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Dear Erika,
This is our acknowledgment of your OIA request.
Warm regards,
Office of Hon Judith Collins KC

-----Original Message-----
From: Erika Whittome <[FOI #32289 email]>
Sent: Thursday, 11 September 2025 12:01 pm
To: Judith Collins (MIN) <[email address]>
Subject: Official Information request - Attorney General Consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 for vaccination

Dear Judith Collins,
There is advice from 23 Nov 2021 on the justified limitations on the Bill of Rights 1990 to require covid-19 vaccination in this document https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www....

This advice is published on the Ministry of Justice's website here https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www....

Paragraph 24 of the AG advice says:
'Vaccination has been shown to substantially reduce transmission of COVID-19 as well as severity of symptoms."

Would you kindly provide the evidence or basis for this statement that vaccination has been shown to substantially reduce transmission of covid-19?

I have been unable to locate any evidence of a reduction in transmission from covid-19 vaccination. The Pfizer trials published in a NEMJ study only evaluated whether a person caught the disease or not. There was no transmission studies nor severity of symptoms evaluated in this study:
"Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine | New England Journal of Medicine" https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www....
Reducing transmission was not an outcome measured in the trials.

In February 2021 the statement from the Ministry of Health was “…we don’t yet know if it will stop you from catching and passing on the virus”
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://web....

In June 2021, the statement from Medsafe was ' At this stage, we do not know if vaccination prevents or reduces transmission of COVID-19: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://web....

Please supply the information/evidence relied on in this 23 Nov 2021 AG advice to say 'Vaccination has been shown to substantially reduce transmission of COVID-19 as well as severity of symptoms."

Yours faithfully,

Erika Whittome

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