In 2022 former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern launched an inquiry into the Government’s response to the pandemic but it wasn’t designed to look specifically at how the response to it was handled, instead focusing on how to handle another health crisis in the future.
Public submissions on the inquiry were delayed until earlier this year and some 11,000 of those were made after the new Government proposed to widen the terms of the inquiry.
There was concern that those terms had been decided by the same Government that handled the pandemic response in the first place.
Ahead of the deadline for those submissions, independent radio broadcaster Reality Check Radio, which is fronted by former TVNZ newsreader Peter Williams and former Act Party leader Rodney Hide, paid for a full-page advert in the Sunday Star-Times calling for people to submit on the inquiry.
“Did your health suffer after the Covid shot?” the advert reads, which also depicts a man clutching his chest.
“New Zealand’s ‘Zero Covid’ policy meant many Kiwis were coerced into taking an mRNA ‘vaccine’ to get their ‘lives back’.
“Tens of thousands of people experienced negative health impacts following their shots. Many continue to suffer. Don’t let it happen again.”
The full page advert paid for by Reality Check Radio. Photo / SST
The advertisement included a call to action to demand a full-scale public inquiry into the Government’s response to the pandemic and a pointer to its website.
That website describes the current scope of the inquiry as “woefully inadequate giving them free rein to conclude whatever they want”.
The website also notes that while submissions have closed it’s still encouraging people to sign so Reality Check Radio can “present the people’s terms directly to Government.”
However, the independent broadcaster, which is currently off-air and halfway to raising the nearly $500,000 they need to get off the ground, ran foul of the Advertising Standards Authority with their printed advert.
A member of the public complained that it made unsubstantiated claims about how many people experienced negative health impacts from the vaccine.
The Complaints Board of the authority agreed that the consumer takeaway from the advert was that the radio station wanted people to support their call to action for a wider inquiry into the Covid-19 response for mandatory vaccination.
“The board said the emotive image of the man clutching his chest combined with the wording “tens of thousands of people experienced negative heath impacts”, implied the adverse effects being referred to were serious symptoms, over and above those most consumers would expect from receiving a vaccination,” their recently-released ruling reads.
The board said the advert fell into the category of “advocacy advertising” where opinion needed to be distinguished from fact and those facts must be substantiated.
“The Complaints Board said that given the likely consumer takeout of the image and wording in the advertisement, it would expect the advertiser to provide substantiation which corroborated the fact that tens of thousands of people experienced serious negative health impacts which differed from normal vaccination symptoms,” the board said.
“The Complaints Board noted that no substantiation had been provided by the advertiser.”
The board compared a similar advertisement run by the Advance New Zealand Party which made the claim that the Covid-19 death rate was comparable to the seasonal flu, which it found was not-founded and not socially responsible.
Reality Check Radio did not respond to the authority as part of its investigation into the advert.
In submissions to the board, Stuff, which owns the Sunday Star-Times newspaper, said that it had initially rejected the advert and asked the ASA for advice.
That advice reminded the publisher of the rules for advocacy advertising, the ability of the advertiser to substantiate any claims it made and the risk of confusion between Reality Check Radio’s website and the Covid-19 Royal Commission’s own website.
The radio station then made amendments to their advert and it was signed off by Stuff’s managing director of brand connections.
Ultimately the board found that Reality Check Radio had breached the standards of the advertising code and ordered the offending advert not be run again in its current format. The window for submissions on the scope of the inquiry has since closed.
Reality Check Radio co-founder Claire Deeks said in an emailed statement that the authority’s behaviour had been akin to a “kangaroo court”.
“...over the past few years we provided the ASA with ample evidence to substantiate our claims only to be rebuffed by a finding of “not socially responsible” which simply and quite obviously was shorthand for ‘not what the government deems acceptable’,” she said.
Deeks said that the broadcaster’s claims about the number of adverse reactions from the vaccine could be substantiated by MedSafe’s data.
The Sunday Star Times did not respond to questions in time for publication.
The New Zealand Herald also ran the same paid advertisement from Reality Check Radio in its newspaper on March 22.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.
