Professor John Gibson

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Best in Show? 

The last eight months have seen 3,000 more deaths than expected – an unfolding disaster. Over 1,000 are unrelated to COVID-19. Health authorities and politicians should face more scrutiny over the causes of these unexplained excess deaths - especially as they are concentrated in age groups eligible for boosters.


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COVID-19 Boosters and Rising Excess Mortality in New Zealand

Overseas health professionals have called for booster vaccinations to be discontinued for safety reasons. A comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the COVID-19 booster rollout should be conducted: Given that over 2.5 million booster doses have been administered, this amounts to over 400 excess deaths.


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Public Misunderstanding of COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

There is a widespread public misunderstanding about the testing the vaccines underwent in the pivotal trials underpinning their approval, with over 95 percent of New Zealand’s voting-age public believing that the vaccines were tested against more demanding criteria than was actually the case.


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Economic and Health Effects of Mass Covid-19 Vaccination

From these results it seems that mass vaccination is some sort of get-out-of-jail card, as a way to get out of ruinously expensive lockdowns and allow some rebound in economic activity.


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Lockdown Again

The apparent kindness of locking down to limit Covid-19 deaths will, instead, be killing more people by making us poorer - lockdowns are one of our greatest peacetime policy failures.


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Lockdowns only slightly postponed deaths in New Zealand

The Level 4 lockdown imposed on March 25 2020 in New Zealand was the world’s most restrictive set of closure and containment policies at the time.


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Killed by Kindness?

There are at least two grounds for concern about the New Zealand strategy. First, the people making decisions are the same ones who botched the preparation for the arrival of Covid-19 and so there is little reason to have faith in the wisdom of their choices...


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Government Mandated Lockdowns Do Not Reduce Covid-19 Deaths

In terms of the recent past, the ineffectiveness of lockdowns implies that New Zealand suffered large output losses, of ten billion dollars or more, for no likely benefit in terms of lives saved as a result of the decision to move almost immediately from Level 2 to Level 4... Any claim that lockdown was necessary to save lives can be treated with strong scepticism.