Silenced?

A New Zealand focused anti-vaccine “documentary” has recently been released, called Silenced. It focuses on broadcaster Peter Williams, as well as ex-GP Anne O'Reilly and sociologist Jodie Bruning, with much of the talk centering around COVID vaccination, the mainstream media and alternative treatments such as ivermectin. It also talks quite a bit about Dr Simon Thornley, past winner of our Bent Spoon award, although the footage the documentary makers shot of Thornley is not used in the documentary beyond a couple of silent clips, as apparently his lawyers recommended after filming that he shouldn't be a part of it.

I have to say that for a project that appears to have been completed on a shoestring budget, it's pretty well put together. However, despite it looking somewhat professional, the content is another matter. There's nothing really new in this documentary, and if they'd kept away from the alternative medicine nonsense and ivermectin claims, it would have looked a lot less like quackery. As it is, to an extent the film just feels like a collection of bad ideas strung together into some sort of alternative narrative, along with a new way of describing nonsense. Apparently the claims that ivermectin is a wonder drug and vaccines are dangerous are not pseudoscience, they're just “uncomfortable science”.

The silencing referenced in the title appears to reference Peter Williams' removal from MagicTalk radio, as well as Dr O'Reilly's removal from the Medical Council's register of Doctors, the refusal of mainstream media to broadcast anti-vaccine messaging, and even the idea that the documentary itself is being silenced. As proof of this, the official Silenced website says that a copy of the video was removed from video hosting site Vimeo. However, it'll come as a surprise to nobody to hear that the conspiracy-friendly site Rumble has no concerns about hosting it, so it turns out that the video hasn't been silenced after all and it can easily be watched at:

https://rumble.com/v2gxr4i-silenced-nz.html

I have my suspicions that maybe, just maybe, the documentary makers posted their video to Vimeo knowing full-well that it would be in breach of the site's terms and conditions and taken down, just so that they could show this on their website: