As everybody in this corner of the internet knows, a New Zealand Te Whatu Ora employee named Barry Young leaked four million vaccination records from New Zealand's "pay per dose" vaccine programme to Steve Kirsch on 8 November. The records apparently pertain to doses administered to individual patients at apothecaries and doctors' practices; vaccines administered by special mobile vaccination teams and at government mass vaccination centres were recorded separately and remain hidden from us.

Kirsch removed patient names from the data before providing a summary version to Norman Fenton and the full records to my friend William Briggs for independent review. Finally, on 30 November, he released the anonymised dataset to the internet and posted his own analysis to Substack, where he argues vigorously that the records show a vaccine-associated mortality rate of one death per 1,000 doses. This mortality rate would mean well over 13 million vaccine-induced deaths worldwide.

A lively Twitter debate has emerged about the significance of the data and their proper interpretation. Further drama has visited the real world. Young, the leaker, was arrested on Sunday for "dishonestly accessing Te Whatu Ora databases." He faces up to seven years in prison, and was released on bail yesterday. Meanwhile, the New Zealand Ministry of Health secured a court injunction to stop the distribution of the leaked data, and used this authority to close Kirsch's Wasabi file server. Friend-of-the-blog Kevin McKernan, who had agreed to mirror the dataset, likewise had his account with the file hosting service MEGA deleted with no notice, and at considerable personal and professional cost. These measures are of course contemptible and they will do nothing to stop the further spread of the leak, which is now all over the internet.

Some of you have asked me for my thoughts about the leak, but I didn't want to say anything until Briggs posted his analysis, because his work has always been very important to me. I am pleased to say that he has now published his full, in-depth report. I encourage you to read the whole thing, and also to subscribe to his Substack. You won't regret it.