I try to write about general issues of importance, in a general – indeed global – context. This time I will write just about me.

I am the same age as Phil Goff, Mayor of Auckland. And I want to be appropriately protected from Covid19. I have had three shots of the Pfizer Covid19 vaccine. My most recent vaccination – the so-called booster – was on the first of February this year. On 27 June I enquired about getting another ‘booster’ shot on Tuesday 28 June, before going away ‘on holiday’ on 30 June. I was not allowed to, because of a set of rules that have never been adequately explained. (RNZ‘s Kathryn Ryan tried to ask an expert on 13 July, but gave up in frustration.) The best I could do was to get a vaccination booking at my local Health Centre, for Wednesday 3 August.

(Between 28 June and 3 August, about 700 people in New Zealand will have died with Covid19. The substantial majority of these are Pakeha aged over 70 who received a booster vaccination ahead of the March wave of Covid19, and who have died (or will soon die) of Covid19. How many of these are dying for want of a vaccine booster?A rhetorical question. But the answer will be that at least one of these would have had a booster had they been allowed.)

I am classed as being in the ‘vulnerable age group’. Now, I’m not ‘very old’. But if I was the same age as Joe Biden, or even Jimmy Carter, I would also have been refused. I’ll bet that Jimmy Carter faced no impediments in getting a fourth vaccination shot. But Jim Bolger will have had to wait.

Anyway, I continue to be one of the dwindling number of people who has yet to get Covid19. Today, I asked if I could get my vaccination booking brought forward to Monday 1 August. “No”, they said, “we only do Covid19 vaccinations on Wednesdays and Thursdays”.

So I went to the local shopping mall. At the first pharmacy, I asked if I could come in for a vaccine on Monday 1 August? They said I could ‘walk-in’ any time from Tuesday 2 August. Why not Monday I asked; after-all Monday will be six months since my previous shot. They said I had to wait six months plus one day!! I asked why the Ministry of Health (MoH) requires that I wait that extra day. They had no answer.

So I went to another pharmacy and asked the same question. They said that “I could try coming in on Monday”, and that they can sometimes override the MoH computer. It was a roundabout way of confirming that I am meant to wait ‘six months plus one day’. I further questioned the Ministry of Health’s reason for this extra day’s wait, but the pharmacist had no explanation. He did say, though, to come in on Monday 1 August, implying that he would be able to do the system override.

At first impression, this situation – the needlessly long six-month wait – is a case of ‘bureaucracy gone mad’, killing a significant number of New Zealanders. And, regardless of the answer to that question, why must I wait that extra day beyond the six months?

MoH: Please just answer – not necessarily to me personally, but preferably to this publisher – these three questions? [Reminder: I got my third ‘first booster shot ‘ on 1 February 2022.]

• What is the medical reason why I cannot get my Covid19 ‘second booster’ on Friday 29 July?
• Why was I told by a health professional that I will not be allowed to get my Covid19 ‘second booster’ on Monday 1 August?
• Given the large number of people who become eligible for another vaccination in August, when and how will you tell the vaccination-willing New Zealand public that the rule is that they must wait ‘six months plus one day’?

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

West Europe

The first three charts (above) show three of the larger Western European countries: Germany, France, Spain. (Italy shows a similar picture.)

The most important data item is ‘excess deaths’. (In the case of France and Spain, the last few weeks of this data have been ‘topped up’ using estimates from The Economist, published by Our World in Data. Germany’s data is complete to the end of June, though most countries which release their mortality data promptly do subsequently revise their recent numbers, usually upwards.) For the pandemic as a whole, Germany has ‘lost’ 1530 per million of its population, including 197pm in the first half of this year.

In Germany, we clearly see the ‘Omicron death wave’ in March 2022, a common but by no means universal feature of country charts of this type. Reported covid cases clearly correlate with excess deaths in that month. We are also seeing the same June/July wave in Germany – in its summer – as we are seeing (in winter) in New Zealand. And, there is a clear June/July death wave to match Germany’s ‘case wave’. (Germany’s two worst death waves were in December 2020 [original Wuhan variant] and November 2021 [Delta variant].)

France shows many of the same recent patterns as Germany, though with only about half the severity. Two important differences are that the late 2020 wave came a month earlier in France, indicating that this late 2020 resurgence in Europe was probably driven by tourists from North America; covid levels in the summer of 2020 were much higher in the USA than in Europe.

Overall, France ‘lost’ 1740 per million of its population, including 240pm in the first half of this year. Certainly, France has the look of a more immune population than Germany. And it’s starting to show once again in the French Caribbean; throughout the pandemic, French people – relatively well-adapted to covid – have been conspicuous spreaders of covid through France’s extant empire.

As with Germany, deaths in the present wave do not show up markedly, yet, in the official death statistics; they only show up in excess deaths, meaning many people who have died in this wave have not been acknowledged as covid deaths.

Spain, while much more like France than Germany, still conforms with the general 2022 pattern for Western Europe. While case numbers appear lower in Spain than France, deaths are similar. Overall, Spain ‘lost’ 2570 per million of its population, including 286pm in the first half of this year. Spain looks to be well up the immunity gradient, like France; more so than Germany. This means that I would predict that Germany will have more excess deaths per million in the second half of this year than France and Spain.

We should note the importance of this concept of ‘immunity gradient’. New Zealand (like the much of the Western Pacific region) has a low place on the immunity gradient. This gradient means that countries like France and Spain will be among the most dangerous for New Zealand tourists to visit, at least with respect to catching Covid19. (New Zealand sports teams in Europe this year will be particularly vulnerable to covid, though these younger and fitter sportspeople will generally get through the illness quite quickly. So far, while significant numbers of elite sportspeople from New Zealand have caught covid overseas, almost none seem to have had disabling forms of the illness.)

Thanks to its place on the immunity gradient, in Spain “the pandemic has felt like an afterthought as Spaniards reverted to their usual beach holidays and eagerly welcomed tourists.” Deep in a Covid wave, Europe counts cases and carries on (22 July, NZ Herald courtesy of NY Times).

We should also note that the Scandinavian countries other than Sweden have charts that are similar to the Germany chart; except that their tolls in the first half of the pandemic so far were lower than Germany’s.

East Europe

Here I include charts for Czechia and Hungary, noting that other neighbouring countries – especially Poland and Slovakia – show similar patterns. (The Balkan countries and the former Soviet Union countries are more complex, and will not be further mentioned here.)

The first and most important things to note are that Czechia and Hungary successfully suppressed Covid19 until September 2020; they were significantly more successful than even Germany, in this respect. The pattern then shows a particularly severe winter of 2020/21; in two or three waves, though the troughs of these waves were probably overstated.

The key issue here is that countries in these temperate latitudes – and North Europe is the best set of test cases – suffer significant winter seasonal epidemics in three or four winters out of five. The timings of these regular epidemics of excess deaths vary; February tends to be worst. This makes it very hard to determine a winter normal for these countries.

In the winters of 2020/21 and 2021/22, covid has to a large extent displaced influenza and other seasonal cullers. Thus, in the peak influenza months, excess deaths from Covid19 may fall. Rather covid has displaced these other illnesses as the principal seasonal culler. That’s why covid deaths are best understood in the context of the fatal illnesses that covid is displacing. (See these charts on Evening Report.)

Czechia ‘lost’ 4480 per million of its population, including 234pm in the first half of this year. Hungary ‘lost’ 4500 per million of its population, including 292pm in the first half of this year. Overall, both countries have lost nearly one in every 200 of their populations, so far. (One in 200 of the world’s population would be 39 million people.)

So far, these Eastern European countries have incurred double the mortality of the major western countries noted here. But they suffered much less in the first six months of the pandemic, and they have seen significantly fewer deaths in the last couple of months. They also suffered surprisingly little in July-September 2021, the Delta wave that was then washing through the whole world.

These countries appear to have suffered a calamitous shift down the immunity gradient during 2020, and then paid the full price. Thus, by mid-2021, they shifted up the immunity gradient; or at least the ‘natural immunity gradient’. With waning vaccination immunity, and lower rates of vaccination, these eastern countries suffered in the late months of 2021 (October and November).

From the abovementioned New York Times article: “Other parts of Europe were even more hands-off [this year]. In the Czech Republic, where there are no restrictions at all, including in hospitals, the virus is running rampant, and officials openly predict an increasing spike in cases.” While Czechia is a place to watch, I suspect that any uptick in covid there will be less than the present covid spike in Germany. Either way, like France and Spain, Czechia and Hungary are presumably dangerous countries for New Zealanders to visit at present.

New Zealand and Sweden

These two countries are widely regarded as the developed capitalist countries which represent the opposite ends of the 2020 ‘stringency spectrum’. Sweden’s public health scientists emphasised the importance of population natural immunity as the key to good public health outcomes. New Zealand was the poster-child for interventionist mandates with the aim of creating maximum distance between the coronavirus and the people. New Zealand and Australia took more cues than Europe from those East Asian countries which were at the frontline of the successful suppression of the more lethal (though less transmissible) SARS1 coronavirus.

Sweden ‘lost’ 1210 per million of its population, including 128pm in the first half of this year. New Zealand ‘lost’ minus 220 per million of its population, though plus 272pm in the first half of this year.

Looking backwards, New Zealand has ‘done best’, though its excess deaths this year are comparable to all the other countries mentioned here (except Sweden which has done the best of the developed capitalist countries this year).

What matters, clearly, is the next phase of the pandemic. New Zealand is clearly, at present, well down the immunity gradient. New Zealand remains very vulnerable to international visitors bringing new strains of respiratory (and maybe some non-respiratory) pathogens.

The charts suggest that Spain, France, Czechia, Hungary and Sweden will have comparatively low excess mortality in the coming year and a half. My sense is that Germany will have higher ongoing mortality rates than these neighbours and near-neighbours.

My concern is for New Zealand, ‘going forward’, and with those other western Pacific countries that have taken bigger covid tolls in 2022 than in the previous two years combined. A particular point to note is that the next wave – the coming summer wave (or late spring) wave – will have a higher excess death toll than the present wave.

We see that, in many countries, Covid19 remains much more than a ‘winter’ illness. New Zealand at present is still seeing (at least in the early winter) rising covid-deaths offset by lower than normal non-covid winter deaths. When New Zealand gets to the late-spring or summer, there will be no such offset. Rather, in November or December, New Zealand could suffer a covid death spike similar to those this year faced by South Korea and Taiwan.

In terms of published data, New Zealand had the most covid deaths in the world last week. For some reason this known fact did not make the headlines. (This week New Zealand has been overtaken by Martinique and Anguilla, pointing to a new Caribbean covid wave. Just now is the peak of European and North American tourism into the Caribbean holiday destinations.) Further, while published cases and deaths have held steady in New Zealand over the last week, hospitalisations are rising again in the most recent data. It is possible that New Zealand will suffer over 800pm excess deaths in the second half of 2022; that’s another 4,000 people.

Below is the screenshot from Worldometer from Friday 22 July, showing New Zealand in its place at the top of the table for reported Covid19 deaths. The table is sorted by deaths per million people in each country’s population.

Context of the Immunity Gradient

Johan Anderberg, in The Herd, cites Hungary and Poland – and Spain and France – as being among “countries that had shutdown playgrounds, forced children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach, and surveilled parks with drones” (p.298). And he includes Germany, Czechia and Hungary “among countries that hadn’t been affected in the spring and thus lacked immunity” as having problematic experiences at the end on 2020 (p.292). Hungary, “where Viktor Orbán had invoked the threat of the virus to strengthen his power”, gets a special mention for the initial strength of its anti-covid response (p.260).

Re the matter of children, on RNZ today I heard a news report about this story: Likely cause of mystery child hepatitis outbreak found. This story provides significant counter-evidence against requiring younger children to isolate and wear facemasks. Presumably, adenoviruses have been in short supply in New Zealand too, especially given the prolonged closures of New Zealand’s international borders.

It’s more important than ever that the blindspots in New Zealand’s official covid narrative are exposed. Many countries desperately need a scientific scrutiny of facts, and not just a lazy presumption that a few overexposed experts are presenting all the known facts to the New Zealand public; all the facts about New Zealanders’ – and other peoples of the Western Pacific – changing vulnerability to Covid19 and other infectious diseases.

Instead, the latest reporting of Covid19 [RNZ] is substantially downplaying deaths, with no daily death total given in the press release, and no further mentions of people dying ‘with covid’. If the reporting had been done the same as last week, there would have been a record high daily death total of 40. Even under the new tighter definition, the latest daily covid death toll is 29, also close to the daily record.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

A Kaipara district councillor’s almost week-long participation in New Zealand’s anti-covid-19 mandate protest at Parliament is jeopardising the safety of Kaipara residents, warns Mayor Dr Jason Smith.

Dr Smith said he was particularly worried about those in the councillor’s West Coast/Central council ward which had Kaipara’s lowest vaccination rates.

The councillor was participating in a likely “superspreader” event when health authorities yesterday reported a surge to a record 1160 covid-19 cases.

Anti-mandate campaigner and Kaipara District Council (KDC) councillor Victoria del la Varis-Woodcock left Kaipara for the Wellington anti-vaccine, anti-mandate protest on Thursday, February 10, and was still there yesterday.

She declined to say when she would be returning home. She also dismissed Dr Smith’s safety concerns as “nonsensical”.

Since arriving at the protest, del la Varis-Woodcock has addressed thousands of protesters through a megaphone, calling for the government’s covid-19 legislation to be immediately repealed.

“My name is Victoria del la Varis-Woodcock and I have a message, repeal all covid-19 legislation now,” she has told thousands of Wellington protesters.

Declined to comment
She declined to comment on whether she was representing any of the groups participating in the protest.

Del la Varis-Woodcock has previously told Local Democracy Reporting that elected representatives needed to be role models.

“Elected members need to be role models, need to stand for values of respect, of civil liberties and human rights,” she said.

A video of del la Varis-Woodcock’s speech is circulating online, including accompanying reference to her being a protest organiser, which she said was not the case, in response to Local Democracy Reporting clarification questioning.

The video has been viewed almost 3000 times, amid a protest that started on Tuesday, 8 February 8, and is now entering its ninth day.

She said protesters would be continuing their mission, regardless of water being sprayed or music being played, until the government repealed “draconian” laws it had enacted around the virus.

Del la Varis-Woodcock has been a local government elected representative since 2016.

Individual rights
She said she was not at the protest as a KDC councillor. instead, she was there as a protester exercising her individual rights. It was possible to separate the two.

Mayor Dr Smith said being a councillor was a 24/7 365-day-a-year role.

Dr Smith said del la Varis-Woodcock was entitled to her opinions, but being an elected representative brought a unique position of leadership in her local community that needed to be taken into account.

“As an elected representative there are all sorts of responsibilities to the people and organisation of the council. It is a 24/7, seven day a week role. You don’t get to suddenly be someone else. That’s part of the responsibility of this role,” Dr Smith said.

He said her protest participation was “worrisome” in terms of Kaipara residents’ health and safety.

“It’s a long way to travel from Kaipara to a likely superspreader event during the height of a pandemic with a heightened risk of bringing the virus back here,” Smith said.

That was particularly the case with Omicron rates increasing through the community, he said.

Low vaccination rate
Dr Smith said he was particularly worried about people in del la Varis-Woodcock’s West Coast/Central council ward. Latest available figures showed Māori in this area had a double vaccination rate of just over 71 percent (76.5 percent single dose rate).

Overall, there was a just over 78 percent double vaccination rate and just under 82 percent single vaccinated, he said.

Del la Varis-Woodcock said being at the protest did not compromise being able to carry out her role as a councillor.

She said she would be participating virtually from Wellington in KDC’s District Plan review meeting. The meeting was being held face-to-face in Dargaville Town Hall.

Del la Varis-Woodcock also participated virtually while councillors gathered face-to-face for KDC’s first 2022 meeting, in the same venue on February 2. A vaccination passport is required to enter the building.

Mayor Dr Smith said del la Varis-Woodcock had not provided this.

Del la Varis-Woodcock declined today to confirm her vaccination status, including whether she was unvaccinated.

Personal information
She has previously told Local Democracy Reporting that was her personal information.

Del la Varis-Woodcock describes herself on her Facebook page as “environmentalist, district councillor, mother, artist and lover of language”.

The page shares posts including against vaccination passports and concerns over media representations regarding the virus.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Published by Asia Pacific Report in collaboration.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The protest against covid-19 protection measures has continued through its fifth day with police saying new tents and marquees had been erected while police have strengthened protective barriers.

There are now three barriers between protesters and police in some places on Parliament grounds. This morning concrete blocks were placed before the orange and white plastic barriers.

Ambulance for protester blocked on road
In a statement, Superintendent Scott Fraser said police remained at Parliament grounds overnight to monitor the activity of protesters.

Earlier in the evening, a protester within the grounds needed medical attention, but this was delayed because an ambulance was unable to drive directly to him due to the protesters’ vehicles blocking the surrounding roads.

Molesworth Street remains blocked by more than 100 vehicles including large trucks, campervans and cars.

Fraser said ambulance staff had to walk “some distance” to get to the man, who was waiting with officers.

‘Empathy and professionalism’
“Despite the very difficult environment, our staff, and our Wellington Free Ambulance colleagues, acted with empathy and professionalism, ensuring this man got the medical treatment he needed.”

Fraser said there was one arrest overnight for a breach of bail conditions, but there had been no arrests this morning.

A deluge from Cyclone Dovi has drenched anti-mandate protesters.

MetService issued a heavy rain warning for Wellington which will be in place until 3pm Sunday and strong winds were forecast in the capital today.

More people joined the crowd today in spite of the rain, taking numbers up to about 1000.

Now under a sea of tents and umbrellas, the Parliament lawn is beginning to resemble a monsoon-sodden marketplace.

A battle of the music speakers started up at Parliament this evening as Speaker Trevor Mallard played the likes of Barry Manilow and the Macarena through speakers inside Parliament buildings. He has also been playing covid-19 vaccination advertisements.

Mallard said the 15-minute loop of music and covid-19 ads would be on repeat and possibly play through the night.

Most of the protesters greeted the tunes with boos and played back We’re Not Going to Take It by Twisted Sister on their own speakers.

Use of haka criticised
The New Zealand Herald reports that protesters had performed Ka Mate — New Zealand’s most famous haka — in spite of requests from the Ngāti Toa iwi for anti-vaxxer protesters to stay away from it.

Ngāti Toa has condemned the use of their haka at anti-vaccination protests.

“As the descendants of Te Rauparaha, we insist that protesters stop using our taonga immediately,” one of the iwi’s leaders, Dr Taku Parai, said.

“We do not support their position and we do not want our tupuna or our iwi associated with their messages.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz