Public Science, Covid19 Vaccines, And The Audio Medium

Thursday, 6 April 2023, 10:54 am
Opinion: Keith Rankin

Public science is an open contestable process, whereby questions of public importance are evaluated in an open contestable forum. If any research by one scientist is not able to be replicated by other citizens using the same data, then the findings of that research cannot be classed as 'public science'. In public science, the data, the assumptions, and the reasoning all must be contestable.

Polarising Radio Media

Whereas television is principally a visual medium, radio (and social media 'podcasts') are better suited to the transmission of ideas, rumours, and information. Also, with people's increased need to 'get off screens' – for eye health if for no other reason – audio media is coming back into its own, long after its heyday in the mid twentieth century.

No longer having the reasonably balanced former Today FM as my 'go to' alternative to RNZ, I have taken to listening to snippets from new online 'radio' outlets The Platform (Sean Plunkett) and Reality Check (Paul Brennan and Peter Williams). While very much on the 'right-wing fringe' today, these three broadcasters forged substantial journalistic careers with RNZ or TVNZ, and it's good to hear their voices again. Though no single voice or outlet should be listened to for too long without recourse to other voices.

At least Reality Check recently ran a long-form interview (24 March) addressing increased 'all-cause' mortality (with Matt Shelton, 'discredited' by this country's technocratic ingroup). Rising mortality is an issue I have highlighted in my charting of excess and total deaths in the pandemic and post-pandemic periods. On 4 April I caught another interview by Paul Brennan, with Guy Hatchard, also discussing ongoing 'all-cause' mortality problems.

Both Shelton and Hatchard are covid 'anti-vaxxers'. I have heard nothing from either to suggest that they have major issues with other vaccinations. I listened though I remain unconvinced by their anti-covid-vax conclusions. I favour other explanations – in short, increases in morbidity and decreases in general immunity – for most of the recent escalation in the West of all-cause mortality. And I am not persuaded that the Covid19 coronavirus is substantially different from previous novel human coronaviruses.

One useful piece of evidence in favour of the life-saving benefits of last year's Covid19 booster vaccinations was the big drop-off in deaths after July; that is, after substantial numbers of covid-vulnerable people were permitted to have their second booster. Further, in Australia excess deaths closely matched New Zealand's in May and June. But New Zealand peaked at 44% in July, in contrast with Australia's peak of 35%. Many more people in Australia (on a per capita basis) had had second boosters before July.

(In my own case, by the way, I got the second booster as soon as I was allowed, in August. This year, my inclination was to get the new bivalent vaccine this month, but was not allowed to because I got Covid19 in December. I have to wait until the end of June. This situation of long waits for vaccines reminds us that the Ministry of Health has had to destroy old vaccine stocks because the Ministry was overly restrictive around allowing second boosters. Many, maybe most, of the people who died of Covid19 in New Zealand in July 2022 were vulnerable people who had had their first booster in January or February 2022, and were not allowed to get a second booster in May or June ahead of the winter covid wave. In other countries, that requirement for a six-month gap between boosters did not apply. Deaths 'with Covid19' in New Zealand were reported for three vaccine cagetories: 01 doses, 2 doses, and 34 doses. No published death data distinguishes people who had three doses from people who had four!)

Hatchard's general tone was that of an mRNA vaccine sceptic, and he was alleging that an important explanation for 'excess deaths' in the United States was aftereffects of these vaccines. While I was not convinced by his overall argument – there are significant differences between countries' age profiles of excess deaths, and the patterns of death in most countries correlates closely with covid case data – he did make this intriguing comment (48' into the interview): "… some vaccine batches are really deadly and others are no more deadly than the flu and that's because of the way that the vaccine is manufactured, which in some cases causes a lot of contamination and in other cases doesn't … [the politicians] don't read the science".

Hatchard offered a research question, a testable hypothesis of the kind which represents the bread and butter of public science. He claimed that death rates were significantly different for people who had received vaccines from certain production batches of vaccine rather than from other batches. While I am not in position to assess the quality of the research he cites, this kind of research should be easily available and replicable by other researchers. Is this an important question? Yes. If some of our vaccine batches have been contaminated, and as a result we were dying (by the metaphorical planeload), then it is a very important question. The Ministry of Health should be telling us about such research, where we can find it, and how independent researchers can verify it. And the audio (and other) media should be being alerted in ways that make them pay attention.

It is when very specific and testable claims such as this are ignored by the authorities that people start to suspect that the authorities are untrustworthy, even deceitful; and it is in this low trust context that 'conspiracy theories' flourish. Public science is a forum for the exchange of understandings about the nature of the world, open to all global citizens. Public science is not experts on authoritative pulpits telling the masses what is true, or what to believe.

(I do worry about the use of the term 'conspiracy theories' as a way of discrediting people who ask inconvenient questions. Such questions should always be addressed, and through a process of open public science. Conspiracies are known to have happened in history. Indeed, we still commemorate one of the most famous conspiracies on November 5 each year. The 1605 Gunpowder Plot was a conspiracy theory until it became a conspiracy fact.)

Scientists promote narratives; they are storytellers, with the same kinds of blindspots as other storytellers. Science is a process which uses publicly-available evidence to contest (and sometimes refute) narratives, including (indeed especially) scientists' narratives. Authority figures are like other people, they are storytellers. We should most trust those experts who are open to having their narratives contested, and who are willing to acknowledge when their narratives are no longer fit for purpose. People in political authority who listen to scientists also need to hear the science, and need to be willing to face up to unintended consequences arising from acting on advice from a faction – even a majority faction – of scientists in a single discipline. Politicians need good advice, not advice biassed to promote fashionable narratives; not advice laced with cautionary inertia, nor advice leading to government 'mission creep'. We can forgive politicians who (with hindsight) make 'wrong' policy calls if they truly follow robust unbiassed decision-making processes.

Helen Clark, the science, and the scientists

Helen Clark (Prime Minister 1999-2008) said yesterday on RNZ in Helen Clark on Jacinda Ardern's legacy as next roles revealed (5'40" in): "There's no doubt that thousands of people are alive today because of the [pandemic policy] steps taken. … Would [people such as her, born 1950] have survived it if had been allowed to rip through our community as it was allowed to rip through others?"

Well, actually, there is doubt. On the narrow basis of excess deaths – the basis Helen Clark is presuming, though apparently not well informed about – when you compare 201922 deaths with 201518 deaths, then Sweden, the best known of the ripper countries, clearly has a better outcome than New Zealand. Perhaps more to the point, Sweden has had a significantly better outcome than its neighbour Finland, the most 'cautionary' of the Nordic countries.

Further, while few of the scientists who presided over the 'science' narrative which Jacinda Ardern's government followed would today acclaim the 'success' of the East Asian countries in terms of their overall mortality experience, those men and women did so repeatedly in the past and have yet to acknowledge that they were mistaken.

The 'science' that we in New Zealand were fed was a biassed narrative that was to a significant extent at odds with the nuanced comments from many of the scientists interviewed on RNZ in (especially) 2021 (mainly interviews on the Saturday Morning and Sunday Morning shows). Helen Clark continues to be a perpetrator of New Zealand exceptionalism.

Even the most acclaimed scientists perpetuated false narratives

I'll finish with a different tale of 'scientist narrative' prevailing over 'scientific research'. Isaac Newton – who made lots of money as Master of the Royal Mint in the years either side of 1700 (though not so much in his earlier pre-occupation with alchemy) – as a sideline from these two main activities of his life became the world's most celebrated scientist, for centuries; thanks in particular to his study of the motions of planets.

In addition to his profound insights into planetary motion and gravity, Newton revised Johannes Kepler's estimate that the Earth was created in the year 3993 BC; Newton favoured an older date, 3998 BC. (For the wider story about Earth's age, refer The Man Who Found Time, 1997, by Jack Repcheck; and How Old is the Earth? summarises the early-modern estimates.) Newton's finely-tuned estimate, deduced from biblical narrative rather than induced from evidence – held as authoritative because of Newton's prestige as the leading scientist – held back scientific progress in geology and biology for a century. Even as recently as the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it was widely believed (even by many experts) that the Earth was just a few thousand years old; despite all the evidence to the contrary. For well over a century, on that question, most people favoured the public scientist over the public science. (And don't get me started on the prevailing 'miasma' explanation for cholera and other transmissible diseases in the nineteenth century; a false explanation perpetuated by scientists long after its useby date.)

Biassed scientists are not bad people. Nor are covid anti-vaxxers. They are simply people, being people. We should evaluate what people say, not who they are. We should listen to (on the radio!) and evaluate their arguments with scepticism but not cynicism. Reason and observation trump anointed authority.

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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.

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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