The New Zealand Outdoors & Freedom Party is calling on the Government to immediately end New Zealand’s status as a dangerous international anomaly by enacting a total statutory ban on Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicines across all domestic media platforms.
The call comes as the Deputy Prime Minister, Hon. David Seymour, has agreed to formally present the petition of Aly Cook to the House of Representatives during the parliamentary session on Tuesday, 23 June, 2026.
The petition, brought forward by Outdoors & Freedom Party Board Member and Broadcasting Spokesperson Aly Cook, demands that the House of Representatives ban all advertising by pharmaceutical companies and of any pharmaceuticals on all forms of New Zealand media, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and digital platforms.
New Zealand and the United States remain the only two high-income nations in the world that allow multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical corporations to market branded prescription drugs directly to the public.
“Medical choices must be guided by objective health professionals providing genuine informed consent based on patient need, not by slick, emotionally manipulative commercial marketing campaigns,” says petitioner Aly Cook. “Prescriptions belong in clinics, not in commercials.”
The Outdoors & Freedom Party’s submission weaves in damning written evidence from the Council of Medical Colleges (CMC), which represents all 17 medical colleges and over 9,000 practitioners in New Zealand.
The submission evidence directly quotes the CMC’s March 2023 written submission to the Health Select Committee on the Therapeutic Products Bill, which warned Parliament that pharmaceutical ads present a “biased, overly optimistic picture of advertised medicines and prompt patients to request treatments they do not need,” highlighting that these predatory tactics target the most vulnerable and lead directly to “inappropriate prescribing and overtreatment.”
“Our overstretched front-line medical workforce is facing severe burnout, yet we are allowing corporate marketing to deliberately waste their time,” Cook states. “Data from the CMC’s July 2023 historic Open Letter, which was co-signed by Sir Ashley Bloomfield and former Prime Minister Helen Clark, shows that banning direct-to-consumer drug ads would instantly free up our medical professionals by an estimated 48,000 hours a year. Those are precious clinical hours currently wasted dealing with commercial queries that would be much better spent helping sick Kiwis get better.”
As the Party’s Broadcasting Spokesperson, Cook also highlights a profound conflict of interest within the New Zealand media landscape, pointing to the tens of millions of dollars in pharmaceutical advertising revenue flowing into domestic media companies annually.
“We must look at who is paying the bills,” Cook states. “When mainstream media outlets rely heavily on corporate pharmaceutical revenue to survive, it introduces an unavoidable conflict of interest. As the medical colleges noted in their March 2023 brief, our healthcare environment shouldn’t be controlled by those who manufacture the medications. A media ecosystem financially dependent on Big Pharma cannot serve as an objective watchdog for the public. To safeguard true media independence, we must remove this financial lever.”
The submission draws a sharp line between independent public health education and commercial exploitation, citing Official Information Act data revealing that the New Zealand government spent over $45 million on the COVID-19 vaccine advertising campaign alone between 2021 and 2022.
“While public agencies must have channels to broadcast emergency safety data, allowing private corporations to buy up the exact same prime-time slots commercialises medicine and floods the public square with competing corporate interests trying to monetize public health anxieties,” says Cook.
The Party points to a major, live international precedent to back its case: the United States is currently dismantling the very system New Zealand allows. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA have launched a sweeping federal crackdown on deceptive drug ads, enforcing “radical transparency” rules that mandate exhaustive safety disclosures within broadcast slots. Simultaneously, the End Prescription Drug Ads Now Act (Senate Bill 2068) has been introduced to the U.S. Senate to outlaw the practice entirely. he End Prescription Drug Ads Now Act (S. 2068) was introduced to the Senate by Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent from Vermont) alongside Senator Angus King (Independent from Maine).
When they introduced the legislation, Senator Sanders heavily targeted the pharmaceutical industry’s massive marketing budgets, famously stating that the United States and New Zealand are the only two developed nations in the world that still allow direct-to-consumer television and print advertising for prescription medication.
“The consensus across doctors, health professionals, and consumer advocates is absolute, and as CMC Chair Dr. Samantha Murton summarized perfectly in her July 2023 declaration: ‘New Zealand doesn’t need to better regulate DTCA, we need to ban it.’ If the United States, the global epicenter of commercial pharmaceutical marketing is actively shutting down this ‘pipeline of deception’ because of its destructive impact on public health, this leaves New Zealand on track to become the only developed nation in the world that still permits Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising. Time to change that!” – Cook concludes.
Following the formal presentation by Deputy PM David Seymour on Tuesday, the petition will be officially referred to a parliamentary select committee for consideration. Cook has indicated she intends to appear in person before the committee to present extensive evidence and defend the integrity of New Zealand’s broadcasting and healthcare sectors.
Image credit: Roberto Sorin
Great stuff NZOFP.
I’m sick of those “I didn’t know that when you were pregnant, there were vaccines you had to get” ads. It was and is, all bs. You should NEVER put anything into your body while carrying precious cargo.
My late Doctor would be highly disgusted at what is happening now. Yes, he was an old fashioned, sensible “first do no harm” Doctor.
100% right.
Having been in the US I can say that their pharmaceutical advertising is more relentless, but it is more obviously commercial advertising. Here, they masquerade as public service announcements, making it all the more insidious.
its changing in the USA now .. there is a bill before the senate now
AND BILL GATES HAD HIS UGLY HEAD INVOLVED IN IT ALL ?
Cover for The Lifeboat: New Zealand’s Quiet Capture
The Lifeboat: New Zealand’s Quiet Capture
The Lifeboat: New Zealand’s Quiet Capture
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Chapter 2: The Biomedical Laboratory – NZ’s Health Data and Genetic Resources
The Pharmac Relationship Exposed: How the Gates Foundation Shaped NZ’s Vaccine Schedule and Drug Purchasing Priorities
You might know Pharmac as New Zealand’s drug-buying agency, proud of its independence and its ability to negotiate low prices. But behind the curtain, a very different story unfolds. Pharmac’s decisions about which medicines and vaccines make it onto the funded list are not made in a vacuum. They are shaped by a web of international funding, academic partnerships, and philanthropic agendas. And one name stands out above the rest: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past two decades, the foundation has quietly but steadily influenced New Zealand’s vaccine schedule and drug purchasing priorities, steering them toward a globalist vision that many Kiwis would reject if they knew the full story.
Let’s start with the vaccine schedule. New Zealand now gives children more shots earlier than almost any other country in the OECD. Six weeks after birth, they receive a cocktail of vaccines. Three months later, another batch. The schedule keeps piling on through infancy and toddlerhood. This didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of recommendations from advisory committees that rely heavily on research funded by the Gates Foundation. The foundation has poured millions into New Zealand universities for ‘global health’ programs, pandemic preparedness, and vaccine effectiveness studies. When those studies conclude that more vaccines are needed, Pharmac listens. But the studies are designed to find what the funder wants them to find.
The foundation’s involvement goes beyond funding research. It has helped build the very data infrastructure that Pharmac uses to make decisions. The Integrated Data Infrastructure, or IDI, links health records with education, welfare, and even social services data. It is a powerful tool, but it was built with significant input from Gates-backed initiatives. The foundation’s long‑standing goal is to create ‘learning health systems’ that track every individual from cradle to grave. In a small, contained country like New Zealand, with high compliance and centralised records, this becomes a perfect laboratory. And once the system is in place, it can be used to justify any policy the funder desires.
What about the drug purchasing side? Pharmac is famous for saying no to expensive medicines. Yet it has consistently expanded coverage for vaccines and patented drugs that align with Gates Foundation priorities. The foundation has a clear agenda: to push its preferred vaccines, promote synthetic biology in agriculture, and digitalise health records. By funding the academic research that Pharmac relies on, and by training the experts who sit on advisory boards, the foundation effectively sets the agenda. Pharmac seems independent, but its thinking has been shaped by decades of Gates-funded influence. As David Holmgren points out in Future Scenarios, communities that fail to recognise these subtle forms of control end up surrendering their sovereignty piece by piece.
There is a deeper, more troubling layer. New Zealand serves as a staging ground for the foundation’s Pacific health initiatives. Patient records from Fiji, Samoa, and other island nations flow through New Zealand servers, creating a vast database of genetic and health data from isolated populations. The Gates Foundation has funded this digitisation. The informed consent standards in these aid‑dependent countries are often weak. And once the data is in New Zealand, it can be shared with international research partners. This is pharmacogenomic gold – perfect for studying how different genetic groups respond to drugs and vaccines. But the people whose data is being used rarely have a say. As Michael Shellenberger documents in Apocalypse Never, such data grabs are often justified as humanitarian work while serving very different ends.
Māori and Pasifika communities are especially vulnerable. The Gates Foundation has funded multiple health studies that collect genetic and biometric data from these populations, promising better health outcomes. Yet the principle of Māori data sovereignty – rangatiratanga – has been repeatedly sidestepped. University ethics committees approve broad data‑sharing clauses, and the information ends up in international databases with no enforceable Māori control. Once it’s there, pharmaceutical companies, military researchers, and others can access it. The Waitangi Tribunal has raised concerns, but the funding continues. The Crown prefers to keep this issue quiet.
Why would a foreign foundation care so much about a small country at the bottom of the world? New Zealand offers something unique: geographic isolation, a compliant population, advanced infrastructure, and a government eager for foreign investment. It is the perfect testbed for new technologies – digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and integrated health surveillance systems. The Gates Foundation has long advocated for digital ID as a tool for development. In New Zealand, the Reserve Bank is actively exploring a CBDC. Combine that with the health data infrastructure already in place, and you have a blueprint for total surveillance economy, piloted on five million people before being rolled out elsewhere.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the natural result of a foundation with vast resources and a technocratic worldview operating in a country with weak regulatory safeguards. The foundation does not need to lobby openly. It simply funds the research, trains the experts, and builds the systems that then steer policy. Pharmac, for all its reputation as a tough negotiator, is caught in this web. Its priorities are shaped by the same globalist agenda that wants to centralise health, food, and data control. As Charles Birch wrote in Confronting the Future, the struggle for control of resources – including health resources – will define the coming decades. New Zealand is in the middle of that struggle.
The end goal is not a secret meeting in a bunker. It is a world where every person’s health records are linked to their digital ID, where vaccine schedules are determined by foreign-funded research, where land use is dictated by carbon credit schemes, and where genetic data from indigenous populations is mined without consent. New Zealand’s quiet capture is almost complete. The media will not cover it because the same universities and research institutes that should be sounding the alarm are the ones cashing the cheques. The only way to stop it is for ordinary Kiwis to wake up, file Official Information Act requests, support independent media, and demand that Pharmac’s decision‑making process be transparent and free from foreign influence.
This is not about being anti-vaccine or anti-science. It is about sovereignty. It is about who gets to decide what goes into your child’s body, what happens to your health data, and whether your country’s resources serve its own people or a global elite. The Pharmac relationship with the Gates Foundation is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. But it is a piece that, once understood, changes everything. The time to act is now, before the last bits of New Zealand’s independence are quietly traded away for promises of aid and partnership.
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