The scientist and the rabbit hole: How epidemiologist Simon Thornley became an outcast of his profession

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As New Zealand became the global poster child for managing Covid-19, one local expert – the only one – still believes New Zealand’s response has been a failure. How did Dr Simon Thornley become a hero to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, and a villain within his own profession? National Correspondent Charlie Mitchell reports.

Two months before residents of Wuhan, China, began succumbing to a mysterious coronavirus, Dr Simon Thornley was thinking about scabies.

In his own words, Thornley was a scabies enthusiast. The infectious skin disease had become his major area of research, prompting his appearance as a featured speaker at a scabies conference in September 2019.

In his presentation, he outlined his belief that scabies was linked to rheumatic fever, a serious disease that, in New Zealand, almost exclusively affects Māori and Pacific children.

His work was praised by the next speaker, Professor Michael Baker, a prominent public health expert and epidemiologist at the University of Otago.

“Simon Thornley’s work has really put this on the map,” Baker said during his presentation.

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Just over a year later, Thornley and Baker appeared together again.

It was New Year’s Eve, and the venue was talkback radio station MagicTalk. A planned interview with Thornley had become an impromptu debate, with Baker asked to provide a response to Thornley’s arguments.

Over the course of 2020, Thornley had become the most notable critic of the Government’s Covid-19 elimination strategy. It happened largely by default; he was the only known academic within his speciality to publicly disagree with it. Baker had been one of the strategy’s chief architects, backed by the overwhelming majority of public health experts.

The two men had traded jabs over the pandemic’s course. It started off politely, but had become more heated as their views diverged further. A week before the debate, Thornley and several other academics – known together as Plan B, a group proposing an alternative method for handling the pandemic – had published a letter in the British Medical Journal outlining their position against the country’s elimination strategy.

The letter contained several dubious arguments, prompting Baker to publicly describe it as “almost scandalous” and “patently absurd”; a piece both poorly argued and reliant on cherry-picked evidence.

The animosity between the two continued on-air, during the debate.

“It is shameful that some people have denigrated our efforts,” Thornley said, obliquely referring to Baker and other public health experts, many of whom had been critical of Plan B.

“They’re trying to shut down alternative views which have already been proven correct.”

Baker, for his part, was baffled. Over Christmas, New Zealanders had been free to gather with their families, go to the beach, and pack malls on Boxing Day. While much of the world remained in the grip of Covid-19, New Zealanders could spend the holidays going to music festivals and sports events.

Data showed New Zealand had among the least stringent restriction measures in the world, with a surprisingly resilient economic outlook. The likes of Sweden, long celebrated by Thornley as a beacon of freedom, was in the grip of a second spike in deaths, prompting severe movement and gathering restrictions which remained in place for months.

“I guess the question I have for Simon is, at this point in time, how could he look at the same data as we do and come to a diametrically opposite view?” Baker asked.

Others in the field had been asking that question, too.

As New Zealand’s Covid-19 response became the envy of the world, Thornley said it was a failure. He retreated into baroque theories about the origin of the coronavirus and the efficacy of vaccines, becoming a magnet for conspiracy theorists and fringe political figures.

Baker and others became fixtures in the mainstream media, and were showered with formal and informal accolades. Thornley was mostly exiled by the press and disregarded by his colleagues.

It has not dissuaded Thornley and Plan B.

Thornley was an expert witness for a legal challenge against the vaccine roll-outs mounted by lawyer Sue Grey, a figurehead of the New Zealand anti-vaccine movement. Thornley himself warns against most people getting the vaccine, a position several scientists say is extraordinary for a public health expert during a global pandemic.

It reflects a shift in Plan B and Thornley's priorities, most evident in the group's Facebook page, which has become a vector for misinformation and a favoured hang-out for conspiracy theorists.

Recent comments include personal attacks on New Zealand scientists, claiming they are corrupt and will be convicted of crimes against humanity. Others have said vaccines are being used to control the population, that Covid-19 itself is a hoax, and that the fundamental aim of the pandemic is to establish a global communist state.

It is proving uncomfortable for Thornley’s peers, some of whom have both publicly and privately rebuked him for what they say is unscientific conduct and a pattern of cherry-picking evidence to support his position. Thornley levies similar charges against his opponents.

Researchers at the University of Auckland studying misinformation and disinformation have included Plan B’s work in their research, tracking the group's informal links to anti-vaccination groups. Several academics told Stuff they believed Thornley’s career and credibility had been dealt a major blow due to his activism.

Nevertheless, Thornley remains convinced the public health establishment has got it wrong, and New Zealand should change course.

In the midst of a once-in-a-generation public health crisis – and a related misinformation crisis – it poses a problem. What happens when one subject-matter expert takes a contrarian position, emboldening online groups who are increasingly convinced scientists and experts cannot be trusted?

“New Zealand descends into another lockdown abyss just as I am now questioning the very foundations of the covid story.”

It was February 2021, and Simon Thornley had embraced a sweeping new theory, which he outlined in a blog post. He believed Covid-19 was circulating before Wuhan; it may have been spreading in Europe as early as March 2019.

If true, it would mean the disease was not particularly deadly. For nine months, it had circulated unnoticed, without lockdowns or any other restrictions. Life had continued as usual.

“It looks increasingly as if covid-19 is a kind of chimera, largely created by our own modern fears,” Thornley concluded in his post.

Since he had first written about Covid-19 nearly a year earlier, Thornley had come to embrace idiosyncratic theories, some of which were not only at odds with the bulk of the scientific evidence, but with basic epidemiology.

When a new virus emerges, it spreads rapidly across the available population, until the chain of transmission is severed. In Thornley’s hypothesis, the virus appeared, had no noticeable impact, and then millions of people started dying.

In an online presentation around the same time, Thornley offers evidence for his hypothesis in the form of two scientific papers. One has not been peer-reviewed or published in a journal; the other was published in a small Italian journal, which has since added an expression of concern about the peer review. Experts have raised methodological problems with each paper.

It is possible the virus was circulating before the first cases were reported in Wuhan. But a finding in Europe many months earlier would dramatically change our understanding of the virus.

Despite the meagre evidence, Thornley was convinced.

“What do I believe? My money is that it was around before Wuhan,” he said during his presentation.

“It leads you to think, if this virus was really around, would we have noticed? All these dramatic policies which have really centred around the idea the virus is new in Wuhan … does that make sense in the light of this data where it’s been freely circulating in 2019 without any restrictions?”

It was the logical endpoint of Thornley’s most enduring view; That the deadliness of Covid-19 had been systematically exaggerated, both in the media and the scientific community.

If the virus is not particularly deadly, an explanation is required for the 3.3 million deaths sustained thus far. Thornley argues the response to the virus – including lockdowns and medical interventions such as mechanical ventilation – are largely responsible for the death toll.

It is a theory not seriously argued by many public health experts.

“It’s bizarre ... I mean, it’s nonsense,” says Professor Rod Jackson, one of the country’s most senior epidemiologists, and Thornley’s colleague at the University of Auckland.

“In countries like Italy, France, Spain, the UK, and the US, where you’d expect them to have reasonable health infrastructure, they were overwhelmed.

“[Covid-19] presented over a matter of weeks in Wuhan. In Italy, within a few weeks their health services were overwhelmed, their intensive care units were overflowing.”

At the end of his presentation, a slide notes many of Thornley’s references came from one place: A blog post purporting to describe “the manufacturing of the coronavirus crisis”, written by an architect in the United Kingdom who has no apparent medical or science expertise.

During a question and answer session, Thornley was asked if it meant Covid-19 had circulated undetected in New Zealand: “It’s very hard to believe we haven’t been exposed to the virus in quite a dramatic way”, he responded.

Only a seroprevalence survey – measuring the proportion of people with antibodies for the virus – would give the answer, he added.

Two months later, a seroprevalence survey was released. It determined only around 0.1 per cent of New Zealand had been infected with Covid-19. The finding “provides robust evidence to support New Zealand’s successful elimination strategy for COVID-19”.

Thornley, nevertheless, remains unconvinced.

Dr Simon Thornley is the archetypal academic. He speaks in a slow, dry manner, usually pausing or sighing before answering a question. His conversational tone is polite and considered, his responses usually peppered with references to academic papers.

It is a stark contrast to the community Plan B has cultivated online, rife with wild conspiracy theories and personal attacks on scientists. Nearly any given post on Plan B's Facebook page is flooded with such comments; describing a fraudulent pandemic, led by figures such as Bill Gates and corrupt politicians and scientists.

It speaks to the contradiction at the heart of Plan B.

A group of academics claiming to be driven by science and reason, providing analysis contrary to a hysterical global establishment, for an audience that feverishly embraces conspiracy theories and is generally hostile to scientists. Even if Thornley does not subscribe to his audience’s beliefs, they see him as an ally, and he does little to disabuse them of that notion.

For much of his career, Thornley’s primary topic of expertise has been nutrition. His publishing record mostly comprises papers on issues such as vaping, cycling, and sugar consumption.

His credentials are conventional by most measures. He works in epidemiology – a branch of medicine involving statistical analysis of health patterns across a population – has been a public health physician, and modelled infectious disease spread for the Auckland DHB, including during past epidemics.

As a lecturer at the University of Auckland, he coordinates a postgraduate course for using the best evidence to inform healthcare decisions. His academic qualifications are broadly similar to those of Dr Ashley Bloomfield, another Auckland University-graduate who became a public health doctor specialising in non-communicable diseases.

Before Covid-19, his sole animating issue, at least in public, had been sugar.

He is a vocal advocate for a sugar tax, a member of the FIZZ group of researchers and doctors which advocates for such measures. He speaks at conferences, outlining his views that sugar consumption is linked to other health conditions. In one paper, he argued one such condition was rheumatic fever, a claim that proved controversial in the field.

In his own life, Thornley started a ketogenic diet, which he has said helped him lose weight. He went to the dentist less often. He was celebrated by other anti-sugar public figures, including Claire Deeks, a corporate lawyer turned activist who has since co-founded the anti-vaccination group Voices for Freedom.

“It was very similar to the response I’ve had with my Covid work,” Thornley tells Stuff.

“I was rubbished, I was laughed at, my job was threatened. Slowly, slowly it became acceptable to talk about the health impacts of sugar.”

Some academics in the field believe some of Thornley’s views on sugar were absolutist and did not reflect the bulk of the published evidence.

Two people who know Thornley say once he takes a position on something, he becomes immovable, a personality trait that could explain his actions during the pandemic. Thornley says he has acknowledged errors he’s made during the pandemic, and has looked at the evidence systematically. He does, however, say he and Plan B “haven't really changed our position substantially” since the start of the pandemic.

That position has continued to puzzle his colleagues, which has led Thornley to become increasingly isolated within the public health community.

Staff within his department at the university were asked to present their thoughts on the pandemic. Thornley ran through the arguments he had been developing; That Covid-19 was not particularly deadly, and that there was little evidential basis for lockdowns. He did not convince his colleagues, who were clearly unimpressed.

Online critics frequently demand he be fired or censured by his employer. One senior academic at the university complained to Thornley’s supervisor about public comments he had made about another scientist.

It is almost certain Thornley’s career in public health has been damaged, potentially beyond repair.

“I knew this was going to be very costly to me in terms of my career, in terms of my standing within the public health community,” Thornley says.

“There was very little for me to gain in making the stand.”

In the days before the level four lockdown, public health experts had started calling for drastic action.

The charge was led by Michael Baker and his University of Otago colleague Professor Nick Wilson. Days before the lockdown was announced, the pair had argued for a short period of “intense social distancing” until testing and contact tracing capacity could be bolstered.

They had seen the early success of such a strategy in China, Taiwan, and South Korea; the virus could be contained, preventing the need for prolonged lock-downs.

Thornley was leaning another way.

He had been following the writing of John Ionnadis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University best known for his belief that most published research findings are false.

Ioannadis had been an early critic of lockdowns. He wrote articles questioning the evidential basis for the response to the pandemic, claiming decisions were being made with flimsy evidence. It reflected a common debate in public health: How much evidence is required before taking measures to protect public health, particularly when the consequences of acting too late can be disastrous?

Thornley was inspired, and started writing. In his first opinion piece, published on Stuff on March 31 he likened the Government's level four restrictions to squashing a flea with a sledgehammer, proposing Sweden's more laissez-fare approach as “a more sensible course”.

When that piece was published, the global Covid-19 death toll was around 40,000. It has since increased 8000 per cent to more than 3.3 million, with more than 10,000 new deaths per day. In Sweden, more than one million people have been infected with Covid-19, causing nearly 15,000 deaths, a per capita death rate nearly 300 times that of New Zealand.

Sweden's GDP loss for 2020 was the same as New Zealand’s, but its unemployment rate is nearly twice as high. For 49 of the last 52 weeks, Sweden has had stricter social restrictions than New Zealand, according to the government response stringency index. Both the King of Sweden and the Swedish prime minister have said the high number of deaths constituted a failure.

But Thornley’s view on the severity of the virus, and the wisdom of New Zealand's strategy relative to Sweden’s, has not changed.

“The response [in New Zealand] has had worse effects than the virus would have,” Thornley says.

“There’s no doubt in my mind the effects of the virus have been systematically exaggerated at every level.”

He points to lines at food banks, and deferred surgeries; families separated by border closures, and problems getting workers in the agriculture sector. What about the counterfactual, in which the virus spreads rapidly through the country unabated? That would have effects, too, Thornley acknowledges, but he does not attempt to quantify them.

Asked about Sweden, he pointed to a study comparing excess mortality in Sweden and Norway, saying the two were similar. The study accounted for only the first four months of the pandemic – complete data from the Human Mortality Database shows excess mortality in Sweden was around 11 per cent higher than average.

In a later email, Thornley acknowledged Sweden had higher excess mortality than previous years: “Understanding exactly how much of this was due to COVID, and how much due to other factors would take time to analyse the data,” he says.

The argument he outlined in March convinced five academics to join Thornley as Plan B, a group proposing a different approach to managing Covid-19.

The group was launched with the help of Mark Blackham, a corporate lobbyist. Blackham was a press secretary to former prime minister Mike Moore, and ran the Labour Party’s media unit. He has become a PR specialist for sometimes unpopular causes; his company has lobbied for the greyhound racing industry, the alcohol industry, and the oil and gas industry.

In 2018, Stuff reported that Blackham was behind a seemingly-grass roots campaign that sought to downplay concerns about freshwater quality.

The heart of Plan B's argument was “focused protection” for those most vulnerable to Covid-19. Much of society would return to normality, allowing the virus to spread whilst the elderly and people with underlying health conditions would receive additional protection.

The theory relies on herd immunity developing naturally – and quickly – in the bulk of the population. Given the much higher risk posed to those aged over 65, there could be little, if any, interaction possible between the protected group and wider society (Thornley notes such measures would be voluntary).

A similar argument has been made by the Great Barrington Declaration, a group sponsored by a libertarian think tank. Plan B as a whole, and Thornley individually, are signatories of the declaration. The argument has been harshly criticised by the likes of the World Health Organisation (WHO), and other public health experts.

After its launch Plan B received considerable media coverage, including a front-page story in The Dominion Post, which is owned by Stuff.

Thornley, as leader of the group, appeared on talkback radio stations NewstalkZB and MagicTalk and was interviewed by mainstream TV news outlets. He was quoted in Time magazine and the New York Times as a critic of the Government’s strategy.

It didn't last long. Less than two weeks after the group formed, the country returned to level 3, shifting to level 2 two weeks later. There was no immediate reemergence of community transmission, and Thornley mostly disappeared from the mainstream media.

“The debate was shut down, effectively, I felt,” Thornley says.

Some of his critics say there was a debate; Thornley and Plan B lost.

After lockdown restrictions ended, New Zealand went 100 days without community transmission, and life for many people returned to near normality.

Thornley’s argument – that “we’d be better off seeking herd immunity and protecting the frail and the elderly,“ as he described it in August – had little public support.

On the day that Stuff spoke to Thornley, stories of devastation are coming out of India.

Images show bodies of Covid-19 victims burning along the Ganges river. Hospitals turn away sick people after running out of oxygen.

A few months earlier, Plan B’s Facebook page had commented favourably on India’s response.

“India's Covid-19 cases have dropped like a stone,” the group wrote.

“It's not been able to install social restrictions and its vaccine programme hasn't even started yet. This will be a counter to other Governments that will claim the only reason cases go down is due to vaccine roll-outs.”

The timing was unfortunate. Within less than a week, India’s daily Covid-19 cases began its upwards trajectory, culminating in the worst outbreak anywhere in the world.

While the severity of India's outbreak caught many public health experts by surprise, it happened amid the rise of more virulent strains, lifting of public gathering restrictions and a faltering vaccine roll-out, a combination of factors consistent with previous outbreaks.

There have been many horror stories over the course of the pandemic. Bodies piled into refrigerated trucks in New York; overcrowding in Brazilian hospitals; waves of deaths in Sweden’s nursing homes.

They are an obvious counterpoint to Thornley’s belief the virus is no worse than a nasty seasonal flu.

“I’ve been accused of cherry-picking data during this, and not looking at the disaster stuff,” he says.

“I find it hard to trust, at face value, stories of devastation in parts of the world – that this is simply Covid, all this devastation is attributable to Covid. It’s simply not that clear.”

Asked if he thought the scenes of crisis reflected normal seasonal circumstances in India, Thornley demurred.

“I would need to look at the statistics, need to see the data, talk to people on the ground there to get a good idea of what is going on.”

For his colleagues in public health, Thornley's steadfast and consistent belief the virus is no worse than a seasonal flu is particularly confounding.

On that, he has proved unshakeable.

During a Plan B symposium last year, Thornley suggested the Infection Fatality Risk (IFR) – the number of people infected with Covid-19 who die – in New Zealand could be as low as 0.03% (most global estimates put the range between 0.5 and 1%).

Such a low number would be statistically impossible in many places. In Sweden, for example, an IFR of 0.03% would mean every person had been infected with Covid-19 four times each.

Other claims by Thornley and Plan B, with the benefit of hindsight, have not aged well.

In August, Thornley said it looked like Sweden “had probably got herd immunity” (Sweden’s confirmed Covid-19 cases have increased 10-fold since then). A month later, he implied New Zealand itself may have herd immunity: “At the moment we don't know whether case numbers went down because of the lockdown, or most of us had had the virus and the virus was running out of people to infect.” (Around 0.1 per cent of New Zealanders have antibodies for the virus.)

In a since-deleted post on the Plan B website, Thornley said the Government’s elimination strategy was over in part due to “plummeting cases and deaths internationally”, even though new daily cases at the time were at near-record highs (Thornley says at the time that comment was made, the group believed it to be true). Months earlier, in June, a piece published by Plan B said: “With the virus now waning in many countries, demonstrating the effectiveness of the vaccine will be difficult, since exposure to the virus will be rare.” More than 150 million cases have been reported since.

On multiple occasions, Thornley and Plan B claimed vaccines would be at best four to 10 years away, if they emerged at all: “Looking at the science, I believe an effective vaccine is a very remote possibility for COVID-19,” Thornley said in August. (He says he has publicly acknowledged this was an error).

Errors are normal in fast-moving situations, particularly as the evidence base grows and changes. Some errors, however, have been repeated, in ways that have disparaged Thornley's colleagues.

In March 2020, Te Pūnaha Matatini (TPM), a multi-disciplinary research group at the University of Auckland, produced modelling which became a major justification for entering level four lockdown restrictions.

That was, in part, due to its headline figure: With no control measures, Covid-19 could kill 80,000 New Zealanders.

Thornley and Plan B often denounce this modelling, once describing it as “staggeringly inaccurate”, and the genesis of what they call erroneous Government decision-making.

That belief comes from a basic misreading. The modelling, which is publicly available, shows the worst case scenario is based on no controls at all. Plan B and Thornley have, on multiple occasions, wrongly claimed the scenario included lockdowns.

It has fuelled a perception in some parts of the internet that TPM’s modelling was wrong, and modelling in general cannot be trusted. It has led to personal attacks against Professor Shaun Hendy, head of TPM and co-author of the modelling, on Plan B’s Facebook page.

“That early modeling was very much the worst case scenario – unmitigated without the public taking any measures,” Hendy told Stuff.

“We weren’t making that as a prediction, it was really just something you could benchmark against when you do actually take actions.”

When asked why Plan B had repeated the error, Thornley insisted his interpretation was correct. He pointed to a table in the modelling he said backed up his claim: “I believe that it is the Matatini group that owe the country an apology for substantially inaccurate predictions,” he says.

He was still incorrect. The figure he referred to showed a scenario with no controls in place; the correct figure, in brackets next to it, show what would be expected with controls still in place.

“It shows that if New Zealand were to remove its border controls and dismantle its alert system right now, that we would, fairly obviously, have a severe COVID-19 outbreak,” Hendy says.

Like other scientists, Hendy has pondered how to respond to Thornley and Plan B.

He has written about academic freedom, and has defended the right of academics to speak publicly, particularly in times of crisis and uncertainty. It’s something he’s reflected on during the pandemic.

“I had interviewed a bunch of the seismologists who had been involved in the Canterbury earthquake, and I often cast my mind back to some of those interviews and some of the things they’d said,” Hendy says.

“Your choice on how and when to communicate comes down to a value judgment and being aware of that value judgment is so important.”

Science is not inherently neutral; the way it is presented and communicated is shaped by the scientist and their values.

Being aware of, and acknowledging, those values is important, Hendy says.

“No doubt they [Plan B] feel very strongly about the position they’re presenting, but whether they fully understand the trade-offs, and the role of their values in the choices they’ve made in the way they present the science ... I struggle a bit with that.”

The calculus in deciding whether to respond to Thornley and Plan B became easier as the pandemic progressed.

The post-lockdown media blackout had sidelined Thornley, essentially de-platforming his ideas.

Even Thornley, who gives little ground to his opponents, acknowledged the bind he was in: “I have to admit, I didn’t think they would be as successful as they have been, historically, with the 100 days Covid-free in New Zealand,” he said in one August webinar.

It pushed him into new territory.

He gave interviews to obscure Youtubers with double-digit subscriber counts, and spoke at length during weekly webinars for a small but passionate group of Plan B's supporters, who commiserated over what they saw as a global establishment losing its mind.

Thornley was interviewed by a self-proclaimed anarchist and life-coach who railed against “climate alarmism”; and a Canadian nutritionist who has claimed he can cure Covid-19 with a juice-based diet.

Whilst the Government was re-elected in a landslide, in large part due to the success of a strategy led by Thornley’s colleagues, he was being celebrated by fringe political figures such as Billy Te Kahika, Eliot Ikilei, and Advance NZ.

Thornley attended a protest against level three restrictions in Auckland, receiving considerable online pushback when he tweeted from the event.

At a similar protest a few weeks later, Jami-Lee Ross, then representing Advance NZ, paid tribute to some “freedom fighters” in front of a large crowd.

“I want to acknowledge an inspiring gentleman ... His name is Simon Thornley”, Ross said, according to a recording of the speech.

“Simon Thornley is a courageous epidemiologist. He is not here today, but he has been to every single march.”

Connections with the political fringes became more explicit in December. The founders of anti-vaccination group Voices for Freedom (VFF) were invited onto a Plan B webinar. Claire Deeks – who was also an Advance NZ board member – praised Thornley as “a great friend to the movement” and talked about encouraging people to ignore public health measures.

“If we can just get the people who already know there’s an issue to stop wearing masks, to stop using hand sanitiser and to stop social distancing and abiding completely by the lockdown the next time if we have one, that’s a big win,” she said.

Plan B and VFF had discussed coordinating events, including activist workshops during a Plan B symposium. Thornley was interviewed by the group, and was a keynote speaker at a public event it held in March. Other speakers at the event included a German man comparing life in New Zealand to East Germany, and an anti-vaccination activist who touts the fact her unvaccinated children caught measles during the 2019 outbreak in Auckland.

Plan B’s growing stature in fringe online groups has brought it to the attention of misinformation and disinformation researchers, including at the University of Auckland, where Thornley and two other Plan B members work.

Kate Hannah leads The Disinformation Project as part of Te Pūnaha Matatini, which investigates the ‘Infodemic’ – the rise in misinformation and disinformation that has flourished alongside the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The level of relationship between Plan B and those groups in terms of direct connections is hard to ascertain, but there definitely seem to be mutual ideologies and a shared acceptance that it’s useful to share these ideas throughout broader public spaces,” Hannah says.

Much of this was happening online, particularly on Facebook and other algorithm driven platforms that push users towards content within linked groups.

Plan B has been asked to disavow VFF. In an open-letter signed by dozens of academics and medical experts, the signatories called on Plan B to reject conspiracy theories and stop associating with VFF. Thornley responded with a statement saying the group rejected conspiracy theories, but would not commit to distancing the group from VFF.

Among the signatories was Thornley's colleague Professor Des Gorman, a critic of the Government’s response who at the time said he was concerned about Plan B’s communications: “We should never stifle academic debate, but when [academics] are promoting misinformation that may create public harm, we have to stand up and say ‘sorry you have crossed a line’.”

As Plan B’s links to such groups have hardened, comments on its Facebook page have become more extreme. Most comments on the page are unmoderated, Thornley says, “because we believe in free speech”.

“Opinions expressed on the Facebook page are real – and sometimes disconcerting – but they don’t go away by suppressing them. Indeed, we have watched them intensify in response to the censorious instincts of the establishment that has shut down so much debate.”

Stuff has heard from people saying comments of theirs that are pro-vaccination or critical of Plan B have been removed Thornley says such comments are deleted if they abuse people in the group or are from “pro-covid-strategy people not intending to be fair-minded”.

What makes Plan B distinct among such groups is that it comprises academics, which bolsters its standing in online communities, Hannah says.

“I think that the associations that have been allowed to happen between Plan B – with academics as part of the team – and groups which are trying to undermine New Zealand's highly successful COVID-19 response has given [those groups] a sense of intellectual and epistemic authority, which is really, really disappointing.”

It was a dreary Wednesday in Wellington, but the atmosphere was festival-like at the High Court.

Anti-vaccine activists adorned the footpath outside, waving branded signs from Voices for Freedom; Conspiracy theorist Billy Te Kahika, broadcasting live from inside the court, was removed by security.

The courtroom quickly filled out, as people queued to get inside. Some in the public gallery applauded when lawyer Sue Grey made her argument against the roll-out of the vaccines.

Simon Thornley, the only public health expert serving as a witness for Grey’s case, was there, too.

The vaccine has become the motivating issue for Thornley and Plan B. Despite not being an expert on vaccines – which Thornley himself has admitted – he contributed a written affidavit to Grey’s legal bid to stop the roll-out.

The shift towards scepticism about the vaccine has raised particular concern among Thornley’s colleagues in public health, and academics more broadly, some of whom see it as a step too far.

“He seems to be rejecting this huge weight of scientific evidence in favour of vaccines,” Professor Michael Baker says.

“There are numerous papers in high quality journals for all the leading vaccines that have been trialled, there’s consistently high effectiveness against symptomatic illness, particularly severe illness and death. Then there’s observational data coming from countries that have rolled out vaccines showing a marked decline in the rates of serious illness and death from Covid-19.

“I find it very concerning that he can reject all of that evidence because it doesn’t fit with his strongly held views.”

Thornley's rhetoric is likely to embolden anti-vaccination groups. Their arguments rarely gain traction in the public health community, where vaccines are seen as a major tool for improving global health.

The Pfizer vaccine used in New Zealand has gone through standard clinical trial processes, and Covid-19 vaccines in general have demonstrated effectiveness in highly vaccinated populations including Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Tacit support for anti-vaccination groups by a public health expert was invaluable to their cause, says Dr Alison Campbell, an honorary fellow at the University of Waikato who blogs about science and misinformation.

“Epidemiologists are expected to be authorities in areas related to disease spread and measuring impacts of things on public health, so it’s understandable that people would see it as having that legitimacy and probably as sound as most public health experts,” she says.

”If you get support from university academics, particularly science-based academics, that really lends an air of legitimacy to those groups.”

Asked to defend his stance on vaccines, Thornley told Stuff he is not philosophically opposed to vaccines in general and believes the Covid-19 vaccine could play a role for the frail elderly. But he believes the principles of “informed consent” are not being respected.

“I have had chills going down my spine when I hear on the radio the message ‘safe and effective, safe and effective’,” he says.

In support of his claim, Thornley cited a spike in reports to the Adverse Events and Reporting System (AERS) in the US, a self-reporting system anyone can submit to which requires no causal connection between the vaccine and the event.

Grey, one of the lawyers arguing the case, has likened mandatory vaccination to rape on her Facebook page, and frequently promotes unverified and unsourced rumours associating deaths with the vaccine.

Among her recent posts are links to content from VFF, and a post about vaccines by her expert witness: Simon Thornley of Plan B.

Debate is a fundamental part of the scientific method, but it has been complicated during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unlike long-running issues such as climate change, where an overwhelming consensus has emerged over time, the debate over Covid-19 has been truncated due to the urgency of the pandemic.

Issues that would typically be litigated in peer-reviewed journals are taking place online, or in the news media. Expert advice shifts as the evidence base grows, making consistent messaging, a vital tool in public health, difficult.

All of this is happening amid an Infodemic, in which misinformation and disinformation travels quickly online, fuelled by algorithms that push people towards content that affirms their existing beliefs.

To some of his colleagues, Thornley has been sucked into the Infodemic, in ways that are frustrating and unscientific.

“Some debate is healthy, but at a certain point it does need to be connected to evidence that is looked at systematically, and I think that as a scientist you have an obligation to do that,” Baker says.

“What’s most concerned me about Simon is that he doesn’t appear to have changed his viewpoint at any stage about the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic or how to respond.”

Baker has two specific areas of frustration with Thornley – his unchanging view on the deadliness of the virus, and his downplaying of the need for a vaccine.

“For people who don’t believe in science, all bets are off what they might say, because it’s not about evidence,” Baker says.

“Simon, his whole professional career is about evidence – collecting evidence, assembling it to create a picture of what problems are and how to solve them. For him to do those two things, I think, is highly irresponsible.

“I don’t understand why a scientist would do that ... It’s almost beyond public health ethical standards to do that.”

Thornley’s colleague at the University of Auckland, Professor Rod Jackson, emphasises how little support there is for Thornley’s position.

“The experienced epidemiologists and public health experts right around the world, almost to a person, supported the New Zealand and Australia approach,” he says.

“Of the two to three hundred health professionals in New Zealand, who, I would say, have got the training and expertise to comment on Covid, Simon stands alone.

“He's an extreme outlier.”

Thornley argues he is defending an important component of the scientific process, something he believes many in his profession have lost sight of during Covid-19.

During this process, he has been attacked online, his job threatened; he has been accused of wanting to kill the elderly, and being a right-wing extremist.

“I think Covid has become a sort of moralistic issue that has almost transcended the scientific debate, and kind of become an issue where any questioning of the narrative becomes synonymous with being an evil person," he says.

“I don’t think that is healthy. I think that science, good science, happens when there’s a diversity of views, and even if those views are uncomfortable or unwelcome it’s possible to debate and discuss these issues.”

During his debate with Baker last year, Baker had asked how he and Thornley could look at the same data and come to different conclusions.

Thornley, speaking months later, has a thoughtful response.

“If you think about science from a Bayesian point of view, there’s the idea you have prior ideas or prior beliefs, and then you have data that’s thrown in front of you and so you update your prior beliefs based on that data,” he says.

“If your prior beliefs are very different, then it’s likely when you look at this new data your conclusions are going to be very different from somebody else who has formed a different view.”

Were his views so different from his colleagues because he has different values, as some of his peers believe?

He didn’t think so.

“My concern was for the country, for my children who are going to live in this country,” he says.

“To me, this not about values. My entire career has been about improving health.”