID-19 it can be demonstrated that our governments adopted utilitarian principles to achieve policy ends.

MORALS, ETHICS, TRUTH AND PRINCIPLES.

At the individual and organisational level people are guided by morals (self-determined principles or standards of wright and wrong) and ethics (standards and guidelines that are societally derived). Both can be culturally grounded.

This is not stuff we talk about, in media, at school, and rarely with families. But it’s important for a safe and healthy society.

The etymology of the word truth reflects how ancient cultures linked notions of truth with faith and fidelity – value systems. Inevitably in human systems, processes of arriving at truth will be contested, because of different value systems and perspectives. It’s not surprising that truth and trust are closely related:

• Trust: reliance on the veracity, integrity, or other virtues of someone or something; religious faith

In Western democracies constitutional principles guide government decision-making and behaviour. A principle is a

‘fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of beliefs or behavior or a chain of reasoning. That is a guide for behavior or evaluation.’

Principles are in place to require officials to carry out their duties in such a way that they strive to protect health and economic life, to prevent abuse of power, and to safeguard resources for future generations.

Constitutional principles are the values which underlie constitutional (or ‘liberal’) democracy. These principles provide a framework within which politics is properly conducted.

There exists no single definitive list of constitutional principles, but their fundamental content is widely agreed. These can be grouped as follows: institutional checks and balances; representative government; the rule of law; protection of fundamental rights; and integrity and standards in public life.

New Zealand’s constitution is not in one place. There are barriers to the public challenging officials when decisions are considered to be inconsistent with constitutional principles. Judges are unwilling to deal with scientifically complex issues. During 2020-2023 judges repeatedly deferring to the scientific expertise’ of the Crown scientists in court cases concerning pandemic decision-making. Yet these officials were directly involved in establishing ‘evidence’ and policy to support lock-downs and mandates. These actors were biased, they had pervasive conflicts of interest.

Where were the other scientists that the judiciary could draw upon? New Zealand scientists were not there, and judges seemed unable to weigh the authority of information from authoritative, highly published scientists such as cardiologist Peter McCullough and epidemiologist John Ioannidis, against advice from local scientists speaking for the Crown.

Our judiciary and our courts are unable to soundly judge scientific controversies, because our science system is broken, and the unbiased experts aren’t present, or they’re unable to be considered seriously.

THE ATOMISATION OF MORAL & ETHICAL THINKING

Social institutions such as churches have traditionally (and imperfectly) played a large role in establishing and protecting values (which are always negotiated). With the decline of religion, and with atomised information systems, values become more difficult to agree upon. They can become groundless/unrooted and polarised

Disrupted value systems are of benefit to tyrants and demagogues who step into the void. It’s a good part of why communist regimes supress religion.

And that’s a slippery slope.

At school, my children largely learned to assemble facts as knowledge. But there was little discussion of principles, value systems, morals and ethics. Write and wrong was experienced and discussed. But there were no rich, informed discussion threads.

When COVID-19 arrived, my teenagers did what their friends did. There was no language of risk benefit ratio in the media and in their schools, there was no parsing of natural immunity, no elucidation of why the COVID-19 vaccine was light years from childhood vaccines, and far more uncertain and risky.

I might have written thousands of words on the subject and conversed with doctors on a weekly basis to ensure my writing was appropriate. But in my family, I had no standing. The fear promoted through daily media outlets utterly overshadowed any remonstrances that my family were not at risk of COVID-19. They were not elderly, they did not have multiple health conditions. My complex reasoning was for more confusing than simple messages of avoiding the nearest case and getting injected. Ultimately, social ostracism was a far greater threat to them.

My Masters’ thesis (sociology) had just been completed, its title was Innovation and Ignorance. I had just spent two years looking at how scientists struggled to do public good health research when government policy ensured funding streams encouraged innovation and tech development.

Therefore, from the commencement of COVID-19 I was well aware of the suppression of science, and that precious few scientists and doctors would have sufficient expertise and autonomy to speak up. Not only because of peer pressure – but because for 40 years funding streams had steered science away from broader basic and biological research that could look at drivers of harm. I knew that regulators ordinarily did not undertake reviews of the scientific literature to assess the current status of risk of technologies that the public are exposed to in daily life.

Today, most scientists are technical experts in very narrow areas of expertise. They are not comfortable traversing broad topic areas that involve guesswork and judgment.

I knew therefore that claims of ‘science’ were conditional upon the content that the governments and regulators were willing to accept as legitimate. ‘Illegitimate’ science was commonly published and peer reviewed, while the science that formed the backbone of approvals was private, industry paid science.

Contesting regulatory decisions is fraught with political risk, and all too often regulators put up walls and refuse to shift positions.

New Zealand’s scientific climate was captured. And it was upheld by a medicalised Ministry of Health, whose health system indicators are predominantly tied to immunisation rates and access to medical care rather than prevention of metabolic disease or mental illness. Contesting injection for all was not possible.

The irony of course, is that built into every scientific research project are values – how big the study group is, what effects will be recorded, what ages will be studied … these values can be derived following protocols or guidelines, or personally arrived at.

WHEN WE CAN’T PUBLICLY DEBATE VALUES, WE GET INTO TROUBLE.

In COVID-19 we could not debate that under 50s and young people, from the earliest, were not at risk. Our government and media did not permit this. We could not emphasise that early case studies in China and on the large cruise ships revealed that only the elderly and very multimorbid were at risk. We could not discuss age stratified risk. We could not debate the absence of long-term data and the risk to healthy people.

COVID-19 vaccines have been given provisional approval in New Zealand because data to support the longer-term safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines is not yet available.

At no stage were bioethics panels convened to debate the ethics of compulsory vaccination and masking.

This is why civil society need conferences like this. So that we may not only discuss the importance of information to prevent harm, and the trauma when information is ignored, but the values that go into decision-making, and the nature of judgement.

It seems that neither the New Zealand government nor legacy media are interested in this – so let civil society step into that empty space. Thank you, NZDSOS.