OPINION
Once again I’m sharing my submission in order to encourage my countrymen & women to do likewise before March 24th, 2024.
There are two parts to our submissions this time, indicated by two distinct labels: ‘Share your story’ & ‘Feedback on our terms of reference.’
Regarding the label ‘Feedback on our terms of reference’:
VFF & Reality Check Radio have simplified this hefty topic by offering us the ability to sign on to The People’s Terms of Reference, which you can do here. This is a very comprehensive point-by-point document of the issues pertaining to the government’s Covid response that have not been included in their own deeply inadequate terms of reference with their half-assed Royal Commission of Inquiry so far.
If you agree with the People’s Terms of reference, I encourage you to sign in with your name and email and follow the steps to be able to make that a part of your own official submission process. The terms of reference will determine the scope of what can be included in a proper inquiry.
Best,
Olivia
My Submission under the label “Share your story.”
Looking back – what would you like the Inquiry to know about your experiences of the pandemic?
Dear Sirs/Madams,
1. From the get go of the “global pandemic” what struck me as something terribly wrong, first and foremost, was the fact that our whole country was locked down on March 25, 2020.
Aside from being a historical first, this is a terrible power for a government to exercise and not consonant in any respect with living in a free world nation. NZ, always a follower nation, blindly followed the panic from overseas and did likewise. It was as if we were being manipulated from propaganda coming out of China and the World Health Organisation (where China has influence over non-medical, non-scientist person, Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus).
Our whole nation came to a stand still over a flu virus of uncertain origin. No clear thinking person paying attention believed the bat bullshit.
The ominous term “lockdown” previously known only in prison communities, suddenly was on everybody’s lips and a grossly abnormal state of affairs became normalised, mainly by panic.
Meanwhile in the United States, Professor John P.A. Ioannidis… (Professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University)
… had published an article in STAT medical journal on March 17, 2020 titled “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.”
At the time, the WHO were predicting fatality levels to be as high as 3.5% and Imperial College London’s predictions were much higher.
Dr Ioannidis’ article advised more caution with such limited data available, and used the example of the Diamond Princess cruise ship which housed an elderly population where Covid broke out on board. During that cruise, 7 out of 700 people died, which showed a 1% fatality rate of the most high-risk people – the elderly with multiple comorbidities.
Ioannidis wrote, fully cognisant that he (everyone) was dealing with very limited data, “reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%” and most of those would be people with limited life expectancies (aged & with multiple co-morbidities).
Ioannidis: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.”
The point of his writing was to caution that draconian lockdowns and social distancing countermeasures could do more harm to a population much like “a cat attacking an elephant and in the panic the elephant accidentally falling off a cliff.”
Ioannidis went on to say that preventing people from working or leaving their homes could cause more harm than the virus itself.
What stunned me was how viciously attacked a previously well-respected lion of medical science, such as Ioannidis is, was, after his op-ed was published. He was widely derided and publicly shamed for offering nothing more than his professional opinion at the very start of C-19. This should’ve been gold in the panic of that time.
I thought then that what we were looking at was more akin to worldwide public hysteria, than a rational reaction to a flu pandemic. The continuation of medical experts who shared Ioannidis’ cautious views to be savagely derided and shamed only confirmed this to me. And there were many. This shaming of long standing professionals became an ominous pattern throughout the pandemic.
Multiple lockdowns, with smashed livelihoods & businesses, assaulted people psychologically & financially and I submit it was an absurd & cruel thing to do.
What really galls me are the elderly people who died alone – without the comfort of family members present. I know many people who will never get over that horrible sense of failing their loved ones in their last moments on this earth, when their sick and dying family members, often their parents, needed them most. It was an unconscionable, beyond draconian, government imposition and over-reach.
In looking at Worldometer stats for the United States published 7th March 2024, the United States clocked 111,632,779 cases of Covid 19 from February 2020 to February 2024, and out of those, 1,217,017 died. That’s 1% of the Covid cases.
Ioannidis’ original “mid-range” mapping of the Diamond Princess’ stats onto the general American population was not a prediction, his point was always that the data at that early stage was far too limited to be making draconian measures the answer. It was a call to not panic that should’ve been heeded not scorned, but it was nothing but scorned.
We now know that the Covid 19 infection rate (all variants) was very high and the fatality rate was low – and dying from Covid is a very different thing than dying WITH Covid, yet that aspect of the causes of deaths became fudged. Most people with the virus remained remarkably asymptomatic.
If Worldometer stats are true… NZ, from Feb 2020 to Feb 2024 has had a 40% infection rate over the whole population with around 5000 (5594) deaths… a 0.2% fatality rate in those 2 million-odd cases (2,604,202), so it strikes me that Ioannidis was pretty close in his estimations with his limited data of March 2020. NZ had a 0.1% death rate in a population of 5,223,100 people – over 4 years.
Was this worth the damage done to this country? To say nothing about the low-trust society that the Ardern administration foisted upon us with all the bribed organs of media at her disposal?
I say a firm “no.”
2. The Vaccines
The mRNA technology used in these experimental gene therapies has never before been used on humans, let alone rolled out en masse using our populations as the stage 3 clinical trial. (Usually 1-4 years: https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3-clinical-research)
This is the second most disturbing factor to me over the last few years.
Then it was mandated during 2021, across all our places of work. We were promised by Ardern that there would be “no forced vaccinations” and no repercussions for those who refused to accept it. That turned into an abominable lie – coercion upon the pain of losing one’s livelihood is forcing people. Coercion upon the pain of not being included in society and activities, for adults & young people, is to force them.
We even got an absurd & grossly tasteless TV vaxathon, relentless media propaganda about the vaccines being “safe and effective” – when there was no reliable data to be able to make that claim honestly (Stage 3 trials were not complete) – and the vaccines were not even tested by Pfizer “for transmission.”
In October of 2022, in a European Parliamentary hearing, Dutch MP, Mr Rob Roos, asks Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, Janine Small, if the vaccine was “tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market”. In response, Ms Small answers “no,” and says the company had to “move at the speed of science.”
Some “vaccine.”
Ethically, how did an untested for transmission gene therapy suddenly become a “vaccine” that was rolled out to our whole population under “provisional approval” and “emergency use”?
We had lockdowns and our government were continuing to keep us in lockdowns to coerce us to get vaccinated with this shonky experimental gene based therapy.
That was an unconscionable breach of our individual rights under the Bill of Rights.
Most shockingly, even pregnant women were pressured by doctors & employers to be injected.
All of this creepy vaccine coercion was considered so disgusting by so many of our citizens that thousands of people rolled into Wellington with the convoy to parliament grounds to take a stand against it.
3. The Wellington Protest
For 23 days this protest stood and was treated with nothing but contempt by our politicians and our government funded/subsidised media. Tens of thousands of Kiwis circulated through parliament grounds over that time, it was the largest and most diverse protest ever to gather in NZ, yet there was no dialogue with protesters and no redress of grievances.
These were our citizens standing up for the sacred (& protected by law) principle of ‘bodily autonomy.’ They demanded an end to the vaccine mandates.
Police were often brutish, psychological tactics were used against the protesters, loud music, sprinklers to further soak people camping in a cyclone in tents. Unarmed grandmothers, grandfathers, men, women, youths and children held their ground only to be violently chased out by police using overwhelming force, in riot gear, with sonic weapons and rubber grenades.
This was utterly shameful.
During that protest, the mandates used by the NZDF and the police were held to be “unlawful” as an “unjustified incursion on our Bill of Rights.”
This was just reiterated in the Appeals Court decision of 16th February, 2024.
Unlawful.
The protesters deserve a fulsome apology from our government and our media.
Moving forward – what lessons should we learn from your experiences so we can be as prepared as possible for a future pandemic?
1. Remove Tony Blakely from the Royal Commission of Inquiry.
The man is not objective in any respect to the heavy-handed measures forced upon us in 2020 & beyond.
Blakely is an Ardern appointment to the Commission and I can see why.
Professor Blakely, guided Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in his COVID-19 response. Referencing the virus elimination strategy recommended by Michael Baker, Amanda Kvalsvig and Ayesha Verrall in New Zealand, Blakely’s team recommended the following ruthless ten point plan:
- Demonstrate strong, decisive leadership articulating an explicit goal of elimination
- Convene a group of elimination strategy experts
- Close all schools
- Provide strict definition of essential businesses and strict rules for reopening non-essential businesses
- Implement mandated mask wearing and promotion of 1.5 metre physical distancing
- Provide strict definition of essential workers and work
- Implement mandated mask wearing for all essential workers
- Offer universal basic income implementations for those required to stay at home
- Strengthen contact tracing and isolation of cases using digital technology
- Suspend international arrivals into Victoria.
As a result of these recommendations which contravene established public health evidence, the Andrews government invoked criminal law against the citizenry to enforce compliance with the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world.
The criminal law is society’s harshest form of condemnation and strongest instrument of coercion. It must only be used as a last resort for serious wrongdoing.
https://thebfd.co.nz/2024/02/21/can-we-trust-the-covid-19-royal-commission/
Tony Blakely also has a conflict of interest. He consulted for Moderna, received Covid 19 funding for Covid 19 “research” from the Victorian government and one other anonymous donor. Having him on this Commission is akin to him inquiring into his own behaviours. He is not objective.
Blakely must not be any part of this Inquiry.
2. Never mandate an injection and override the principle of bodily autonomy again.
3. Compensate all those injured by the gene based therapy shots. The deaths and injuries in our population are REAL – as evidenced by our excess all-cause mortality stats. This must be looked into properly. These people are suffering because they followed governments orders.
https://nzdsos.com/2022/05/24/deaths-following-c-19-vaccination/
4. Give a formal apology to the Wellington protesters who stood to uphold a principle which our politicians should have needed no lesson in. Luxon & Seymour and many Nats were in Parliament and in opposition, why the hell were they silent?
5. Never quarantine healthy people again in the form of blanket lockdowns. Protect the elderly and those with multiple comorbidities as much as possible, but do not sacrifice the future of our healthy children and grandchildren because vulnerable people might be at a slightly higher risk of death. That’s a dire & immoral calculation.
6. Do not censor dissenting opinions. That is not democratically healthy no matter what the topic is. We will thrive on more open & robust debate than outright government propaganda, which is ominous and breeds suspicion & low trust.
7. Condemn gain-of-function biotechnology and those who truck in it – and mean it. The origin of the Covid 19 virus was not natural and too many bio-labs around the world are meddling with this sinister technology. Men are not angels.
8. Make transparent the Pfizer contracts which were signed by our representatives under “emergency use authorisation.” The people have a right to know big Pharma’s role in what transpired over the last 4 years.
9. Investigate and explain to us how repurposed medications like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, which had an impact on lessening the symptoms of Covid 19 wherever used overseas, if taken early or as a prophylactic, were made intentionally unavailable to us in NZ. This is particularly ominous and Ashleigh Bloomfield deserves to be publicly questioned over his decisions about it. It is as if he only wanted one therapy, an experimental gene-based one, shot into every arm. This has caused so much mistrust of government with those of us with relatives overseas who had these banned meds available to them without the drama.
10. Never strong arm, coerce or threaten our doctors and the medical profession into only one new course of therapy – and then reward them for it financially. It puts them in a position where greed and survival can override their Hippocratic Oath. This is egregious.
11. Please investigate properly, in a transparent manner, how this affected our medical doctors and clinicians as per point 10.
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Feedback on our terms of reference
Give us your feedback
1 Do you have specific feedback on the inclusion of these topics?
I support the adoption of The People’s Terms as set out at www.covidinquiry.co.nz to be the extended and full terms of reference for the inquiry.
Olivia Pierson
The End