Some of his more restrained quotes include: "This "virus" which is nothing more than a bad flu has a 99.7 per cent recovery rate yet the maniacs in the beehive persist with the lie" and "I don't know why everyone's pandering to this pandemic, what pandemic?".
In spite of the limitations of the Auckland lockdown, he cruised around the city three or four times a week, and as friend described him: "He certainly wasn't a frail old man, he was as active as the day is long".
He remained unvaccinated and despite his faith in his "immune system" he caught the virus, probably from a visit to friend whose wife's son who had attended a funeral along with a number of Covid cases.
This person ought to have been in self isolation.
The same friend who attested to this anti-vaxxer's good health described him as "a very stubborn and opinionated man".
His character and his anti-vaccination stance were to cost him his life.
He was hospitalised with Covid-19 and died at North Shore Hospital last Saturday.
Many of his social media posts concern a perceived attack on the individual's personal freedoms, most importantly the right to refuse vaccination (which is protected under law).
Relatively small numbers of this persuasion have defied Covid-19 restrictions in Auckland and other towns to insist on their right to assemble and protest at this supposed loss of freedom.
To put this into perspective. The most generous estimate of the turnout at the largest of these gatherings was 2000 people in the Auckland Domain. This is from a city of a million and a half.
There is also good sense to be found on social media like my own son James' post on Facebook which I quote in full:
"I've been thinking a lot about why I find the protests against the Covid response so galling. I think it's because they all try to depict the government's measures as tyrannical by removing the context of a global crisis.
"An analogy - imagine I describe a scenario in which a gang of shouting, sweaty men, all dressed the same, crashed through my front door with an axe in the middle of the night, dragged me out of my house and bundled me into the back of a van.
"It sounds like a horrific home-invasion scene from A Clockwork Orange - if I neglect to mention that my house was on fire, and these firefighters kindly saved my life.
"Whether it's lockdowns, mask use or vaccine mandates, of course you can make them sound like oppression if you pretend they are something governments are just choosing to do, absent any context.
"But then of course you're pretending - either through implication or outright denial - that there is no crisis, in which case you are arguing against every credible scientist and physician and 5.2 million dead people, which I don't think is rationally defensible.
"When there's a crisis, it's still OK to have differences of opinion about the best response.
"Going back to the house fire analogy, someone might argue for grabbing a hose, while you think it's better to run and grab a fire extinguisher. But someone who argues for no response at all, because they choose to pretend that actually the house isn't on fire? That person should, at best, be ignored."
More than five million deaths in this pandemic is the official number released by governments and is a gross understatement according the Economist newspaper, driven by governments like Brazil and Russia covering up just how serious the pandemic has become in their countries.
By comparing current death rates with those of previous years, "excess mortality" is revealed. This source puts the world pandemic death rate at more than double the official rate.
Though first jabs are at 90 per cent, nearly 11,000 Hawke's Bay people have yet to be fully vaccinated. As Aucklanders get to travel this becomes urgent.
• Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
