‘A different kind of power’: Jacinda Ardern’s autohagiography

“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
– Jean Giraudoux

A ‘hagiography’ is a biography of a saint, but its use has been extended to mean an excessively admiring book about a person making them seem better than they are.

Hagiographies are normally written so long after the death of the subject that the author is remote from the subject of the hagiography and, in theory at least, unbiased. Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power, is subtitled ‘a memoir’, but some readers might see it as an autohagiography.

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Published in June 2025, Jacinda Ardern’s book evoked comments ranging from fawning adulation to cynical excoriation. Among the reviews by public figures were the following extracts (emphasis added):

“It is rare enough to find someone who lives an inspiring life of genuine service to humanity; it is even rarer to find that they’ve written a beautiful book that will inspire others. Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power is just such a book. I could not put down this deeply personal memoir by an icon who insists on being a real person. . . . . ”—Sarah Ruhl, author

“An honest, inviting and profoundly personal story of rising to power, and then choosing to give it up. This book is filled with humor, conviction, self-awareness, uncommon kindness, and a wisdom earned through the dizzying trials of recent history. . . . . “ —Ben Rhodes, author

“Thank you for your partnership and your friendship – and for your empathetic, compassionate, strong, and steady leadership over these past several years.” – Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister

“Jacinda Ardern reminds us that kindness and strength are not mutually exclusive.”– Anthony Albanese, Australian Prime Minister.

And what did the general public think? Reportedly aimed at the American market (and therefore mostly at readers who have no first-hand experience of her policies), the great majority (77%) of Amazon readers gave it a five-star rating, typical of which was:

“Jacinda Ardern is an incredible human being who brought a bracingly fresh paradigm to political engagement in her role as Prime Minister of New Zealand/Aotearoa. Even those who most ardently disagreed with her views still respected her energy, kindness, integrity and devotion to her work. Her thoughtful approach to governing and parenting illuminates a path that we should all be inspired to follow, each in our own unique way. I hope this book is a runaway best seller.”

Some readers, however, took an independent-minded view. Among the 1%, 1-star reviews was:

Do you really want to know how great Jacinda Ardern is? Talk to New Zealanders, and you’ll discover the absolute truth, and you’ll find that it’s the complete opposite of what the rest of the world thinks. If kindness could kill, Ardern had it in spades. In her nearly 6 years as Prime Minister of New Zealand, she left the country severely divided, economically impoverished, judicially radicalised, policing softened and mentally broken.

Amid all this diversity of views, there is one statement that we can all agree on. Political commentator Bryce Edwards described Ardern as “one of the most remarkable of New Zealand’s prime ministers”.

So, what did Ardern herself have to say?

In her memoir, the ‘power’ is the power of ‘kindness’, as her admirers unceasingly remind us.

There’s one problem, and it’s a big one. People who are genuinely kind never talk about it – they just get on with being kind; that’s the sort of people they are. So a person who broadcasts her kindness naturally invites the accusation of image-building. To have any validity, one would expect Ardern to have shown kindness in her private life.

And we have her word for it.

In her first few chapters she portrays herself as an all-too-human, ‘girl next door’ – vulnerable, unsure of herself, and above all, deeply concerned for others. Dedicated to “the criers, and huggers”, her book is aimed at a population reared on Hollywood, who just love to have their heartstrings pulled.

In chapter one, aged five, she tells of the little boy walking barefoot on ice-covered puddles, crying, with diarrhoea running down the backs of his legs, Jacinda and her sister watching in silence. Almost 40 years later, aged 44, she recalls her thoughts at the time: Please. Someone come and find him.

Fast forward to nearing the end of intermediate school when, aged 12, the embryonic social justice warrior within her was beginning to stir. She describes how she began collecting for famine relief in Somalia, organised by World Vision. Over thirty years later, she tells the reader that her nagging thought was that “someone should do something”.

Closer to home, she recalls Ruth Richardson’s ‘mother of all budgets’, which cut welfare. In particular, she remembers a newspaper cartoon showing Richardson above a cauldron of soup and a line of hungry children holding bowls, but instead of giving them soup, Richardson was making them pour what little they had back in. Though she was too young to understand the politics of child poverty, it “definitely didn’t feel right”.

At Morrinsville High School she was winning school speaking competitions, competing in inter-schools debating competitions and for Waikato in national competitions. Public speaking is a prerequisite for success in politics, and later, she would put her rhetorical skills to good effect as she climbed the greasy pole.

A first step up the political ladder was at the age of seventeen, when she joined the Labour Party. Her aunt, Marie Ardern, a long standing Labour Party member, recruited her to help in Harry Duynhoven’s 1999 re-election campaign for the New Plymouth electorate.

The art of manipulating opinion

In 1999 she began a three-year degree course at the University of Waikato Management School. She graduated in 2001 as a Bachelor of Communication, spending her third year overseas at Arizona State University.

The Waikato Bachelor of Communication course offers a choice of five subject majors: Applied Digital Communication, Creative Media, Public Relations, Marketing, and Media Production. She chose Public Relations (PR) – the management and dissemination of information given to the public in order to influence its perception.

Manipulating public opinion – a perfect choice for an aspiring politician.

The term ‘public relations’ was first coined by Edward Bernays, a nephew of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Combining the psychological insights of his uncle Sigmund with his own commercial ‘know-how’, he developed the idea of appealing not to the rational mind, but to the subconscious. He showed how it was possible to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it,” and called his approach “the engineering of consent.”

His techniques were widely adopted in marketing and in recruitment campaigns, and became so successful that he became known as ‘the father of public relations’.

He set out his ideas in his book Propaganda, in which he wrote:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. This is merely a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised.

Whereas PR might seem relatively benign in advertising, in geopolitics it has been thoroughly malignant. One of the most egregious examples was the case of the ‘babies in incubators’, in which public support for American involvement in the 1991 Gulf War had been stoked by an invented story about Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators and leaving them on the floor to die.

The resulting public outrage garnered massive support for the U.S. invasion resulting, conservatively, in tens of thousands of deaths of Iraqi conscripts, not to mention the half-million children estimated to have died as a result of subsequent U.S. sanctions.

There was just one problem; it never happened. John MacArthur, a reporter who investigated the role of propaganda in the Gulf War and author of “Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War”, discovered that Nayirah was a daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington, and a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family.

Even more revealing was that her testimony had been organised as part of the ‘Citizens for a Free Kuwait’ public relations campaign run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government.

I’ve mentioned the Gulf War because PR is at the heart of much geopolitical evil-doing, which is why I have given it more than a passing mention of Ardern’s PR background. Together with her subsequent relationship with the World Economic Forum (see below) and later, the Covid ‘pandemic’, PR forms an important strand in her rise to power. Others, some of which are even more shocking, I cover in The control of thought.

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For the third and final year in her degree course she opted to spend a year on exchange at Arizona State University, a place where her family had Mormon connections. But the American academic calendar was out of synch with New Zealand’s, so she decided to spend several weeks working as a volunteer in Wellington as a researcher for Phil Goff and Helen Clark.

In 2006, aged 26, Ardern moved to the UK and spent some time as a senior policy adviser in a policy unit in the Cabinet Office of Prime Minister Tony Blair. It was Tony Blair who sent British troops into Iraq in support of the US on the pretext of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, for which there was no firm evidence. Another example of the malign use of public relations. As a result of what was essentially a lie, 179 British personnel were killed, leading to Blair being labelled a ‘war criminal’.

President of International Union of Socialist Youth

In January 2008, at age 27, Ardern was elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) for a two-year term. One would have thought that this would have been a feather in the cap of an aspiring young socialist, but in her memoir she devotes a short paragraph of a mere 61 words to it.

Why so coy? Could it be that, in her closing remarks at the IUSY Festival in Hungary, she might have displayed just a bit too much socialist fervour when she referred to her fellow members as ‘comrades’ no fewer than 15 times in her seven-minute speech? In the voters’ minds the word ‘comrade’ is just a bit too closely associated in with Marxism to sit easily alongside her self-declared ‘social democrat’ identity.

Mid-way through her presidency, Ardern became a list MP for the Labour Party, but continued to in both roles for the next 15 months.

List MP

While working as a civil servant in the UK, using the slogan ‘have your say from far away’, Ardern began organising a campaign to get kiwi expats enrolled for the forthcoming 2008 New Zealand general election. Impressed by her campaign, Grant Roberson urged her to get on the party list. By not contesting an electorate seat, she had the chance of becoming a list MP.

So she flew back to New Zealand for the party conference in Wellington, where the party list was chosen, as a result of which she became number 20, ahead of some sitting MPs. In the election she contested the strong National seat in Waikato, fully aware that she had no chance. But no matter, because at number 20 on the list, she was ahead of some sitting MPs and almost guaranteed becoming Member of Parliament as a list MP.

The election on November 8 was a defeat for Helen Clark’s Labour, and a win for National’s John Key, but the Labour party gained 34 per cent of the party vote, – more than enough to ensure her entry to parliament as a list MP. Phil Goff had become party leader, and he promoted Ardern to the front bench, as spokesperson for Youth Affairs and as associate spokesperson for Justice (Youth Affairs).

In the 2011 election she contested Auckland Central, standing against Nikki Kaye, the incumbent National MP. She lost to Kaye by 717 votes, but was returned to Parliament via her 13^th position the party list.

In the 2014 general election she was once more against Nikki Kaye in Auckland Central, and although she increased her vote, she again finished second to Kaye. As number 5 on the party list, she was returned to parliament and became shadow spokesperson for Justice, Children, Small Business, and Arts & Culture under the new leader, Andrew Little. But for Labour, the result was the worst since 1922, with only 25 per cent of the party vote.

That night, she tells readers, she cried herself to sleep with “big, despairing sobs”.

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World Economic Forum

“Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are”– Miguel de Cervantes

If Ardern’s presidency IUSY had solidified her socialist credentials, her selection in 2014 as a Young Global Leader (YGL) in the World Economic Forum (WEF) must have raised some eyebrows –not least among her comrades in the IUSY.

The WEF was founded in 1971 by German engineer Klaus Schwab. It is an unelected organisation of the world’s most powerful individuals, whose mission statement is “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”.

The WEF meets every January at the Swiss resort at Davos. The Business Insider presented some data that give an idea of the remoteness of the WEF from the needs of people at the ‘grassroots’:

• Of attendees at the 2019 meeting, 309 arrived by private jets
• At the 2020 meeting, 119 were billionaires’
• 53 were heads of state
• The cost of ‘upper tier’ membership was $620,000.

If hobnobbing with hard-nosed billionaires at Davos was as far as it went, Ardern just might have got away with being no more hypocritical than many other politicians.

But the WEF is not just a plutocrats club. In an unguarded moment during an interview, Klaus Schwab claimed that the WEF had “penetrated the cabinets” of governments, citing Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government as an example.

So it’s no surprise that Ardern was reticent regarding her close links with these unelected billionaires who, by Schwab’s proud admission, have influence over elected governments.

Pre-premiership

Ardern’s next step up the ladder was the by-election in Mount Albert in February 2017, after the resignation of the leader of the Labour Party, David Shearer. As the only Labour nominee, she was elected by a landslide, with 77 per cent of the votes.

Deputy Leader

On 7 March 2017, Ardern was unanimously elected as deputy leader of the Labour Party after the resignation of Annette King.

Leader of the Opposition

Following the resignation of David Cunliffe as leader of the Labour party, Andrew Little was unanimously elected Leader, but Labour continued to languish in the polls at historically low levels, so much that Little resigned seven weeks before the 2017 general election. On 1 August 2017, at age 37, Ardern was elected Party Leader, and hence leader of the Opposition.

After her election as party leader, Labour’s popularity in opinion polls rose dramatically, from 24 per cent to 43 per cent, ahead of National.

Prime Minister

After the general election of 23 September 2017, Ardern retained her seat with a large majority, and though increasing its share of the vote to almost 37 per cent, National had just over 44 per cent. With Labour having 46 seats to National’s 56, neither could form a government. New Zealand First held the balance of power and, after negotiations, agreed to form a coalition with Labour, making Ardern the Prime Minister.

Christchurch mosque shootings

On 15 March, 2019, in mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, murdered 51 people and injured 89 others.

Ardern was in New Plymouth when she heard the news, and she immediately returned to Wellington. The following day she came to Christchurch to meet with the first responders and families of the victims. She wore a hijab and, as she hugged survivors and their families, photos were circulated round the world’s media. Typical of the headlines was the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Face of empathy: Jacinda Ardern photo resonates worldwide after attack”.

Not everyone regarded her hijab with praise. The New Zealand Herald carried the headline “Iranian women’s rights activist calls hijab display ‘heartbreaking’”. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist, says visitors to Iran shouldn’t wear the hijab out of “respect for the culture of Iran”, and those who do are “sending a message that men are more equal than women”. And in an article in Stuff, the anonymous Muslim woman writer said it was “cheap tokenism”.

The Covid-19 “Pandemic”

For reasons best known to herself, Ardern devoted only 26 of 340 pages to the event that would prove to be her nemesis – Covid. Given its global impact, this might seem surprising to some, but probably not to the perceptive reader.

Ardern’s tenure as Prime Minister during the Covid years were marked by a government campaign of disinformation, intimidation – and, as I shall show later, excess deaths, unprecedented in New Zealand history. How this stacks up with her trademark brand of ‘kindness’, will then be for readers to decide.

In December 2019 in Wuhan, China, people reportedly started to fall sick with an illness resembling severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). By January, cases had spread as far as United States and Australia, at the end of January the WHO declared the outbreak to be a “public health emergency of international concern”.

Ardern tells readers how her chief science adviser informed her that the latest modelling indicated that 100,000 New Zealanders would need to be hospitalised, with tens of thousands of deaths. Following such bloodcurdling warnings, on March 19, 2020 she announced that New Zealand would close its borders to anyone who was not a citizen or permanent resident, and that the border closure would include people from the Pacific.

But not if you were a multibillionaire. In August 2020 Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and among the richest people in the world, who had been living in Fiji with his wife and son, was allowed in to New Zealand so that his son could obtain medical treatment at Auckland Hospital.

The New Zealand media were relatively uncritical, except for mentioning that Page had hoped to keep his exemption quiet and that the family had requested a “high level of discretion and confidentiality”.

ACT leader David Seymour called on the Government to be open about Mr Page’s visit, saying: “The Government has questions to answer about why billionaire Google co-founder Larry Page was allowed into New Zealand when desperate Kiwis and separated families can’t get through the border.”

Nicola Hogg, general manager of border and visa operations, said that Mr Page “met relevant requirements’ to be approved entry.”

Speaking to AFP news, Ms Hogg admitted Mr Page was not a permanent resident of New Zealand, but due to privacy reasons would not comment further without a privacy waiver.

International media treatment was more critical, the UK Express headlining “Jacinda Ardern faces fury as NZ allowed Google chief into country despite closed border”

Making exceptions for billionaire non-citizens is evidence that for the New Zealand government, money trumps kindness.

New Zealand’s border was also made less porous for film industry people involved in production of the sequel to Hollywood’s Avatar, and for competitors in elite sporting events such as Ironman junior badminton championships, and the Zealand Golf Open. Exemptions were also granted for crew who would be involved in the 2021 America’s Cup.

It’s doubtful if many of the thousands of New Zealanders who were locked out of their own country would consider that ‘kindness’ was Jacinda Ardern’s core value, as was brought into sharp focus when kiwi citizens were prevented from seeing their seriously ill or dying relatives.

Paul Mullally, an Irish-born New Zealand citizen, revealed that he was forced to watch his mother die via video link due to New Zealand’s Covid-19 restrictions.

Even worse was the predicament of pregnant New Zealand women who were stranded overseas during lockdowns. Although people with medical conditions overseas were able to return to New Zealand, pregnancy and childbirth were excluded.

And for pregnant ex-pat kiwis forced to give birth overseas, there was another problem – citizenship for the child. Under New Zealand law, babies that are born overseas can’t automatically pass on New Zealand citizenship to their own children.

In January 2022 this was brought into sharp focus by the case of Charlotte Bellis, an Al Jazeera journalist in Afghanistan, who was prevented from returning to New Zealand where her baby could be born safely. But after submitting 59 documents in attempting to return to New Zealand, her application was rejected. In a speech attacking the Government’s Covid-19 response, ACT leader David Seymour said;

“…that great feminist organisation the Taliban has now been given the outsourcing of New Zealand’s maternity care.”

In response to the international publicity, the government finally caved in and allowed her back in her home country.

Perhaps mindful of the dangers of attempting to defend the indefensible, Ardern has little to say in her ‘memoir’ about these stains on her trademark escutcheon of ‘kindness’. But perhaps she felt she had to say something to rescue her carefully cultivated image. Too late for actions, she resorted to words, telling the reader that she had had a letter from a woman who couldn’t see her daughter’s body after she had died in a farm accident. Seemingly overcome with emotion and empathy, Ardern writes:

“I cried when I read the letter. She said that she was writing not just to tell me her story but to say she understood why we had the rules we had, no matter how hard. And I could feel how hard they were. Please let this work, I thought. People are giving up so much.”

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Closing the borders couldn’t keep Covid out indefinitely; sooner or later, it was going to get in to New Zealand. In anticipation of this, in March 2020 the government introduced a four level alert system.

In Level 2, limits were placed on numbers in gatherings, and people were required to observe ‘social distancing’ by staying 2 metres apart.

In Level 3, people were ordered to stay at home in what was termed their ‘support bubble’, defined as those with whom one has close contact, such as families. Within a bubble, there was no requirement for social distancing.

Level 4 was Lockdown, a term used in the prison system to deal with riots. No gatherings, including church services, were allowed. Only essential services such as supermarkets, pharmacies, and petrol stations, were allowed. Schools and other education services were closed.

“Don’t talk to your neighbours”

At a media briefing on August 17, 2021, Ardern said that “the public can drive locally to essential services, such as the supermarket, but need to stay 2m away from others and to wear a mask when they go out anywhere”, and “don’t congregate and don’t stop to talk to your neighbours”.

Do as I say, not what I do

Among the most prominent advocates of masks and social distancing was Siouxsie Wiles, microbiologist at the University of Auckland, and Ardern’s science advisor. Her role in publicising the government’s response to Covid led to her being seen as ‘the public face of the Covid-19 pandemic’. In acknowledgment of this, she was presented by Jacinda Ardern with the award of the 2021 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year.

Speaking to Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon on August 18, Wiles said that now that we know Covid-19 is airborne, “stay away from people who aren’t in your bubble.”

“Don’t hang around and have a chat, connect in other ways. We’ve got phones, we’ve got Skype, we’ve got Zoom…we need to physically disconnect for a little while,” she said.

Given the wall-to-wall propaganda, you’d assume that those who were telling us about the importance of masks and social distancing actually believed their own propaganda. Well, Siouxsie Wiles didn’t appear to.

‘Stay away from people’, she exhorted.

But on Friday 3 September, just a couple of weeks after her Radio New Zealand interview, while Auckland was still in Level Four lockdown, Cam Slater reported on his blog ‘The BFD’ that she had been seen “hanging around and having a chat” with a journalist at Judges Bay in Parnell.

And it gets worse. The BFD obtained a video showing Wiles sitting in close proximity to the journalist, and neither was wearing a mask.

One would assume that the public would be interested to know that one of Ardern’s key science advisors had been observed breaking lockdown rules, so she was invited to comment, but The BFD reports that there had been no reply.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with Ardern’s trademark ‘kindness’, consider how Wiles’ transgression was handled by the authorities.

The story was given to 1News, but after sitting on it for five days The BFD’s source was told that they wouldn’t be using it because Wiles wasn’t a politician, so there was no public interest in the story. Evidently, an editor at 1News had chosen to suppress it, clear evidence that New Zealanders are being lied to, if only by omission.

The behaviour of Siouxsie Wiles could be a case of one person’s hypocrisy, but the June 2021 G7 Summit in Cornwall, UK, showed that she was far from alone in having no regard for masking and social distancing. The photo below says it all.

James Delingpole writing in Breitbart, pulled no punches:

“At least one good thing has emerged from the G7 summit: we now know that President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Bieber of Canada and the various other world leaders who’ve been sunning themselves in Cornwall are ocean-going, copper-bottomed hypocrites.”

and

“Sure, when they’re posing for one of their staged photographs they all pretend, for propaganda purposes, that they are Covid regulation compliant.”

What Delingpole didn’t say, and indeed hardly needed to, is that it raised suspicions that the world’s leaders are perpetrating a gigantic fraud.

If so, our own ‘queen of kindness’, would appear to be party to it, and the border restrictions and lockdowns.

But worse was to come with the ‘vaccine’.

Vaccine rollout

The Covid-19 “vaccine” became available on February 20, 2021. When interviewed on the AM Show the previous September, New Zealanders had been told that no-one would be forced to take the shot. “Not only will there be no forced vaccinations, but those who choose to opt-out won’t face any penalties at all.”

These promises were broken as, step-by-step, vaccine mandates were introduced. First the border workers, then the armed services and police, then health workers and teachers and finally, all members of the public who wanted to enter public enclosed spaces such as bars and restaurants. All these workers had to choose between the injection or loss of livelihood and, for some people who had mortgages, loss of their homes.

In addition to the vaccine mandates, pressure was exerted on everyone to have the injection by the introduction of the ‘vaccine pass’. This was a record of a person’s Covid-19 vaccination status, and was needed to enter hospitality venues, community, sport and faith-based gatherings.

The ‘traffic light’ system

In October 2021 Ardern announced details of its forthcoming Covid-19 Protection Framework, an integral part of it being a vaccine certificate. The framework would involve the introduction of a ‘traffic-light’ system once all DHBs reached 90 percent full vaccination rates. The traffic light system would involve three settings – green, orange and red: red to indicate that health care system is at risk of being overloaded, orange when there is pressure on the health care system, and green when hospitals can cope.

Ardern told the media that the vaccination certificates would allow businesses to be able to open and operate at any level, so for people to be guaranteed they could go to bars, restaurants and close-proximity businesses like a hairdresser, they would need to be vaccinated.

In conjunction with ‘vaccine passes’, the ‘traffic light’ system acted as a powerful arm twister for coercing people to take the jab. The need for a vaccine pass to live a normal life resulted in society being segregated into two different classes, those who submitted to government pressure having more rights than ‘refuseniks’.

When interviewed by a New Zealand Herald reporter, the reporter reminded Ardern that she had earlier stated that her Covid policies would create a two-tier system in New Zealand. Offering her the chance to rephrase that statement, the journalist said “you probably don’t see it like this.” Her reply was unequivocal: “that is what it is, she said with a smile”, nodding her head.

Unsurprisingly, New Zealand’s ‘two-tier’ society drew headlines in overseas media, such as the UK Telegraph.

One of the reasons for what the government called ‘vaccine hesitancy’ was that people who didn’t get their news from the media were aware that round the world, even the media must have been aware that the Covid ‘vaccine’ gave little protection. The fact that the slogan “nobody is safe ‘til everyone is safe” is self-contradictory, since if vaccinated people really are threatened by the unvaccinated, the ‘vaccine’ is hardly living up to the claims.

On a less hyperbolic level, but  still implying that vaccinated people are not protected, Dr Fawzi Amin, a senior Red Cross official warned that people who are unvaccinated against coronavirus ‘are a public threat’.

And Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at MIT, and an acknowledged public intellectual, said when interviewed in April 2011 that while unvaccinated people have the right to refuse a Covid jab, they “should have the decency to isolate from the community for the safety of others.”

And as for ‘safe’, there is no need to invoke the mountainous evidence of its dangers, since the government already knew of one of its dangers, myocarditis. In this condition the heart muscle becomes inflamed and can lead to cardiac arrest and death. It is normally a rare condition, but in 2021, soon after Covid-19 mass injections began, there were reports of deaths from myocarditis. The reports became so numerous that they became difficult for medical authorities to ignore.

Yet at a press conference on 19 August, 2021, Prime Minister Ardern said [at 19:15, emphasis added]:

As you know, it’s imperative that we get as many people as possible vaccinated. When we make a decision on who is eligible, though, our No. 1 priority is the medical advice of our experts. You will remember that in June, our regulator, Medsafe, granted provisional approval for the Pfizer vaccine to be given to 12 to 15 year olds in New Zealand. Similar decisions have been made by other regulators in Europe, the US, Canada and Japan. The advice was then considered by an additional group of experts, who also supported an extension of eligibility to young people. On that basis, Cabinet has agreed to make the Pfizer vaccine available for 12 to 15 year olds. This is not a decision we have taken lightly.

Many of us are parents ourselves and take this duty of making decisions about other people’s children extremely seriously, but it is safe, and it’s the right thing to do. So 12 to 15 year olds can become eligible and book, along with everyone else that we are opening up to from the 1st of September .

This was the take-home message for the assembled journalists: based on expert advice, the vaccine was “safe, and the right thing to do”.

Except that it wasn’t safe, according to their own expert medical advisers – advice that the government had knowingly and deliberately ignored, following a report by the CV TAG (COVID-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group), chaired by the Chief Science Adviser, Dr. Ian Town.

Had it not been for the work of investigative blogger ‘Thomas Cranmer’, it’s likely that the public would have continued to be deceived.

On June 24 CV TAG issued a memo headed “Decision to use the Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 12 -15 years. Among the group’s recommendations were the following:

• “there is a potential safety signal for myocarditis in people under 30 years who receive mRNA vaccines (e.g., Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna), which requires ongoing consideration”
• “overall, there is not an urgent need to progress with vaccination of this group, but consideration should be given to equity and whānau-based approaches and ensuring that other childhood immunisation programmes are not compromised, e.g., measles and HPV vaccination.”

So, what happened? The government knew about the ‘safety signal for myocarditis’, yet ignored the advice from their experts.

Excess deaths

Reports of myocarditis were worrying enough, but of even greater concern were statistically significant increases in mortality in populations round the world, particularly among young people.

Most powerful is actuarial evidence from life insurance companies, whose business requires a detailed understanding of death rates in different sectors of the population. To give just one of many examples, in an on-line news conference on Jan 2022, Scott Davison, CEO of the Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica, reported that the death rate in the third quarter of 2021 was up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state. Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies with group life insurance plans through OneAmerica. Moreover, Davison said that most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma [three standard deviations] or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

A 40% increase would be a 12-sigma event, which would happen by pure chance every 2.8 x 10³² years., It’s the same as the probability of repeatedly tossing a coin and getting heads 109 times. This is proof that the event that happened is not a statistical fluke, and that something completely unprecedented must have happened that involved the majority of the American population.

So what could that ‘something’ be?

Such actuarial evidence might have remained below the public’s ‘radar’, had it not been for Edward Dowd, a former Wall Street hedge fund guru. When the Covid shots were rolled out, he was very suspicious because, as part of his work on Wall Street he analysed health care stocks. He knew vaccines normally took 7-10 years to prove effectiveness and safety. The Covid vaccine had been approved in 28 days, in a programme initiated by the U.S. government to accelerate the production of Covid-19 vaccines (“Operation Warp Speed”), so he was highly suspicious from the beginning.

“Then in early 2021, he started hearing about cases of people who were getting sick, or injured, or who had died unexpectedly. He started reading about sudden athlete deaths, [and] suspected the vaccine. He began to look at insurance company results, which eventually led to his study of excess mortality statistics, and the publication of his best-selling book “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022”. In it he brought together the hundreds of reports of deaths of young people, many of whom were teenagers. Though individually reported in local media, as a national phenomenon it was largely ignored by the corporate media. Dowd put it this way:

‘From February 2021 to March 2022, millennials experienced the equivalent of a Vietnam war, with more than 60,000 excess deaths,’ he said. ‘The Vietnam war took 12 years to kill the same number of healthy young people we’ve just seen die in 12 months.’

Since this 12-month period coincides with the Covid vaccination rollout we might have expected to see a decrease in excess mortality, rather than an increase.

Evidence from an entirely different source had been obtained by Steve Connolly, an Iraq War combat veteran. Appalled by the number of unexpected deaths, he did a computer search of hundreds of thousands of obituaries that mentioned the words ‘unexpected’ or ‘suddenly’. He found a massive surge in unexpected or sudden deaths immediately following the U.S. vaccine roll-out:

Sudden Deaths Skyrocket Among Covid-Vaxxed Pilots

One of the most powerful indicators of the dangers of the Covid injection comes from a spike in deaths of younger airline pilots following vaccine mandates imposed by airlines. Airline pilots are among the most fitness-checked members of the population, so this should led to questions.

A similar spike has been reported in mandated navy airmen, heart failure increasing ten-fold since the they were mandated to take the jab.

Evidence of a very different nature has come from the funeral ‘industry’:

A Toronto casket manufacturer: reported that for the first time in over 30 years, coffins for children had been ordered in bulk.

And more significantly, British Undertaker John O’Looney reported that starting in mid-2020, he has been finding strange clots in the bodies of deceased. For over four years, he has been trying to get his substantial evidence of very unusual post-mortem clots heard, but has received no replies.

Citizens protest: Camp Freedom

In early 2022 the Ardern government’s velvet glove was partly removed and New Zealanders were given hints of the mailed fist.

It began on February 6, when New Zealanders took a leaf out of the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy that had converged on Ottawa in January. The New Zealand convoys started in Kaitaia and Bluff, began converging on Wellington. All along the route, far from cities, thousands of supporters lined roads and stood on bridge, waving flags and slogans. Of the thousands, one that captured the essence of their case was: FREEDOM NOT MANDATES!

Even in the countryside, crowds of vocal supporters waved placards and cheered as the convoy passed them. Bridges over motorways were shown jammed with supporters, even in foul weather.

In the New Zealand heartland, something unprecedented was occurring, so it would be natural to assume that in a genuine democracy the media would be sufficiently independent to report it. But the crowds on motorway bridges were given negligible coverage on TV news. The media were acting as if they were under instructions to ignore it, or at least treat it as an inconsequential fringe element. Karl du Fresne, one time editor of the then-independent Dominion newspaper, implied that the media had conspired to keep the populace ignorant.

But media silence was no longer an option when the convoy arrived in Wellington. They set up camp outside the Beehive and demanded that the government listen to their complaints about the vaccine mandate. Their numbers increased and, ready for a long haul, they set up portaloos and child care facilities. At its peak, numbers were reportedly about 3000.

Olympic and America’s Cup sailor Sir Russell Coutts was at the protest, and in a post on his Facebook page, he said:

“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt compelled to join a protest. I’m not anti-vaccine (I’m vaccinated) but I’m definitely against forced vaccinations.

I’m also strongly opposed to the ever increasing erosion of our human rights and the growing limitations on our freedom of choice. I believe in having the freedom to be able to question so-called ‘expert’ opinion”.

He had a lot more to say, as reported in The Daily Telegraph New Zealand. For his trouble, and for exercising his right to free speech, he was threatened with closure of his Facebook account.

Sir Russell was but the most famous sports person to attend the protest. A number of other sports icons were reportedly there, such as former All Black Keith Robinson, former White Ferns coach, cricketer Haidee Tiffen, and Samoa cricket captain Regina Lili’i.

Apart from such luminaries, the protesters were a pretty representative cross section of New Zealand society.

But that was not how it was portrayed in Fire and Fury, a hour-long documentary by Stuff journalists Paula Penfold and Louisa Cleave. It was implied that the protestors were deluded, strongly influenced by “extreme-right conspiracy theorists” Damien de Ment and Counterspin Media’s Kelvyn Alp, together with Facebook activist Chantelle Baker, plus Claire Deeks of Voices for Freedom.

While this small number of people formed the backbone of Fire and Fury, the central question of why the protesters had come from all over the country in such large numbers was scarcely hinted at. None of the vaccine-injured was interviewed, nor were people who had lost their livelihoods as a result of mandation. And though New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) were continuously present, Penfold and Cleave evidently considered them irrelevant. Could it be that here was a group with the scientific knowledge and medical expertise to hole the government’s mandate below the waterline?

Another inconvenient fact that Penfold and Cleave had to deal with was the disproportionately large number of Maori in the protest – about 30 per cent, not far short of double their national representation of 17 per cent. Journalist Graham Adams describes them as “brown white supremacists”.

It’s interesting to note that a Horizon poll published on February 18 showed that 30 per cent of the polled New Zealanders supported the protest and 61 per cent opposed it; rest didn’t know. As Adams points out, “that’s well over a million New Zealanders who the documentary makers imply were deluded, along with the thousands who camped outside Parliament for more than three weeks. And it’s not as if the poll results were not readily available. They were, in fact, published in . . . . Stuff.”

The distortions and selectivity of Fire and Fury were the subject of a Formal Complaint by Voices for Freedom. Among the most serious of their charges was the failure to give a right of reply, itself a breach of Stuff’s Editorial Code of Practice and Ethics, which states:

“Any subject of a news story who is facing criticism or allegations must be afforded reasonable right of reply before publication. Journalists must make every reasonable effort to reach the subject of a story to extend them right of reply. This should not be construed as harassment. ‘Reasonable’ right of reply means they must be given a fair summary of the allegations against them, and adequate time to respond. The response time allowed will vary depending on the nature of the story and production requirements.”

In response, Penfold and Cleave state:

“All the information we reviewed also helped us take an unusual editorial position: We did not seek to interview the main protagonists, for two reasons. One, they’ve had their say in their endless online videos, chatrooms, and posts, so in this instance, we are providing the balance and context to what they have already said. And two, it would elevate their hateful and dangerous behaviours to a platform equal to the harm being done, in what after all is an infodemic driven by adept manipulators.”

A cynic might suspect that the reason why Penfold and Cleave chose not to give right of reply was that the protesters had a strong case, and that the government had no evidence-based answer.

None of such criticisms had any mileage in the mainstream media. On the contrary, it received high praise. A Stuff article by Jenny Nicholls, was headlined “Fire and Fury documentary shows journalism at the peak of its powers”. According to Nicholls,

“Misinformation merchants, they target government officials, politicians, healthcare workers, journalists, academics, and attack our system of democracy, creating an alternate [sic] reality in which no-one else can be trusted except them.”

One couldn’t ask for a clearer illustration of what psychologists  call ‘projection’, a psychological defence mechanism in which one attributes one’s faults to others. From the outset, Penfold and Cleave’s documentary’s mission statement is clear; to discredit the protestors rather than covering their reasons for being there – in some cases travelling hundreds of kilometres. They focused their ire on a small number of individuals, not all of whom were at the protest. Kelvyn Alp and Damien de Ment were described as “threats to democracy”, and also Amy Benjamin, Chantelle Baker, Carlene Hereora and Claire Deeks, of Voices for Freedom.

As independent journalist Karl du Fresne observed, Penfold and Cleave create the impression of starting with a particular premise and gathering whatever information and images were necessary to substantiate it.

But in the Orwellian world of New Zealand journalism, Stuff tells us that

“Our journalists are fiercely independent and unafraid to fight for the truth. We do that for the benefit of all New Zealanders – including you.”

Ardern on free speech

Freedom of speech is the central pillar of a liberal democracy. With such freedom, competing ideas can be tested by disagreement In the marketplace of ideas. But under totalitarianism, governments decide what is ‘truth’. Indeed, in the Soviet Union the name of the Communist party’s newspaper was Pravda, meaning ‘truth’

So consider what Jacinda Ardern said at a press conference in 2020 (emphasis added):

“You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust the Director General of Health and the Ministry of Health. For that information, do feel free to visit – at any time – to clarify any rumour you may hear. ‘Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth. ‘We will provide information frequently. We will share everything we can. Everything else you see – a grain of salt.”

This could be straight out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. You don’t need to think for yourselves; the Government will do your thinking for you. Any views contrary to what the government tells you are silenced because, by definition, they are misleading ‘misinformation’, if unintended, or ‘disinformation’, if intended.

Ardern’s statement, though reported by the media, attracted little comment about her implied totalitarian mindset. It should have; recall her frequent use of the word ‘comrades’ on her election in 2008 as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth.

Any residual reservations about her attitude to free speech were extinguished when, in September 2022, she compared free speech to ‘weapons of war’ while addressing the United Nations. A brief quote from her speech (emphasis added):

“As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech that we value so highly,”

New Zealand is a long way from the Leonid Brezhnev’ Soviet Union, in which political dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals on the grounds that anyone who didn’t accept communist doctrine must be insane. In the ‘soft’ totalitarian state that is New Zealand (and to be fair, many other countries), the illusion of democracy must be maintained at all cost. Rather than 2am visits from the thought police, those who express ideas contrary to the government narrative are discouraged by the well-worn ‘conspiracy theorist’ label, delivered by state-controlled media.

A more subtle expedient in the totalitarian’s toolbox is the use of applied psychology. Ardern cleverly exploited the human desire to feel one of the majority (‘us’), rather than the minority (‘them’) when, asked about lockdown, she told John Campbell on TVNZ’s 1News: “we’re a team of five million”.

At this point, it’s pertinent to mention some of George Orwell’s thoughts on freedom of speech:

• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
• In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act
• All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
• Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
• The further society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those that speak it.

“Threat to democracy”

In this neo-Orwellian world, ‘democracy’ has taken on a near-infinitely elastic meaning by both the Left, as in the case of “The Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea”, and the Right, as when Margaret Thatcher thanked the ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, saying (at 1:30) “it’s you, who brought democracy to Chile”.

In New Zealand, while it’s not yet the case that ‘war is peace’ or ‘freedom is slavery’, Fire and Fury raised some eyebrows when the “extreme-right conspiracy theorists” were depicted as “a serious threat to democracy.”

Well yes, if you define a threat to democracy as disagreement with government narrative on an issue many people consider to be of existential importance. On this definition, it is Fire and Fury that is a threat to democracy.

River of Freedom – an antidote to Fire and Fury

In stark contrast with government funded Fire and Fury, River of Freedom ,directed by Gayleen Barnes, was released in September 2023, was crowd-funded.

Typical of media reaction was a comment by Graeme Tuckett, a contributing writer for Stuff to Watch:

“River of Freedom is blatantly selective and deliberately chooses one side of the story over the other.”

And the elected representatives of the protestors weren’t happy, either.

Speaker Trevor Mallard demonised them as “ferals”, and ordered them to be audio-tortured with loud music.

Perhaps he’d been taking lessons from the US military when, on Christmas Day, 1989, Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega became the most famous victim of “torture by pop music”. Noriega had taken refuge in the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City after the US military had invaded Panama with the intention of arresting him for drug-trafficking. The US troops had surrounded the embassy but Noriega refused to surrender, so the US army decided to use psychological warfare by blasting loud rock music from loudspeakers. After nine days of this acoustic bombardment Noriega who, as an opera lover, actually liked music, surrendered on January 3, 1990. After this “success”, the US went on to submit detainees in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to similar treatment, with the aim of breaking their will.

Mallard also ordered the protestors to be soaked when, against strong advice from the then police commissioner Andrew Coster and current commissioner Richard Chambers, he ordered the sprinkler system to be turned on them.

Not to be outdone by Speaker Mallard, on 17 February his deputy, senior Cabinet minister Michael Wood, referred to the protesters in Parliament as floating on a “river of filth”. He also claimed that anti-vaccine mandate protesters were motivated by violence, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia (!!!). Wood seemed unaware that the some of the freedom campers could have been his own Mt Roskill. Constituents.

Ironically, it was the phrase “river of filth” that had inspired the title of the 2023 documentary River of Freedom, as journalist Graham Adams informed readers.

In arrogating for himself the moral high ground, what were Wood’s own credentials in that respect?

Not great, as Bryce Edwards, director of the Democracy Project, showed in a Daily Telegraph New Zealand article titled: Does Michael Wood have enough integrity to be a Minister?

After his pontifications on “filth”, it was later revealed that he had failed to disclose his extensive shareholdings, as required under Cabinet Manual rules. The manual directs ministers to adhere to the highest ethical and behavioural standards, which includes declaring conflicts of interest. Ministers cannot invest in any companies that they are involved in regulating.

As Transport Minister, Wood had owned hundreds of shares in Auckland International Airport since 1998, so the public could rightly ask whether he has been serving the interests of Auckland International Airport, or the public interest?

As a New Zealand Herald editorial stated, the situation “cannot be overstated for its egregious potential conflicts of interest.”

His worst transgressions went beyond failure to declare such conflicts of interest. He ignored 12 reminders to sell his Airport shares. His boss, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, explained Wood’s failure to divest himself of his shares as forgetfulness. As Edwards shows, the Cabinet Office had been instructing him to divest himself of his shares for two and half years, with a total of twelve reminders, to fix the problem.

As a result of these revelations of moral turpitude, the targets of his “river of filth” comments must feel a degree of vindication, ‘hypocrisy’ coming to mind.

The Tide goes out for Ardern

In a shock announcement at the Labour caucus gathering in Napier, Ardern announced she was stepping down. “I believe that leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also one of the more challenging. You cannot, and should not do it unless you have a full tank plus a bit in reserve for those unexpected challenges,” she said.

“This summer I had hoped to find a way to prepare for not just another year but another term because that is what this year requires. I have not been able to do that”.

“And so today I’m announcing that I will not be seeking re-election and that my term as Prime Minister will conclude no later than the 7th of February.”

“I have no plan, no next steps. All I know is that whatever I do I will try and find ways to keep working for New Zealand.”

“I’m looking forward to spending time with my family once again. Arguably they are the ones that have sacrificed the most out of all of us.

“More time with my family” is a familiar reason that politicians give when they leave office involuntarily, so cynics might wonder if her reason for her resignation had less to do with her ‘tank’ than with her chances of re-election.

The signs were ominous. Sky News Australia reported that Jacinda Ardern’s popularity declined to a record five year low, her worst approval rating since taking office, and that the centre-right parties could form government at the next general election. To many, it seemed she had abandoned ship, leaving her successor to take the electoral drubbing.

Or should we take her word for it? In a Newshub pre-election interview, Patrick Gower asked Ardern and her rival Bill English if it was possible to survive in politics without lying. Like almost all other politicians, English ducked and weaved, avoided giving a simple answer, even when pressed.

But Ardern wasn’t like other politicians. Asked directly if she had ever lied in politics, she replied without hesitation: “No”, and went on to say that good leadership is “all about owning your mistakes”.

Extraordinary! To be successful, politicians have to tell the voters what they want to hear, which inevitably means lying by omission, or at least being selective with the truth. To voters who wanted a ‘clean’ politician, Ardern’s denial that she had ever lied in politics could have been very appealing.

In her first few years as Prime Minister, her ability to lie with her trademark smile and persuasive hand gestures worked well. Her chickens came home to roost when the great majority of the workforce were mandated to take the “vaccine”, despite having been assured that there would be no such compulsion. The brazen lies continued when her successor, Chris Hipkins told reporters (emphasis added):

‘In terms of the vaccine mandates I acknowledge that it was a challenging time for people, but they ultimately made their own choices. There was no compulsory vaccination, people made their own choices.’

Technically this was true in the sense that, during Prohibition in 1920s in America, business owners chose to pay Mafia gangsters protection money as the only way of avoiding having their premises burnt down. Presented with a choice of ‘no jab, no job’, some couldn’t see much daylight between the Ardern government and the Mafia.

While the New Zealand public were waking up to Ardern’s lies and self-deception, in 2023 she moved to Boston to take up fellowships at Harvard university. In her new home she continued to bask in adulation when interviewed on the Oprah Winfrey show in June 2025.

Asked by Winfrey what she loved most about New Zealand, she replied: “The people. Something I’ve missed since I’ve been away”.

Whether the feeling is reciprocated is another matter.

A kiwi whistleblower; Barry Young

The evidence for excess deaths since the “vaccine” rollout is now indisputable, but governments and media have either ignored the elephant in the room, or resorted to the increasingly outworn ‘misinformation’ label.

But at the end of 2023 one particular government – our own no less – was confronted with a problem that was potentially terminal.

Barry Young is a statistician in sole charge of the nationwide Ministry of Health database on the Covid-19 injections. Concerned at the speed with which the mRNA “vaccine” was being administered without adequate testing, he began looking closely at the data, and concern changed to alarm. What became clear was that the batches of the Pfizer “vaccine” varied enormously with regard to their safety, in particular, death rates. In the case of the most dangerous batches, some people were dying within a week of getting injected.

Barry Young’s disclosure would have come as no surprise to those who had been paying attention. Especially the campaigning group NZDSOS:

“New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science has been calling out the increasing numbers of post-jab deaths for nearly three years since the roll out began. We have calculated numbers in the thousands, with many more suffering serious injuries. We have shown the criteria for causation are satisfied, and that the covid injections can cause death and injury through multiple mechanisms.”

And not only NZDSOS. The UK MP Andrew Bridgen had repeatedly raised the alarm in Parliament over increased mortality and Covid injections. On the 17 March 2023 he spoke about the harms of the covid vaccine programme. The video was initially deleted from his YouTube channel but was reinstated after mass protests.

Over and above what Bridgen had said in his speech, he had spoken to an almost empty House, in what looked like a stage-managed exodus of other MPs as he began to speak. Clearly, Pfizer power is not limited to the Beehive, but extends to the UK Parliament.

On 3 Dec 2023 Barry Young arrived at his home to find his front door smashed and his house trashed. He was arrested by 8 armed police officers. He was charged under section 249 of the Crimes Act 1961 for “dishonestly accessing or using a computer system”.

1News reported that

“A health worker has been arrested and charged after allegedly misusing and disclosing vaccination data, while spreading misinformation about Covid-19, police told 1News this evening.”

Health New Zealand chief executive Margie Apa said: “What this individual is trying to claim about vaccines is completely wrong and ill-informed and their comments demonstrate this. The person has no clinical background or expert vaccine knowledge and appears to be trying to spread misinformation.”

There is no evidence that vaccination is responsible for excess mortality in New Zealand.

“Analysis of the released data is ongoing but work so far has not found any National Health Index numbers or personally identifiable information.

“We take the security of our data very seriously and are extremely disappointed at this gross breach of trust by this individual and his alleged involvement in spreading harmful misinformation.”

Margie Apa’s comments showed that Health New Zealand could find no rational argument to justify its action against Young. For one thing, clinical and vaccine knowledge was irrelevant for his job, which only required expertise in Information Technology. And as for the ‘misinformation’ disclosed by Young, it was government-held information.

And while the charge of “dishonestly accessing or using a computer system” might seem credible to Joe Public, accessing the data was an essential part of his job, as Apa had acknowledged when she said that the former staff member had been “authorised to access data as part of his work”.

One more thing. Margie Apa stated that “We are in the response stage right now and that requires very detailed analysis of the data that was released.” Revealingly, she went on to categorically state that the “vaccination is safe and effective” and that there is “no evidence whatsoever that “vaccination” is responsible for excess mortality in New Zealand.

Extraordinary. Her second statement could only be justified if it was validated by the data which, by her own implied admission, had not been completed.

If health data showed that there is no harm from Covid vaccines why would the government deny access to the relevant data?

For his act of courage and decency, Barry Young faces a maximum of seven years imprisonment for his “crime” of warning the public about the serious dangers of the COVID vaccine.

“When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.” ― Edward Snowden