Jemma Geoghegan, Nigel French: Bird flu has reached New Zealand...

Bird flu has reached New Zealand – what this means and what comes next

The first detection of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 in New Zealand marks an important milestone, but not an unexpected one.

Since the virus reached Australia last month, and as it continued its global spread, scientists and government agencies have been preparing for the possibility that it would eventually arrive here.

Michael Tomlinson: The Heart of the Matter - Cardiac Risks of Covid-19 Vaccines

Evidence continues to mount indicating that the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic was counterproductive and harmful, yet mainstream opinion continues to proclaim that it was a triumph.

This is based on scientific papers that often manipulate the data or present it selectively.

John McLean: Enduring love of big Pharma & Maori quackery

Free societies enjoy a defining feature that distinguishes them from totalitarian States. The particular feature I have in mind is that, in a free society, what’s not prohibited is allowed. In other words, a free society’s citizens - including corporate citizens - can do whatever they like unless it’s legally prohibited. On the other hand, the default setting to which citizens under totalitarianism are subjected is that they can only do what’s expressly authorised by the State; everything else is verboten.

David Bell: Vaccines and the Length of Our Lives

The commercial imperative to extract money from human bodies is playing havoc with medical education, and the body of knowledge through which the medical professions operate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of vaccines, and their place in determining the length of our lives.

 
The History of Living Longer

Cam Slater: When Will She Be Held to Account?

Do you remember when Jacinda Ardern told you all that if you got vaccinated “you won’t get sick, and you won’t die”? She also said that the vaccines were safe and effective. When is she going to be held to account for those mistruths?

Guy Hatchard: How Many Mistakes Does an Expert Have to Make Before They Are No Longer an Expert?

Our health service is in crisis, unable to cope, and all-cause mortality is running at record levels.

Ministry of Health data, released two days ago, shows that it is not due to Covid. This morning both main newspapers rushed to ask the experts.

In the NZ Herald, Associate Professor Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, frequent media commentator and expert on the bioluminescence of superbugs, said she was frustrated because:

“There wasn’t a critical mass of people using basic Covid-19 protections…such as RATs, masks, self-isolation and vaccines…I don’t understand why we aren’t using these measures we know work.”

Even though we are arguably the most highly vaccinated, tested, and masked nation in the world, apparently it isn’t enough for Dr. Wiles.

Eric Crampton: If Medsafe won't lead, it needs to get out of the way

On Friday, June 17, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for children over the age of 6 months. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the vaccines the next day. And vaccination of under-5s began last week.

Vaccination for under 5s is not likely to start in New Zealand for months. Our regulatory systems are failing us.

And it matters.

John Gibson: How Vaccine Messaging Confused the Public

Pivotal randomized control trials (RCTs) underpinning approval of Covid-19 vaccines did not set out to, and did not, test if the vaccines prevent transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nor did the trials test if the vaccines reduce mortality risk. A review of seven phase III trials, including those for Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines, found the criterion the vaccines were trialled against was just reduced risk of Covid-19 symptoms.

There should be no secret about these facts, as they were discussed in August 2020 in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal); one of the oldest and most widely cited medical journals in the world. Moreover, this was not an isolated article, as the editor-in-chief also gave her own summary of the vaccine-testing situation, which has proved very prescient:

Matt Ridley: The Unexpected History and Miraculous Success of Vaccines

At a time when the miraculous success of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 has transformed the battle against the pandemic, it is fitting to recall that the general idea behind vaccination was brought to the attention of the western world, not by brilliant and privileged professors, but by a black slave and a woman.

His name was Onesimus and he lived in Boston, as the property of Cotton Mather, a well-known puritan preacher. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, the literary wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople.

Some time around 1715 Onesimus seems to have told Mather that back in West Africa people were in the habit of deliberately infecting children with a drop of “juice of smallpox” from a survivor, thus making them immune. Mather then came across a report to the Royal Society in London from an Italian physician, Emmanuel Timoni, working in the Ottoman court in Constantinople, which described the same practice in combating smallpox. The Ottomans had got the idea from either China or Africa.