In brief

Recent COVID coverage reused a misleading “19 deaths” in one week figure that referred to old deaths being recorded, not 19 people dying that week.
The same small group of New Zealand “experts” keeps shaping the story and booster advice.
Overseas authorities now take a narrower, more targeted approach, especially for healthy younger people.
Readers deserve clearer numbers, wider debate and less autopilot reporting.

New Zealand is now in its so-called ninth COVID wave, and the coverage feels familiar. Same experts, same push for boosters.

But at this point, a few obvious questions need to be answered. Are the numbers right? Are readers getting the full picture? And why does so much of the reporting still sound like it’s coming from 2021?

Those death numbers never passed the sniff test

One of the more eye-catching claims in recent coverage was an RNZ article stating that 50 people were in hospital and 19 had died “with COVID”, in one recent week.

On the face of it, that is absurd. It suggests a death rate of 38 per cent, which should have set off alarm bells immediately. Instead, the figure was repeated by the article being run by other publications.

RNZ later issued a correction. The COVID dashboard does not include deaths that occurred on or after 18 July 2025. The 7-day and 30-day death figures refer to older deaths that were coded into the system during that reporting period.

In plain English, the number was about when deaths that occurred long ago were recorded, not when they happened.

That detail changes the meaning of the story. And the fact that such an obviously misleading impression made it into print without any reporter stopping to ask if it made sense is a problem in itself.

Five years on from the pandemic, if journalists and health commentators are going to use numbers to create urgency, they should know how to read COVID data and be on the alert for glaring mistakes.

Same names, same lines

The second problem is the range of voices readers are hearing, or not hearing.

Recent stories have once again turned to the same New Zealand experts, including Michael Baker and Michael Plank, to explain the latest rise in cases and urge people to get boosted.

There is nothing wrong with quoting them. But media outlets keep acting as though a small local circle represents the full scope of credible opinion. It does not.

Other countries are taking a more targeted approach, especially for healthy younger people. Yet much of the New Zealand coverage still presents booster advice as though there is a single settled global consensus and a single responsible position.

That is not true any more, if it ever was.

Overseas, the advice is not so one-size-fits-all

New Zealand still allows adults aged 30 and over to receive additional COVID doses every six months.

Australia is more selective. Its advice focuses on regular vaccination for older people and high-risk groups. For healthy children aged 5 to 17, vaccination is not recommended.

The UK has narrowed things even further. Its programme is mainly aimed at older people, care home residents and the immunosuppressed.

Many other countries or states in the USA have similarly backpeddled.

That is a long way from the broad pro-booster messaging still common in New Zealand reporting.

It should be reported that respectable overseas authorities are no longer treating repeated vaccination of the general healthy population as the obvious policy.

Even the old certainties are starting to crack

Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan was anything but a vaccine sceptic. Yet now even she is acknowledging that some concerns once dismissed as crazy turned out to have substance. That includes accepted vaccine injury claims and concerns about myocarditis in younger people.

The Royal Commission reported that, as of January 2025, ACC had accepted 1,740 vaccine injury claims out of 4,318 lodged.

That does not prove every anti-vaccine claim was right. But it does show the old framing was too simple. Too many people were dismissed too quickly. Too many legitimate concerns were waved away because they were politically awkward or inconvenient to the public messaging of the time.

It’s a shame that it took a Royal Commission to open Du Plessis-Allan’s eyes and that she isn’t sufficiently plugged in to other sources that could have at least made her less sure earlier.

Readers deserve better than a rerun

If the media wants to keep covering COVID, fine. But it needs to stop doing it on autopilot.

That means checking whether the numbers actually mean what the headlines imply. It means widening the range of experts. And it means dropping the tired assumption that the same narrow set of views should still dominate every story.

Most importantly, the data that could settle the debate about how effective the vaccine actually was, namely the longest possible time-frame comparison of health outcomes between an otherwise comparable group of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, is still not forthcoming.

It seems like the NZ government could produce this and is, indeed, in a somewhat unique position to do so (because COVID was, largely, not in NZ until after the vaccine).

Yet, instead, there is just the constant quoting of public health experts’ beliefs, virtually all of whom will be cheerleaders for anything with the word “vaccine” in it. Is it any wonder that vaccine scepticism is going strong?

_{Image: Ross Mayfield}

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