🧩 Why 25% of the Puzzle Was Never Going to Be Proof
In 2023, a dataset was leaked that was widely claimed by some to “prove” mass harm from COVID-19 vaccination. The narrative that followed suggested tens of thousands of vaccine-related deaths and attempted to draw sweeping conclusions about national mortality trends. But there was one critical problem, visible from the start — it wasn’t the whole dataset.
In fact, it wasn’t even close.
The file contained approximately 4.1 million dose entries, which represented about 25% of all vaccine doses administered in New Zealand at the time. That’s not a sampling error — it’s a structural one.
❌ What Was Missing?
This data represented only a portion of New Zealand’s vaccination records, specifically from what’s known as the Pay Per Dose programme — a system used to reimburse GPs, pharmacies, and some contracted providers for each dose they administered. It excluded:
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Hospital and DHB-administered doses,
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Most early Dose 1 and Dose 2 entries,
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And critically, 75% of all recorded vaccine doses nationwide.
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This means it was missing:
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Most of the early vaccine rollout, which disproportionately included the elderly and clinically vulnerable,
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Many of the higher-risk dose windows that would be needed to assess real-world mortality signals,
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And nearly all of the denominator data needed to calculate anything statistically valid (like per-capita mortality or excess death rates).
📉 What Could It Actually Tell Us?
Not much.
Yes, you could see how many people in that specific system had died. But that alone doesn’t tell you:
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How many people survived, which is required to calculate rates,
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How many deaths would be expected based on age and time since dose,
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Or whether the patterns were different to other datasets — because there was nothing to compare it to.
You can’t determine cause of death from a timestamp. And you can’t draw population-level conclusions from a non-random 25% of the data — especially not when the data is already structurally skewed.
🧠 The Real Lesson
There are valid questions to ask about health outcomes, vaccine safety, and mortality. But these questions require cohort-based, age-stratified, and statistically complete data — not a leaked subset of a reimbursement spreadsheet.
The government has released datasets under the Official Information Act that include:
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Deaths by age, dose number, and time since last dose,
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National mortality trends, and
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Vaccine administration records across the full population.
Those are the tools of proper analysis. The stolen data? It wasn’t proof — it was a quarter of a jigsaw puzzle, missing all the edges, and held upside down.
