Winston Peters: An Important Voice for Truth in Parliament

Foreign Minister and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has emerged as the most direct political voice demanding accountability for the covid-19 vaccine rollout. Support him or not, his words are not merely political theatre; they carry the weight of official findings and a personal stake that should not be dismissed. But the ground he stands on was prepared by many others who worked in obscurity or faced censorship and outright persecution, all while the captured media lauded the powerful.

Royal Commissioner Does a Favour

The current government has largely rolled over to the second Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI2) into covid-19 in accepting most of its recommendations. Senior Ministers were quick to talk up its criticism of the Ardern government’s economic carnage, but there was zero reference to the various accounts of those who “believed they were harmed” by the covid injections.  

Winston Peters will always be the man who pushed for the second Royal Commission but could not negotiate adequate terms of reference with the coalition on the strength of the election results.  Of course the RCI2 was the obvious real-time whitewash many of us predicted, but it did confirm one disturbing fact whilst attempting to insulate government from responsibility for poor external advice: in November 2021, the Covid-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group (CV-TAG) advised the Ministry of Health that the two-dose schedule posed an “unnecessary risk” of myocarditis for 12–17-year-olds, covered here in reluctant fashion by Stuff (who would never mention our name in a month of Sundays!) and also in our own articles, the NZ Herald (pay-walled) and the Freedom Party’s Facebook page. 

The Commission concluded that this advice was never passed on to Ministers or the public. It described this failure as “significant”. The report confirmed that the advice stated: “risks associated with the transmission of covid-19 … among those aged under 18 are insufficient to justify mandating a 2-dose schedule of the Pfizer vaccine”.

Yet the mandates and vaccine passes remained in force. An OIA by Reality Check Radio uncovered that 311,000 young people in that age group received a second dose, despite the risk-benefit assessment being determined negative by CV-TAG.

Peters Joins us to Demand Accountability

Mr Peters has been remarkably direct and has named names in Parliament. He has called for a select committee inquiry into vaccine injuries, arguing the Royal Commission did not go far enough. We disagree that would be a trustworthy forum. Notwithstanding, he has named former ministers Chris Hipkins and Dr Ayesha Verrall, along with epidemiologist Dr Michael Baker, as figures who should face accountability. This is sweet music to the ears of many who have stood up to the war on humanity and worked to help the casualties.

In an interview with Chris Lynch Media, Peters was asked directly whether he believed previous ministers should be charged. He said yes. Asked whether he meant criminally, he said yes again.

Referring to the dangerously double-dosed youngsters he said, “Many of those people are going to have truncated and difficult lives as a consequence as time goes forward,” he said. “Mark my words, you’ll see what happens”. 

We cannot emphasise how seismic these statements are, nor thank Mr Peters enough, against a background of silence, obfuscation and outright lies from many officials on the consequences of the covid jab tragedy. We have presented evidence to them over and over of the jabs’ many dangerous problems. Some effects may have been silent initially but are showing up now and will continue to do so long into the future. 

A Personal Stake

Peters has revealed a personal dimension to his crusade. He has referred to a condition affecting his daughter that he says followed vaccination. His question cuts through political abstraction: “What are you going to say to that young person when they’re 19, 20 years of age, maybe 25 years of age, they get a condition that’s brought on by them having the second vaccine that they were warned not to have?” 

The Debt to Those Who Dug for Truth

The evidence Peters is now running with was uncovered through painstaking work by researchers and journalists who were dismissed as conspiracy theorists while they dug for the truth.

Sue Grey and Aly Cook of the Freedom Party (formerly the NZ Outdoors & Freedom Party) spent countless hours on forensic research through Official Information Act requests. Their work uncovered:

• A critical August 13, 2021, meeting where ministers – including Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, Grant Robertson, and Andrew Little – met via Zoom to finalise the youth vaccine strategy.
• A briefing paper delivered just before that meeting with a directive to sanitise public messaging: “It was suggested that the wording around the potential benefit that an extended dosing interval may have with regard to myocarditis risk should be removed or re-worded”.
• Subsequent OIA denials claiming records of such a meeting “do not exist” – until the agenda finally emerged.
• Meeting records scrubbed from ministerial diaries, with Robertson’s diary altered on that meeting only and placed out of chronological order.
• That many, if not all, of the Vaccine Minsters’ meetings were unminuted.

Aly Cook has stated: “We were referred to as conspiracy theorists and now we are proven to have been correct. Information was withheld. There are people who died from the vaccine and who have injuries with ongoing suffering, one is my son and this fight is only just beginning”.

Derek Cheng of the NZ Herald has done the journalism that gave these findings wider exposure. His investigations tracked how Hipkins’ name appeared on a Cabinet paper showing he knew about the increased myocarditis risk for teens as far back as December 2021. Cheng’s work has connected the OIA material to the public record in a way that the mainstream media largely failed to do during the pandemic itself.

A Polarising Messenger, But a Necessary One

Peters can be a polarising figure. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has reminded reporters that Peters originally supported vaccine mandates, even calling for them to be a requirement for welfare and parole. 

But Mr Peters, like many others, now knows he was tricked in the Ardern years, and has said during campaigning he uncovered for himself evidence that the rationale for the long Auckland lockdown was based on an implausibility. Many believe the same is true for the South Island lockdown, blamed on a solitary case in Queenstown. It is clear now that the various vaccination drives reaching preset government targets coincided nicely with the lockdowns being lifted. 

Peters has said someone else posted the mandate comments and they did not reflect his views. But however one thinks of the messenger, the questions he is asking are now on the table, and they require answers.

The Genie Is Out

This is not a position Peters can retreat from. Once a politician of his mana names names and talks about criminal charges, it’s not a position he can walk back. The issue now has its own momentum.

The story is being covered across local and international outlets. The genie is out of the bottle, and even Peters himself cannot put it back, and he seems sincere enough on this not to want to.

We have to say though, that as a Minister and recent Deputy PM, his office has received many of our letters of concern. Indeed he accepted by hand an Open Letter at parliament, though what happened to it after that is still unclear to us. 

The aware people in our community, who are awake to the many threats against our peace and freedom, have bemoaned that we lack honest and brave politicians, such as the handful of senators in Australia like Alex Antic, Gerard Rennick and Malcolm Roberts, and Ron Johnson and Rand Paul in the US. Well, now we have elder statesman of NZ politics Winston Peters who is putting vital questions on the table – questions which the rest of us have been screaming into the void for years. 

However, his first-term MP Tanya Unkovich did manage to get mention of the vaccine injured, and the fact of NZDSOS speaking out, into the debating chamber before she later quit the party. This was after several meetings with a group of vaccine injured involving her and a senior NZF official, and later with Lynda Wharton of The Health Forum NZ.

The Great Realisation

Why was the risk to our youth hidden from us? Why were the questioning and dissenting voices silenced? Why is there such resistance to a full inquiry into the vaccine rollout?  How many dead and injured children and young people are there in NZ as a result of the deception? Not to mention all the older people dead before their time?

We know some of the answers. Because the vaccination imperative was an order. Get it done, and nothing and no-one must get in the way – even the law, apparently.

But there is so, so much more for the NZ public to learn. They could do worse than read our open letters, our evidence document for the Royal Commission and many others like Voices For Freedom’s People’s Position, our own project of expert interviews (Substantial Minority) for the Commissioners and our Truth Project of many whistle-blower accounts. 

The Freedom Party’s investigation, now picked up by journalists and carried into Parliament by Peters, has moved this from fringe concern to mainstream political debate. Whether this messenger has always done the right thing or is late to the party he must be supported and enabled to continue.  And the answers will not be easily suppressed.

Acknowledgement: This article draws on the investigative work of Sue Grey and Aly Cook of the Freedom Party, whose OIA requests uncovered the August 2021 meeting records and the directive to suppress myocarditis risk information. Philip Crump at www.cranmer.substack.com deserves credit too. Their work, together with the journalism of Derek Cheng at the NZ Herald, has brought these facts into the public domain where they can no longer be ignored.

WATCH: Winston Peters in His Own Words

• Chris Lynch Media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTGMsRk1jIo
• In Parliament https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFiGujtG3YM
• The Platform https://www.facebook.com/reel/28864211603180838
• RNZ Article https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/882545/winston-peters-refuses-to-apologise-for-racist-comments-after-meeting-with-pm

WATCH: Tanya Unkovich in Parliament