Claims of excess deaths related to vaccine labelled ‘nonsense’

Tuesday, 5 December 2023

Barry Young, a Te Whatu Ora staffer charged with illegally accessing personal information on work databases, in court in Wellington on Monday.

“Nonsense” is the overwhelming consensus from experts in vaccine safety, data and public health regarding claims from a Te Whatu Ora staffer that health data – allegedly downloaded illegally – is evidence the Covid-19 vaccine has been killing people.

Barry Young, sometimes known as Winston Smith, appeared in court on Monday facing one charge of dishonestly accessing databases belonging to Te Whatu Ora, which runs the country’s hospitals.

He was suspended from his role after allegedly downloading a large amount of information from Te Whatu Ora related to vaccines. Young appeared in videos with Liz Gunn – a former broadcaster and would-be politician now accused of spreading conspiracy theories – where he presented the data, which is subject to a non-publication order.

He now faces up to seven years in jail.

But experts who have seen the data say the situation is an example of misappropriating numbers in order to support an agenda.

“This is quite classic,” vaccine safety expert and Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris said. “This is what people who are in this game do all the time. They take people who've had an event [like] an illness or death, and they attribute it to exposure to a vaccine.

“If you go out and you vaccinate 90% of the population. Of course, people are going to continue to die as per normal. We saw an increase in mortality at the increase of Covid outbreaks.”

The four deaths most likely to be due to the Covid-19 vaccination had been through robust investigation, Petousis-Harris said.

In September last year, the coroner concluded 26-year-old Rory Nairn died in 2021 of myocarditis 12 days after receiving his first Covid-19 vaccine, although this was a “diagnosis of exclusion” because there was no test that could find the presence of the vaccine in the tissue.

Mathematician Professor Michael Plank said the data “looks like it’s been picked to tell a certain story”.

“If you look at the crude number of deaths, yes, that has gone up a little bit since before the pandemic. But if you actually account for the fact that the population is larger and older now … that age, standardised mortality rate is actually lower now than before the pandemic.”

Young had no clinical background or expert vaccine knowledge, Te Whatu Ora said. He remained an employee while an investigation was under way, but his access to all systems was revoked last Thursday as soon as Te Whatu Ora became aware of the breach.

Controlling for age was a fundamental move when assessing death rates, vaccine safety expert Dr Janine Paynter, of the University of Auckland, said.

“More people die when they are old rather than young unless there is a war. I also take into account deprivation, ethnicity and sex because these things effect death rates as well as age – if you don’t take them into account then your findings are nonsense.”

Data analyst and IT expert David Hood put it another way: “Since Victoria was Queen, we have used death rates by age for looking at how dangerous things are. If you aren't doing that, you're missing over 130 years of understanding.”

In fact, once basic controls are added, the data supported lower than average mortality, Hood said. “We've been being vaccinating for 137 weeks. And the death rate for those 137 weeks for every age group is lower than before Covid-19.”

University of Otago public health professor Michael Baker says there is “no evidence whatsoever” that vaccines have caused excess deaths.

Public health professor Michael Baker said the same, adding much of the rises in mortality could be attributed to Covid-19 circulating and low death rates linked to lockdowns.

New Zealand surveillance data provided no evidence the Covid-19 vaccination was killing people, Baker and his colleagues recently wrote in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

“Excess mortality only started to rise when Covid-19 was circulating [in 2022]. Whereas the previous year, when we got most of our vaccine, it was still declining,” Baker told The Post.

“There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest an association with vaccination.”

Baker was baffled by the alleged data thief’s motivation, saying if they were concerned about what they were seeing, they could have acted without breaking the law.

“We’re all on the same side in a sense. If a vaccine is causing harm, we would be very keen to detect that.”

Vaccine safety expert and Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris says increased mortality occurred around the time of Covid-19 outbreaks.

Baker said fewer people have died in New Zealand overall since the pandemic began because lockdowns prevented deaths by influenza and RSV viruses.

“We are still remarkably ahead of where we would have been if we had never had a pandemic.”

Several experts pointed out conclusions could incorrectly be drawn without having to steal information.

“It is unnecessary to use stolen data to make misleading graphs when you can make just as misleading graphs from publicly available data,” Hood said.

Petousis-Harris said many researchers were appalled at the unethical use of private data.

“Of all the work that we had to try and do to get access to data, funding and resourcing, to do these things properly and well and transparently … a lot of researchers will be a bit peeved.”