OPINION
Peter Allan Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
peterallanwilliams.substack.com
It’s now a week since the whistleblower information from the man we now know to be Barry Young became public. To say that the public release was botched is an understatement.
I’ve known Liz Gunn for 25 years and she has always been a strong anti-vaccination advocate. Even when I worked with her around the turn of the century and she had young children, she was on the case then about not having them vaccinated with the usual childhood injections. This was around the time of the Andrew Wakefield revelations about the MMR vax.
So for her to be so vocal during this entire Covid vaccination era is no surprise.
She is also a strong and often persuasive personality and once she encountered Barry Young and his terabyte of information, there would have been no stopping her, then dramatizing to the nth degree what she believed to be the conclusions that could be drawn from the data.
The video she put out last week with Mr Young, or Winston Smith as he was then, was sloppy, too long and overly emotional.
What we needed was concise data, presented in a coherent way with all the facts – like the ages of the deceased and the time of their deaths after vaccination – with conclusions drawn from a credible medical professional, if such a person could be found.
Because there were so many holes in the data about the deaths at the Invercargill vaccination site, it was very easy for the establishment – the mainstream media, the politicians and the medical authorities – to beat off this data and its presentation as another mad anti-vax conspiracy.
Sadly that’s where it lies at the moment, despite some very reasoned commentary from the likes of Guy Hatchard.
The reality is that more people died in New Zealand last year than during any year in our history – 38,577.
That was a whopping 3445 more than in 2021. Yet politicians and medical authorities said there were no excess deaths.
In the year to the end of September this year the death count was 37,569 – down marginally on the same period for 2022, but it’s still 2091 more than for the same period in 2021.
So the raw facts do not lie. There have been significantly more people dying in the last two years than at any time previously in this country.
And if you say, well then population has increased, try the official number of deaths per thousand of population.
In 2022 it was 7.53. In 2021 it was 6.83. In 2013 it was 6.65.
The numbers do not lie. We are dying at a faster rate than at any time in the last decade. Actually, that 7.53 number is the highest this century.
If those raw facts stick out like canine testicles, anonymized data held by the health authorities will give a breakdown of age, ethnicity, region and vaccination status.
Is it not too much to ask to have authorities release the information to either dispel fears of the impact of the vaccine or tell us that further investigation is required?
That’s what an open, honest and transparent government would do.
We know the last government was anything but.
After the way the new Minister of Health batted away questions about the botched Barry Young data release, I’m yet to be convinced this one is any different.