Covid-19 Royal Commission of Inquiry, Phase 2: My Submission

By Olivia Pierson

To make your own submission click here:

The COVID-19 Inquiry is assessing key decisions made by the New Zealand Government in 2021 and 2022 in the following areas:

Vaccines, including mandates, approvals, and safety Lockdowns, especially the lockdowns of late 2021
Testing and tracing technologies (like RATs or the COVID-19 Tracer app), and public health materials (like masks).
In relation to these topics, we need to hear from you about your COVID-19 experiences and how you think the Government should respond to pandemics in the future.
 
Please share with us your COVID-19 pandemic experiences related to the topics above, and your views on how pandemics should be responded to in the future:

It was obvious from the very get-go of the Covid pandemic, late 2019 - early 2020, that the Chinese Communist Party had lied to the World Health Organization about the origins of the virus, stating in no uncertain terms that it had originated in Wuhan, at the Huanan Seafood Market only miles away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology BSL-4 laboratory.  The human-to-human transmission, they said, had jumped species from either bats or pangolins, or whatever. They kept claiming that the virus was zoonotic in origin yet never found the culprit. Originally, before Taiwan blew the whistle, the CCP had denied that human-to-human transmission was taking place at all.

As early as January 2020, the lab-leak theory had begun to circulate. By Feb 2020, Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, had appeared on Fox News questioning the wet market narrative. He, along with anyone else who did so were labeled “conspiracy theorists.” When I say it was “obvious” that China (and the WHO) lied, I wrote this article in April of 2020: “Did China Unleash a Bio-Weapon?”

If I as a lay-person could work out the lies and contradictions in play, as I sat inside my home in lockdown from NZ, while we lived through our government implementing the CHICOM pandemic playbook for a plague emerging from within their own country, then I submit that our leaders here also could have. But instead they just nodded along and militantly followed all recommendations from the WHO, becoming tyrants as a result, no matter how destructive the WHO recommendations were to our nation, or to people individually.

The VAXX:

The rollout of the Covid-19 vaccination was nothing short of creepy and obsessive. Remember the absurd televised “vaxathon?” It became clear that lockdowns were used on us in order to boost vaccination numbers. That’s heavy-handed coercion… made worse by the constant government propaganda of that time, which set unvaccinated people up as scapegoats. What a disgusting thing to do to a population of mutual citizens. Ardern was smug about “creating two classes of people” - the vaxxed and the unvaxxed… “That is what it is… yep, yep,” as she famously responded to a reporter’s question.

Medical ethics requires proven safety before interventions are given to healthy people, especially under provisional mandates. Full vaccine approval came post-mandate. Despite decades of mRNA vaccine failures due to safety and efficacy issues, the government allowed Big Pharma to vaccinate a mostly healthy population without full trials. Safety and efficacy data shifted in 2021-2022, with long-term effects still unknown.

Our government’s contract with Pfizer has never been disclosed to us. This lack of transparency has been destructive and is just plain wrong, fueling suspicion and bad-faith in a large sector of our population who consider that to be unacceptable.

In October 2022, during a European Parliament hearing, Dutch MP Rob Roos asked Pfizer’s President of International Developed Markets, Janine Small, whether the vaccine was tested for preventing virus transmission before market release. Ms. Small responded, “No,” explaining that the company had to “move at the speed of science.”

How could an untested gene therapy, not evaluated for transmission prevention, be labeled a “vaccine” and distributed to our entire population under “provisional approval” and “emergency use”?  This raises profound ethical concerns.

Our government maintained lockdowns, coercing citizens to receive this questionable experimental gene-based therapy. This constituted an unconscionable violation of individual rights under our Bill of Rights.

Most alarmingly, pregnant women faced pressure from doctors and employers to be vaccinated.

The widespread revulsion at this coercive vaccine campaign drove thousands of citizens to converge on Wellington’s Parliament grounds in a convoy to protest, denouncing these egregious measures.

All our children who took the vaccination now have issues around their own health. My very fit, clean-living 35 year old son recently said to me that before his Covid vaccinations, he used to get a flu once every four years or so, now he’s going down with flu (including Covid) four times a year. Something has weakened his immunity and I can see this in all my children and their friends. Frankly, I find this worrisome. It has destroyed my peace of mind and faith in the future quite considerably.

What is so enraging to me is that Covid was always a highly curable virus, but we were not encouraged by doctors, nor government officials, to seek any other protocols for cure apart from vaccination - that’s another super creepy factor in this whole debacle. Other treatments were actually restricted by Ashley Bloomfield. For more information regarding this, please read my article: “Why All the Panic Porn When Covid Cures Exist?” (written in August 2020).
 
The Lockdowns:

The fact that we allowed our government to exert the unprecedented power of shutting down our businesses and calling a halt to our daily, weekly, monthly liberties over a Chinese virus, which actually wouldn’t harm 99% of our population, was a terrifying spectacle in its total overreach. Ought we to accept lying down that our lives can be paused whenever the government decides they must be? This was always an utterly untenable option for the free people of any democratic nation, and I almost cannot believe that it happened.

For those who say, “we didn’t know what we were facing at the time so we had to err on the side of caution,” there were voices, great, esteemed, knowledgable and credentialed voices, such as Professor John Ioannidis, who were advising against lockdowns right from the very beginning. But the cooler heads did not prevail; they were attacked and canceled instead. At the time, the WHO were wildly predicting fatality levels to be as high as 3.5% and Imperial College London’s predictions were much higher.

Professor Ioannidis’ March 17, 2020 article advised more caution with such limited data available, and used the example of the Diamond Princess cruise ship which housed an elderly population where Covid broke out on board.  During that cruise, 7 out of 700 people died,  which showed a 1% fatality rate of the most high-risk people - the elderly with multiple comorbidities as they endured effectively a lockdown together on a ship.

Ioannidis wrote, fully cognisant that he (everyone) was dealing with very limited data, "reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%” and most of those would be people with limited life expectancies (aged & with multiple co-morbidities).

Ioannidis:

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.

Professor Ioannidis warned that draconian lockdowns and social distancing measures could harm populations more than the virus itself, likening the response to “a cat attacking an elephant, causing the elephant to panic and fall off a cliff.” He argued that restricting work and movement might inflict greater societal damage than COVID-19.

I was shocked by the vicious attacks on Ioannidis, a previously esteemed medical scientist, following his op-ed’s publication. Widely respected, he was derided and publicly shamed for offering a measured professional opinion early in the COVID-19 crisis—a perspective that should have been invaluable amid the panic.

To me, this revealed a global wave of public hysteria rather than a rational response to a flu-like pandemic. The pattern of savagely criticising and shaming other medical experts who shared Ioannidis’ cautious stance — many of whom were seasoned professionals—only reinforced this view, becoming a disturbing trend throughout the pandemic.

Again, this was nothing short of creepy.

Sincerely,
Olivia Pierson
Auckland, NZ


[To read Kirsten Murfitt's outstanding and super-polished submission, click here]