According to Our World in Data (accessed on 1 June 2025), New Zealand achieved 75 per cent coverage of the initial Covid vaccination protocol on December 19, 2021, when its Covid-related death toll was just 44, and 80 per cent (tantamount in effect to universal adult coverage) on June 8, 2022, by which time deaths had risen to 2,095. As at May 13, 2025, the death toll stood at 4,538. In other words, more than half of all New Zealand’s Covid deaths occurred after effectively universal adult vaccination had been achieved and a scarcely believable 99 per cent after 75 per cent of the country’s population had been vaccinated.

Setting aside questions about their safety, how anyone can claim that these statistics are compatible with the ‘Covid vaccines are effective’ narrative is mind-boggling. Moreover, if we accept Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for disproving a scientific claim (if the claim is that all swans are white, and we find just one swan, then the claim is empirically falsified and scientifically invalid), then the narrative is false not just for New Zealand but for the world.

The crucial period for looking at Australia and New Zealand in comparison to the UK is the nine months from November 12, 2021 to August 10, 2022. All three countries had achieved two-thirds double vaccination in their populations in November 2021. Despite increased levels of vaccination coverage after that date, over the next nine months Covid-related deaths jumped 6.9 times for Australia and a whopping 63 times for New Zealand, but only 1.2 times for the UK (Figure 1). The same variance can be seen in the second chart that depicts the temporal correlation between vaccine doses administered and the Covid-related deaths per million people in the three countries (Figure 2). Clearly, leaving aside the question of their safety, Covid vaccines were hardly effective at all in preventing Covid-related deaths.

If not vaccines, what other factor might explain the difference in Covid mortality between the three countries? Well, thanks to their geographical remoteness in the southern and eastern hemispheres and their decision to close both inward and outward international travel before coronavirus was widely seeded in the community, as well as the good luck of the summer season south of the equator, Australia and New Zealand avoided mass infections when Covid was first rampant. Many epidemiologists warned at the time, as indeed had the WHO in a report in September 2019, that this would delay but not avoid mass infections. In November 2021, compared to around 14 per cent of the British population having been Covid-infected, the rates were only 0.7 and 0.2 per cent in Australia and New Zealand, respectively. That is, the UK had a head-start over Australia and New Zealand in infection-induced natural immunity.

Thus a significantly higher proportion of the British population had immunity acquired through infection than their Australasian counterparts in November 2021. When, believing in the protective benefits of the vaccine, Australia and New Zealand opened up again, their Covid-naïve populations were vulnerable to the virus. By August 2022 the cumulative case totals were comparable in all three countries: slightly over one-third (35-37 per cent) of the population. And by now there is a wealth of literature indicating that natural immunity is both more robust and longer-lasting than the weaker and shorter protective efficacy of Covid vaccines (which also rather changes the harms-benefit equation for healthy people under 70). Australia and New Zealand stand as stark demonstrations of this.