Barry Young and the data dump

Craig Shearer - 11 December 2023

You’ll no doubt have heard about the supposed revelations of COVID vaccine deaths recently revealed by an IT employee of Te Whatu Ora - a government agency - the MInistry of Health.

I’ve previously written about Liz Gunn’s M.O.A.R. - her Mother of All Revelations - which she first discussed just before the general election. Liz Gunn was running her NZ Loyal political party which received just 1.2% of the vote. At that time (just before the election), she claimed to have had contact with a person with data that would reveal the danger of COVID vaccines; that many people had died after receiving the vaccine. At the time of the general election, however, the data had not been released.

That has now changed, with Liz Gunn now recording another (long) video, featuring a man, as so-called “whistleblower” calling himself Winston Smith - not his real name. The video was over an hour long, and I must admit I couldn’t stomach watching the whole of it. But I did watch enough to hear “Winston” telling Liz that he was a scientist, and knew how science works, and that it had nothing to do with “settled science”.

Obviously, Winston Smith is a reference to George Orwell’s character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Smith works for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite documents so they’re in keeping with the party line.

Winston Smith is actually Barry Young, a Senior Oracle Database Administrator.

For those who aren’t familiar with IT job roles, Oracle is a database management system generally used by large organisations. A database administrator (DBA) is generally responsible for the design of databases such as how data is broken up into tables and columns, and how to efficiently manage the performance of the database for the various queries run against it.

Being a DBA makes you an expert in how data is structured and stored, but it doesn’t require any qualifications in how to interpret that data. And, working for our Ministry of Health, the role would give you access to sensitive and private records, which would be required in the day-to-day aspects of your role. It would be a very trusted position.

Young, via Liz Gunn’s video, discussed data he had released to overseas websites that purportedly contained records of individual vaccinations and their dates, combined with mortality data, supposedly showing that a large number of people had died after receiving a vaccine dose.

Of course, releasing such data is illegal, and Young has been charged with a crime - accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes - and appeared in the Wellington District Court last week, to which he’s yet to enter a plea. He was initially denied bail but got released on Tuesday last week. The leak was discovered on 30th November, and he remains an employee of the organisation while an investigation is carried out. Of course, these things need to run their course, and in the interim he has no access to data. I’d expect that he’s not even showing up for work, and will likely be fired from the organisation for some sort of gross breach of trust. (And good luck to him finding work as a DBA after that!)

Te Whatu Ora has brought in international forensic experts to ensure that the data can be taken down from overseas websites.

It would appear that Young is an anti-vax zealot, pushing some predetermined view that the COVID vaccines are dangerous and looking to “prove” that by leaking data. Fairly predictably, he’s now the darling of the anti-vax community. He’s being hailed as a hero by the likes of Counterspin Media, Voices for Freedom, and also appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show last week. He’s also being championed by tech millionaire Steve Kirsch, who I’ve also written about in the past.

Liz Gunn’s video has now been taken down.Surfing her NZ Loyal party website would previously prominently show the M.O.A.R. video, but now it seems that Liz is under a bit of pressure. There’s a letter from Logan Courtney, Acting Leader of the party with a few interesting gems:

“First and foremost, Liz wants everyone to know that she is safe and in a remote location and is uncontactable for the next week.”

And

“Please contact the leaders of the current government; Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters, David Seymour, Shane Reti as well as Mark Mitchell, Minister of Police and ask them to call off the police currently surrounding the two addresses where the whistle blowers reside, also remind them that the world is watching, this is their test of leadership and ask them “are they going to represent international interests like Jacinda Ardern’s tyrannical government or will they fulfill their election promises to return NZ to Kiwis?”

Reading between the lines, I question Gunn’s mental health. I certainly question her connection to reality, as it seems she’s happy to uncritically accept the most outlandish claims.

What was in the data seems to have been data about individuals getting vaccinated - where they lived, when they got a dose, and what vaccine. Young seems to have tried to correlate that data with mortality data, drawing conclusions that the COVID vaccine was causing deaths.

Interestingly, Sean Plunket’s The Platform internet media show did an interview with Helen Petousis-Harris, an expert on vaccines. Of course, we’ve awarded Plunket with our Bent Spoon Award in the past for his gullibility. But, in this case, he seems to be on the right side of things, and notably isn’t on the anti-vax side of things. The interview is titled “A real expert explains why Liz Gunn’s MOAR is a complete crock”.

The interview contains some great debunking by Plunket and Petousis-Harris as they delve into the ridiculousness of the claims. And amusingly, Plunket takes a few potshots at Gunn: “…is a former autocue reader from television”, and at the Voices for Freedom media outlet - Reality Check Radio saying “foreign millionaire Steve Kirsch who may or may not be funding an outfit called Rabbit Hole Radio…”.

One of the original claims that Gunn made was that there were particular batches of vaccines where a large number of people died after receiving it. It was made to sound as if there were people essentially dropping dead soon after receiving a dose from that batch.

Most thinking people would have questions about this. Where are all the bodies buried? Why haven’t we heard from the relatives of these people seeking answers as to why these people all died.

The reality of the data is that it showed people dying after they’d received a vaccine, but quite a time later. It turns out that some of the sites of vaccination were aged-care facilities and hospices, and that the ages of people dying were in their 80s, when you obviously have an increased risk of dying from all causes. It’s guaranteed that we’re all going to die after receiving the vaccine - in my case - I’m hoping it’s going to be a few decades away!

Petousis-Harris also discusses the concept of excess deaths, and points out that during the COVID pandemic, New Zealand had negative excess deaths - I guess a dearth or paucity or deficiently might be better words - because of the protection we gave ourselves by largely keeping COVID out of the country until we had a chance to be vaccinated, and that the return to “normal” saw deaths rise back to their previous average level. (And David Hood gave a good presentation about this at our recent conference, highlighting the irresponsible headline reporting by The NZ Herald “New Zealand records biggest increase in registered deaths in 100 years” - more truthfully stated as New Zealand’s death rate returns to pre-pandemic average levels.)

And speaking of David Hood, he did a good analysis of the misleading nature of the data release on X (formerly Twitter). It turns out that the analysis could have been done from publicly available data, and that the illegally released data actually contained attributes that would make it possible to personally identify people. Anyway, I think this one graph is a good illustration of the point:

The short explanation for this is that we were better protected while having our borders closed and being locked down, then when we opened up again, some people got COVID and died, and some older people who might have died in 2020 from other causes, eventually died later. The data certainly doesn’t reveal some huge increase in deaths and some supposed conspiracy to cover things up.

The reality is that it’s been shown that there are probably 4 people in New Zealand who died as a result of having the vaccine. These deaths are tragedies, but without the vaccine we would have had many more deaths.

Then there’s the side effects from the vaccine, which anti-vaxxers love to highlight. We’re probably all familiar with the claims of Myocarditis and Guillain–Barré syndrome, which are real effects which can be caused by the vaccine in rare cases. The thing is that every potential side-effect of the COVID vaccine is also a potential side-effect of getting COVID itself, but at higher rates of incidence. So anti-vaxxers push the dangers of getting vaccines without balancing this against the risks of getting the disease that the vaccine protects against.

Finally, it was good to see some reporting by Stuff which mentioned our recent winner of NZ Skeptic of the Year. Kelvin Morgan was mentioned as “Prominent sceptic”. If you’ve not seen Kelvin’s work, he does some good work reporting on the conspiracy theorists who inhabit our country, mainly on X.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. Will Barry Young be convicted for the release? What will his sentence be? And how complicit is Liz Gunn in this?