OPINION
Covid-19 brought pain and pressure across our communities, dividing families and fracturing our communities. David Fisher, who reported on Covid-19 conspiracy theories throughout the pandemic, met with Billy Te Kahika, Patient Zero of the conspiracy epidemic, to ask: Now the storm has passed, how do we get along?
Billy Te Kahika is facing jail. Any day now, he will find out if he has successfully appealed a five-month prison sentence for organising and attending a protest on the first day of the Level 4 lockdown on August 18, 2021.
“I don’t want to leave my wife and kids for that long,” he told me during the five hours we sat and talked, looking out over Northland’s Hokianga Harbour. Billy, wife Corrin and three of his six children live over the hill on the road south to Dargaville.
“I want to get on with my life.”
I remember watching Billy’s arrest during the live-streamed protest outside TVNZ, just a block from Auckland’s Sky Tower. The new Delta strain of Covid had just been detected in the community. The way I saw it, everyone else was at home doing their best to keep a virus at bay, while Billy and about 300 others were putting that effort at risk. I tell him I was glad he had been arrested: “You do the crime, you do the time.”
Billy, as you might expect, sees it differently. “It would be an injustice to lose my freedoms based on arguing against something that most people accept was very, very damaging.”
Actually, I don’t think “most people” do accept that. And, at the time of the arrest, I didn’t think jailing Billy would be an “injustice”.
Today, the original virus is a watered-down version of that which killed seven million people across the world. In New Zealand this week, there have been three deaths attributed to Covid. Four people are in ICU and about 190 people in hospital. We have a death toll, but at 3416 it’s among the lowest in the world.
The harbour was calm, seemingly as still as the majestic sand dunes across the water. It was a middling sort of day - rain and sun but not much of either. As a country, we’ve found this middling place in our life with Covid-19. Gone is the tempest of 2020 to 2022 when death swept the world, anxiety lived with us all and tempers flared.
It’s months since someone threatened to murder me because they disagreed with my pandemic reportage. The heat of that time is fading. I’d rather just work out how we can get along.
In this calmer place, we had a conversation that stretched from morning into the afternoon. Then I went home and left Billy to make the most of what might be his final few days of freedom.
Patient Zero and the Chief Executioner
I had first met Billy almost a year before he was arrested. Back in 2020, we had passed through our first lockdown and found relative freedom as the world spiralled into chaos.
The original Covid-19 doubter, Billy drew hundreds of people to town hall meetings across the country. Billy TK, as he became known, was Patient Zero of the conspiracy epidemic in New Zealand.
One of those meetings was at the Ōpononi War Memorial Hall, just down the road from where we are sitting now. He gave his spiel and I wrote it up, annotated with - as I wrote then - “actual facts”. It was among the media’s first brushes with a nascent alternative-reality movement.
Those fact-checks would, ultimately, lead to Liz Gunn calling me the Herald’s “most willing and complicit Chief Executioner... over these last three dark years”.
And so we met, Patient Zero and the Chief Executioner, to talk about those dark years. About Covid, conspiracy, corruption - and how we get along after the fractures Covid wreaked on our society.
Billy was born in 1972 and grew up in Mangere, son of guitarist Wiremu Te Kahika, who was the first to carry the moniker “Billy TK”.
Like his dad, Billy was a gifted musician, and plays a brilliant guitar riff of God Defend New Zealand at the opening of a new documentary on Covid-19 which he’s just launched.
He would say the documentary is the product of 36 months of fact-based investigation. I would say something different. We found as we spoke that we could at least recognise the sincerity of effort employed on both sides.
There’s a reflection of that sincerity in Billy’s background. He joined the army, although didn’t last long. He signed up for the police, doing two months’ training before leaving that, too. Billy was active in safer-driving campaigns, was a White Ribbon ambassador, raised funds for those affected by the Christchurch earthquakes, played a benefit concert for the homeless.
He stood for Parliament in the 2020 election, merging his Public Party with Advance NZ, the vehicle adopted by former National MP Jami-Lee Ross. It didn’t succeed. He’s a devout Christian and a preacher with about 70 people he leads in prayer.
The details of his past endeavours come with question marks. But the general thrust is one of public service. That’s where he says he lost faith in the media.
In all those years as a musician, he would deal with journalists - “this is the story, this is what I’m saying” - and it turns up in the paper the next day “pretty much verbatim”.
When it came to Covid-19, he found those positions minimised, characterised as conspiracies or was left feeling his character had been challenged.
“Now I was considered a nut job, now I was styled as a conspiracy theorist. There was not even the slight propensity on their part to actually say, ‘how have you got to this point’.”
Billy argued he had been a constructive force in society. “I’m not going out of my way to be at odds with the Government and yet I have. Why?” He felt journalists skipped straight past what he was asserting without proper examination.
He asked me: Why would the media do that?
“I started a place of trust and then I saw that it appeared the mainstream media had hitched its wagon on to the Government.” And then there was funding set up to support news media through Covid-19.
“Truth was the victim of the contract,” he says.
This was, perhaps, a good place for us to start. The “freedom” movement became angry with “media” largely - it seems - for not accepting the fabulous fictions it believed were true. It’s easy to describe faceless collectives as corrupt, but how does that work when individuals sit down and talk?
And so I told Billy about my background and how it took me from longline fishing boats and factories to a job as a cadet journalist at the Howick and Pakuranga Times.
Everything good in my life stemmed from journalism, I told him, from the family I have, the house we live in and the mortgage I help pay to keep that roof above us.
And, I told Billy, it was a mortgage that would be paid off much faster if I took my journalism skills to better-paid public relations. I owe journalism and its foundation principles: “If I felt there was the slightest adverse influence within our organisation, I would blow the whistle. I would not be a part of it. I would leave.”
“You’re pretty much an oddity, mate,” Billy reckoned. But I’m not. Covid-19 arrived with a massive workload and an onus of responsibility on journalists.
When Covid-19 emerged, newsrooms did what they always do - fact-check what they are told and minimise harm in what they report.
It was clear, as the pandemic unfolded, that there was a greater weight of science in one direction and it was this that the Government embraced. The media didn’t accept that uncritically, I told Billy, but fact-checked it against the alternative voices.
Early in the crisis, it was relatively straightforward - present one side of the argument and balance it with the other. As the pandemic went on and the death toll mounted, anxiety increased, as did the pressure on all of us. For some, that pressure led to seeking explanations that were easier to understand than a constantly-changing virus.
It was appealing to believe, for example, that multinational bodies such as the World Economic Forum and the United Nations and governments were conspiring to (among other things) render the world population compliant and malleable to control. Or that the vaccine had tiny machines in it. Or that bleach would cure it. Or that masks didn’t work.
At this point, journalists had to wrestle with the principle of harm-minimisation. If we publicised information found to be wanting - like the so-called (and false) efficacy of ivermectin - didn’t we put at risk the public we were meant to serve? Journalism compels me to serve my community, not put it at risk.
Billy said: “I’ve contemplated that. How would I feel sitting on the other side of this topic, investigating it and reporting it?
“First of all, I’d I’d start from a place neutrality and go, ‘right, what does this guy say? Does it stack up in any way?’ If you start from the point of view already with a bias that says well, because everyone’s saying it and must be right, then I’m going to be disadvantaged.”
But Billy, we never did that. I know there are scientific papers you rely on - but there are also scientific papers that argue the Earth is flat.
It’s easier to talk about this now. Covid-19 is in the community. Much of the anxiety is gone. The harm possible in airing such contentions is lower. It’s actually a mess getting into this area - like trying to grab a fistful of jelly - but let’s give it a go.
Flat Earth news
When Billy talks about source material, he creates a narrative that justifies the doubt underpinning much of what he talks about.
A key starting point is a May 2020 paper - not peer-reviewed on release - published by a distinguished academic, Stanford University Professor John Ioannidis. In it, Ioannidis argued Covid-19 was more widespread in the community than realised, saying the correct response was “precise and tailored [interventions] to specific high-risk individuals”.
It was a study based on testing of 3300 people that found 1.5 per cent were positive, meaning Covid-19 was far more widespread than realised - and with just 500 deaths in the United States at the time, was less deadly than claimed.
It was a popular argument in some quarters. It was also, in my view, a flawed study. An updated version of the paper placed projections in the same range as other studies on infection spread.
Billy took the initial thrust (and inaccurate numbers) and looked across the Atlantic to the Imperial College, where Professor Neil Ferguson was developing infection and fatality projections. It was Ferguson’s modelling that 500,000 Britons could die if nothing was done. With mitigation efforts, including lockdowns, the current death toll stands around 230,000.
Those who believe as Billy does say Ferguson’s career is one of “gross failure” because he had modelled death projections for outbreaks that didn’t happen. It’s a tough area to work in because if your advice is followed - and Ferguson’s was - then worst-case scenarios don’t occur and you sound a bit like Chicken Little warning of a falling sky.
That early Covid-19 modelling, says Billy, led to the WHO issuing a warning to the world. Billy says New Zealand Covid-19 modeller Shaun Hendy picked it up and - he claims - made similar errors as Ferguson projecting we would have up to 80,000 deaths”.
That’s not quite fair, I said to Billy, because there was a range quoted and 80,000 was the top end if nothing was done. I checked later. Hendy also said if extreme measures were taken - which is what happened - deaths a year on would be around 20 people. As it happened, a year later the death toll was 26 people.
Billy objects to Dame Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister at the time, and officials “going to the extreme end of the risk... saying unless we locked down, we could have up to 80,000 deaths”.
It was startling, he says, and he wondered if “there’s a motive that underlies that”. Could the motive be that you want people to follow health advice and not die, I ask?
Billy sees it as a means to create a compliant population - what he calls “an intensified propaganda campaign to get people to accept loss of civil rights and human rights”. And that is a theory that leads to a vast, global conspiracy of which - I say - there is no credible evidence.
Was our conversation getting anywhere? I remember reading the evidence. Mountains of it. “Our public health officials took what they considered to be the greater weight of evidence and the most reliable evidence and then based their decision-making on that.”
And, I argue, media didn’t just accept what the Government relied on. We checked the opposing arguments, too. It was while checking some of those claims (they turned out to be false) that I found the Government juked the statistics on the claimed 90 per cent vaccination rate. And yes, we published that, like we did other stories the Government would probably rather we hadn’t.
It was while considering all these competing views that I searched out those scientific arguments that the Earth is flat. If I was writing a story about our planet, I asked Billy, would I provide equal space to those who believe the Earth is a globe and those who believe it is flat?
Then we had a bit of a laugh about the Earth being flat and stopped for a bite of lunch.
Finding peace among us
There were many things Billy and I discussed on which we don’t agree. He’s immovable in his belief that his research is solid - so much so that he and others have made the River of Lies documentary that bundles everything he believes in one place.
Making the documentary has been “heartbreaking, distressing” and “infuriating”, he says. “It’s only through my faith that I’ve been able to keep going with it because it’s been, emotionally, a huge toll on me.”
The documentary’s name comes from former Labour MP Michael Wood’s “River of Filth” speech, made in Parliament while the protesters were camped outside. It inflamed the “freedom” movement when it was interpreted as an attack on all those outside Parliament.
Billy: “I’ve got a river that goes through my property, right. And there are tributaries that run off it, little creeks and things - all part of that river. He’s grouping everybody into those that’s going to that protest.”
I brought Wood’s speech up on my phone so I could read it to Billy: “Out the front of this place, there are people who I think we all feel for. There are some people who are confused, there are some people who are scared, there are some people who have been manipulated by an avalanche of misinformation. There are some people who have been hurt over the past couple of years and they’re lashing out. We feel for those people.
“But underneath all of that, there is a river of filth. There is a river of violence and menace. There is a river of anti-Semitism. There is a river of Islamophobia. There is a river of threats to people who work in this place and our staff.”
So he’s not talking about your mates, I say, he’s talking about those people who brought an ugly side to the crowd.
Billy acknowledges there were troubling people among the crowd. “But to everyone that heard that... statement thought that they were included in that statement.”
I said: That’s reflective of the anxiety and pain, isn’t it? Yes, he said, and the trauma of lockdown and the tragedies that went with it.
In many ways, I don’t think yet we know the true cost of our Covid-19 mitigation strategy on mental health, the economy, education and so on. But I do know that we don’t have the mountains of bodies other countries endured.
Billy can’t do that balancing exercise. Without any faith in the world’s response - because it was the world and not just New Zealand - the cost of border closures, lockdowns and mandates is monumental. Without that, he looks for other motives.
Where we do agree is that the division that seemed to come with it needs to end.
It’s not like the Springbok Tour divisions, after which wounds healed over in time, he says.
“I think the hurt is too deep. I think the resentment is too deep. I think the anger is too broad. I think the loss is too far-reaching for it to just develop a crust and skin over again.”
Billy offers himself and his research to lead a citizen’s inquiry to run alongside the current Royal Commission. He might not be available in the unlikely event his offer is taken up, as he awaits the judgment to see if he has successfully appealed a prison sentence over his lockdown-breaking protest.
Billy feels singled out with the prison sentence, citing other lockdown breaches where the only punishment was a fine.
A fine might be fair, he says, or a community detention sentence with electronic monitoring.
“Really, I shouldn’t get anything at all,” he says. “What I’d like to do is get on with my life - be a pastor, have a little business and just get on with life.
“If it is possible that they can jail someone for peacefully protesting... then really anything is possible for a government, and that’s the most dangerous place to be for any open free and democratic society.
“And if that happens, then every New Zealander needs to be afraid for what’s ahead of us.”
Actually, again I disagree. I think our system has those checks and balances, with a democracy that elects politicians to make decisions and create laws, an independent judiciary to interpret and rule on those laws - and a fiercely independent media that challenges failings and overreach when it occurs.
And it might well have been peaceful but Billy had no idea whether he or others present were carrying Covid-19. The restrictions existed for a reason.
I know Billy disagrees with me on many of those things. This holiday season, there will be many families gathering who disagree fervently on these issues. This year, more than last, we have a chance to just get along - as Billy and I found we could on this middling spring day.
I drove home thinking, after spending a day sitting and speaking with Billy, that I’m not so sure I want him to go to jail. There’s a part of me that still feels he should, when I recall how hard he worked to undermine everyone else’s efforts with a protest pushing theories that suffered when under any critical examination.
It’s a conflict that happens when you sit with someone, human to human. It’s something we didn’t do enough of these past three years. This holiday season, we have a chance to do it again.
Hopefully, when we do, we find a space for less heat and more peace. As did Billy and I.
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He first joined the Herald in 2004.