Watch: ‘Silenced’ – new documentary analyses media, medicine and academia during the COVID crisis

Produced by Candlelight Productions NZ, the documentary features broadcaster Peter Williams, former GP Anne O’Reilly and freelance sociologist Jodie Bruning.

In Silenced, the three share their perspectives with presenter Samantha Blanchard on how New Zealand’s freedom of speech in media, medicine and academia was impacted by suppression over the last three years.

‘Freedom of speech in New Zealand is under fire,’ said Blanchard at the beginning of the documentary. ‘Dissent gets burned, or written questions by people with the mandate to ask them go unanswered. Independent media organisations, deplatformed. A disparity of information has driven a wedge between families, friends and communities, creating a divide not seen since the Springbok Tour over 40 years ago.

‘Public dialogue about our COVID-19 response and mass vaccination strategy has dropped in quality if not entirely, and censorship beats back anything that challenges it’s validity. But people are drawing multiple lines in the sand to protect our democracy where freedom of speech is fundamental.’

Broadcaster Peter Williams was the morning show host for Magic Talk when COVID first appeared in the news. He was into his 49th year of a media career spanning television, radio and print which made him a household name. Williams described how his programme hosted a range of scientific experts – from those supportive of the government’s policies to those against, and how MediaWorks bosses wanted to clamp down on his content to make it fit within the limits of Prime Minister’s Jacinda Ardern’s ‘One Source of Truth’. Management interferring in such a direct way with programme content was unheard of, said Williams.

‘When you’ve got the mainstream media enthralled to the government all singing from the same song sheet on the health issues, what chance has the country got to get open, balanced discussion about things? The answer is we don’t.’

Rather than compromise his principles, Williams refused to ‘filter’ his show’s content and resigned. Instead of serving out his notice period MediaWorks bosses paid him out and told him to leave immediately. Williams now hosts the afternoon shows on Reality Check Radio.

‘The presentation or representation of what we see in the media, it’s been extremely, shall I say ‘dumbed down”, said sociologist Jodie Bruning.

‘It’s not just the censorship, the suppression of expert voices, it’s the fact that in New Zealand we’ve never in this pandemic made a space for the uncomfortable or the controversial science.’

The government should have funded spaces for this scientific debate to happen, but instead pumped tens of millions of dollars into legacy media via the Publice Interest Journalism Fund through NZ On Air and lucrative mass marketing campaigns.

‘I’ve been personally aware for a long time that legacy media in New Zealand is very reluctant to carry any content that criticises technology, the off-target impact of technology, of bio-technology, of environmental chemicals. So I know the legacy media don’t really want to go in a place where they’re critically evaluating that.’

The documentary highlighted the case of Dr. Simon Thornley, a senior lecturer in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Auckland. Thornley’s research showed the vast majority of New Zealanders were not at risk from COVID, except for a small group that were aged in their late 70s or older. Rather than a mass vaccination programme of the whole population, Thornley advocated the targeted use of vaccines in ‘at-risk’ groups only – an approach supported by over a million doctors and scientists around the world in the Great Barrington Declaration.

Thornley was interviewed by Jack Tame for the Q+A programme on state broadcaster TVNZ, ‘We’ve sacrificed our humanity, our society and our economy for the wrong virus. The fear and panic that has driven the response of many scientists, politicians, policy-makers and the media, we believe, is unwarranted, and it’s even irrational.’

Thornley’s website ‘COVID Plan B’ was eventually shut down as ‘disinformation’, although as at the time of writing it is back up online. Blanchard had interview Thornley for the making of Silenced, but said, ‘lawyers eventually advised him against contributing.’

The writings and research of another expert, Professor John Ionnidis, a professor of population health and epidemiology at Stanford University were also suppressed.

‘He is the most cited epidemiologist in the world, but his research was ignored by New Zealand academia,’ said Brunning.

Bruning noted how medical experts at the Universities of Auckland and Otago, including Michael Baker, had not cited Ionnidis once.

‘That is unbelievable,’ she said. ‘They should be looking across the spectrum at all the people in this space, and they ignored the most senior cited scientist in this space.’

‘We never once talked about the fact that the generally healthy were not at risk, even though that the obligations that they are working under in the Health Act and the public health norms would require that…. This was a brand new biotechnology coded for a viral protein inside the body. There was an uncontrolled release or production of this viral protein which was the antigen inside the body. Spike proteins are known to be inflammatory. So what we’re going to find, it’s not my opinion, we’re going to understand, when we put all different science together that this was utterly wrong – that this should not have happened.‘

Dr. Anne O’Reilly was a practising GP of 40 years experience. Her own research led her to the writings of Dr. Thornley and raised questions over the government’s ‘one-size fits all’ mass vaccination programme. She became a key figure in the establishment of NZDSOS – a group of doctors and medical professionals opposed the COVID response, particularly in the way it undermined the Hyppocratic Oath and the right to informed consent.

‘We know the most important thing [to combat COVID], it depends on your age, it depends on your level of chronic inflammation, and usually obesity is a measure of that, and the one controlling factor is diet. Sugar and processed foods are probably the easiest things that could make a significant difference.’

The eating healthy message was out in the public domain, but ‘it was being ignored’, said O’Reilly, as were all of the options discovered for early treatment, including the demonstrably safe, effective and cheap Nobel Prize winning drug, Ivermectin.

O’Reilly describes her dealings with the New Zealand Medical Council – the body responsible for implementing standards, assessment and registration of doctors. The Council tried to force her to fall into line with the narrative. She refused and eventually voluntarily de-registered from practising medicine.

Silenced is available to watch for free on Rumble and Vimeo.