New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science
Posted on November 22, 2021
New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science held a press conference on 15 November 2021.
Transcript from Alice Spring to Mind
Dr Alison Goodwin, General Practitioner
We are not giving individual medical advice. These are our personal views. People should check the government website to obtain a range of views. We are not being paid or influenced to be here.
I graduated in 1993 and worked in an Emergency Department until GP training in 2009. I became a Fellow of the College of GPs in 2013. I have done additional training in lifestyle medicine and I understand the power that nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress management can have over our health, including prevention and treating chronic disease and reducing vulnerabilities to infectious disease. Most doctors have not trained in these areas and are unaware of the power of lifestyle interventions.
From the start of the pandemic, I had concerns about the New Zealand response. There was no focus on health creation and noone was counting the cost of the measures imposed on the population. We only heard from a few academics, most of whom were not working in clinical areas. I listened to these local experts and found them lacking, so in addition I have spent probably over 1500 hours listening to and learning from a range of overseas experts in a variety of fields. This includes practising physicians in ICU, Emergency departments, cardiology, General Practice, as well as scientists, vaccine developers, immunologists, virologists, pathologists and others.
I tried to engage in questions and discussions in the limited available medical forums but was mostly ignored or fobbed off with partial answers. It became obvious as 2020 progressed, that the goal was a vaccine and treatment was not part of the agenda. Strict containment measures were required until everyone could be offered a vaccine.
Early in 2021 I felt increasingly uncomfortable about the inexorable push for a vaccine to the exclusion of all else. I was also concerned about the proposed use of a new technology on such a wide scale, the short length of the clinical trials and the small numbers of participants used to provide interim data that the national program was based upon. Also about the fact that Medsafe had a lot of unanswered questions even as the rollout began, the lack of liability for the drug company, and the continued lack of discussion about anything else.
The marketing campaign began and the only message was “get vaccinated, it’s safe and effective”.
I was disturbed that noone in the medical profession except Dr Simon Thornley was asking questions. Trying to engage with the profession got me nowhere, so I felt compelled to speak to the public. I spoke on a PlanB webinar in October 2020 to voice my questions. A significant number of members of the public shared my concerns. I have continued to speak, even though I am more comfortable having individual medical discussions with patients.
Assumptions:
1. We are in the middle of a pandemic of a deadly disease;
2. The PCR test is a valid diagnostic tool;
3. Nothing other than mass vaccination can be done.
All of these assumptions should be debated and challenged.
I have a document from the Ministry of Health which includes a sentence that “Most people experience mild illness and recover completely using symptomatic and supportive treatments for viruses such as rest, fluids and anti-fever medication”. The public has been made to think that if they catch Covid-19 they are going to die. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of people, including the elderly and infirm, will survive.
Some people will die but they are mostly people already in their last year or two of life. Those people might want to be surrounded and supported by their loved ones at the end of their lives, rather than be left scared and alone. The average age of death from Covid-19 is 82 years, which is older than the average life expectancy.
The survival rate for our children and young people less than 29 years old, is 99.986% without vaccines or treatment. There is the possibility of Long Covid, but I don’t have a clear idea of how many people that is likely to affect and whether early treatment reduces the chances of that occurring.
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Via https://alicespringstomind.wordpress.com/2021/11/23/new-zealand-press-conference/
https://youtu.be/4WmctPKw9aQ
https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2021/11/22/new-zealand-doctors-speaking-out-with-science-3/
Thanks to: https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com