Ministry of Health versus Irene (Goliath versus David), 12-15 February, 2024

"Irene knew from prior experience that she would be a target. Pfizer vaccines were safe and Pfizer vaccines were effective, and this was to be the dogma that all practitioners were to follow..."

On 15^th November, 2021, all midwives in New Zealand were told they could only practise their profession if they agreed to take the mandated medical intervention. Hundreds of midwives around the country were not prepared to accept this. What happened to them? What happened to the women they had been treating? A trial of one of the affected midwives, Irene Chain Kalinowski, just completed at the North Shore District Court, gives some insights into the chaos which these mandates have caused. It also shows the kind of courage that will be needed from Kiwis to ensure that something like this can never happen again.

Before that date, Irene Chain had tried to contact the Ministry of Health by email concerning what she saw arising from their coming policy of forcing untested mRNA medical interventions on midwives and on women and children. She told them – along with the Minister and the Council of Midwifery – that she had concerns at midwives being forced to breach their code of ethics and that this could affect the safety of women and their babies that would result when many midwives were forced to resign. Her concerns went unanswered, and she wrote a letter of resignation on 5^th December, 2021.

From then on, she saw herself as a retired person. Just before November 15^th, she had consultations with two women and gave them forms for laboratory tests and ultrasound that they could use later in their pregnancy if needed. This is something that she normally would not have needed to do, but in the time of covid she anticipated that it could be very difficult to get the care needed for these women. She had no further contact with these women except a phone conversation with one where she did not give any advice related to her former profession but did suggest a homeopathic remedy for the woman’s skin.

Then, in January 2022, Irene was shocked to hear that the Midwifery Council had suspended her for “practicing not vaccinated in a clinical setting, posing harm to the public.” Irene had done no such thing and, from March 2022, sent many letters to the Ministry of Health and the Midwifery Council, repeatedly telling them she had resigned. In February, 2023, she filed a claim against Midwifery Council In the Wellington High Court of New Zealand.

Was it this action that led to the Ministry of Health filing a criminal claim against her in March 2023? She was informed that the Ministry of Health had opened an enquiry into her for practicing her profession illegally. She provided affidavits to let them know that this was untrue and applied to strike out the claim under the Evidence Act 2006, but this was ignored. The investigation continued and finally culminated, after Irene had sat in front of four different judges at four hearings in this trial of 12^th to 15^th February.

Many of Irene’s friends came to support her so that on the first day of the trial, a good part of the gallery was occupied. Others were standing out on the road with pictures of Kiwis who had died or been injured by the jab.

Entering the courtroom on that Monday morning, I was greeted with the sight of five policemen. Five police for this one little woman? Luckily, it turned out that hearings of some other cases needed to take place first, and the men in blue were all gone within the hour. Yet to me their presence seemed prophetic of the odds that were stacked against Irene. She was a plucky little David standing up against the mighty Goliath of the Ministry of Health, Te Whatu Ora, who were out to attack her with all the forces at their disposal. Goliath was intent on destroying his opponent and was going to grind David into the dust and decapitate him if he possibly could.

There were five charges against Irene, all relating to forms that had appeared subsequent to her resignation/dismissal. These forms were cited as evidence that she had broken the law by practising midwifery without a licence. Irene had rebutted them all in earlier correspondence, explaining the circumstances behind each and stating that she had done nothing since November 15 when she was legally a registered midwife, but all her explanations had been ignored. For this reason, Irene chose at the outset to contest the legitimacy of the court and made a powerful statement, challenging the jurisdiction of the court and demanding fair process and the principles of natural justice that, till now, had been denied to her.

I am Irene. ... I am of living flesh and blood, one of God’s people [Exodus 6:7]. ... I stand in honor and in truth, ... I am tangata whenua, non-resident settlor, domiciled in Te Moana Nui A Kiwa, the Kingdom of heaven and earth. ... I cannot be complicit in fraud...

The court was cleared, and Irene, together with the amicus curiae appointed by the court to assist her and her advisor Tracy, negotiated with the judge and prosecution whether the trial needed to be abandoned or if a way could be found that it continue. The judge seemed to be sympathetic, and the decision was made that the trial would go on so long as the prosecution was guided by the Evidence Act of 2006, so that all evidence was first-hand and not hearsay, and that the trial followed proper process.

Irene, though small in stature – she calls herself “a little coal-miner’s daughter” – is a giant in the medical field. She has birthed over 2,000 babies under all sorts of circumstances in many countries. She has lectured in China and the Middle East, written textbooks and advised midwifery organizations around the world. She emphasises a holistic approach and incorporates homeopathy into her care. She practices an “anticipatory” form of medical practice which means that much fewer medical interventions such as caesareans need to be carried out.

Perhaps it is these differences from the conventional approach that have made her into a target to the powers that be since 2015 when she went through a great deal of persecution and bullying from the Midwifery Council. This treatment that she’d already received, which had affected her health, was the main reason that Irene resigned so early on after hearing about the mandates. She knew from prior experience that she would be a target. Pfizer vaccines were safe and Pfizer vaccines were effective, and this was to be the dogma that all practitioners were to follow, Hypocritic Oath, informed consent, New Zealand Bill of Rights and the needs of individual women be damned!

Resigning should have taken Irene out of the line of fire, but the clown world of the bureaucrats who represented her profession was not about to let go of her so easily.

When David fought Goliath, he took five smooth stones. Irene faced five changes – five forms that appeared after her resignation. This was all the Ministry had to go on apart from a general attempt to discredit her and attack her medical competence. It should have been over within a day, but for just short of three days we listened to the Ministry’s eight witnesses. In my opinion, not a single one of these could say anything factual against her but managed to say a great deal about themselves and the anti-human system they work for.  

First to testify was the former head of the Midwifery Council of New Zealand, Susan Calvert, who spoke over a link from Wellington. My right as a journalist to take notes had been prevented (the prosecution googled Counterspin Media and brought up Wikipedia to say that we were “far-right anti-vaxxers”), and I actually remember little of what was said. Instead, I have retained a strong impression of how this person’s personality affected me. Until her resignation in September, 2022, she had helped the Ministry of Health them to develop and enforce their policies, and I had the feeling all the time that she was talking that she – and not Irene – should be the one who was on trial. The former CEO did make a staggering admission – that Irene’s suspension (i.e. “practicing not vaccinated in a clinical setting, posing harm to the public,”) was based on a lie!

Another witness was a chemist who swore that Irene had come to his pharmacy on 3^rd June, 2022, and had signed forms requesting a drug used by midwives, oxytocin, in front of him. Unfortunately for him, Irene had been in hospital that day, making his account impossible. Was it perjury or a simple mistake? The prosecution later tried to claim that there had been two small windows of time in the morning when she could have gone to his shop before checking in at the hospital and then picked the drugs up after an operation involving a general anaesthetic.

The hardest part of the trial for many of us was the testimony of the witness selected by the Ministry to challenge Irene’s competency. The prosecutor led her at great length through many medical procedures, asking what she would do in various situations. These had been chosen as examples to challenge what Irene had done in filling out forms that were given to the two patients and presented at a later date. Numerous times, this witness said that she would have done things differently or that when Irene filled out requests for tests in November she could not have seen so far ahead that they would later be needed. The prosecution, on that basis, claimed that this was evidence that Irene must have continued to be involved in the medical care of her former patients.

Irene addressed this directly by asking the witness if she practised anticipatory medicine. The witness had never heard the term. Irene showed that with her methods, in which things such as family history, diet and previous illnesses were taken into account and natural healing methods used, much could be deduced, forecasts for the future could be made and health problems reduced before the arose. Irene gave the reason for why every one of the forms had been pre-emptively requested. We witnessed a clash of two radically different forms of medicine – one that took full account of the needs of the woman and another that made the same claims but simply did not have any comparable breadth of scope and empathetic understanding. Three times Irene had reason to call into question the witness’s competency.

This witness also claimed that in the world of midwifery little changed during the period of the lockdowns, with midwives continuing to visit women (or “pregnant persons” as she preferred to call them) just the same as before lockdowns happened. A midwife sitting next to me leaned over to me at this point and whispered, “That is a lie!” Perhaps for the witness, who was fundamentally an academic, little may have changed except for more use being made of Zoom meetings, but in the real world, enormous problems were unleashed because of the restrictions and the sudden (preventable) shortage of midwives. Difficulties were extreme for women who did not want to be jabbed, and we heard of women being examined in their cars, women not being able to get appointments at all and women forced to give birth with no medical assistance. At last, this witness left the stand but remained close to Irene doing some rather aggressive knitting until a guard was reminded by one of the spectators that dangerous weapons were not supposed to be allowed into the courtroom!

A final witness, whom I shall call Jane Birdseed, had been present throughout the trial, consulting with the prosecution and being part of the process, which included communicating with witnesses before they took the stand, something permissible for them but not for us. (Irene’s only witness – others had been afraid to testify because of the consequences that could happen to them if they spoke up against the Midwifery Council – was not allowed to give testimony because she had been present earlier in the trial.) Jane Birdseed was the last witness to take the stand and went through all of the forms and much more at great length, claiming again that Irene must have been practising midwifery illegally. No proof was ever mentioned. It was all statements beginning, “We believe...” or “It seems as if...”

At this point in the trial, the amicus – the court-appointed official who was available to assist Irene – showed for the first time what he was made of. He took Irene through every one of the forms and got exact answers as to the circumstances behind each – why they may have still had her name on them (because the computer-generated system was still registering her as the lead maternity carer) and why each one had been filled out in November when Irene had been anticipating what could be needed in a time of lockdowns when Irene knew that services for pregnant women would be hard to access. This brought the clarity that had been so lacking in almost three days of testimony from the prosecution witnesses.

Although it had been scheduled to last for three days, the trial then went into a fourth. I would call this a last desperate attempt by Goliath to destroy his opponent. Everything had to be gone through again, with the prosecutor putting it directly to Irene that she had lied to the court and had continued to practise midwifery illegally. The prosecutor was a woman, fairly young; I couldn’t help wondering if she would ever have children herself and, if so, would she remember the midwife she had so relentlessly attacked in the setting of the North Shore courtroom? Lawyers have a job to do, and that involves trying to get a defendant to admit to doing something they say they did not do, but the adversarial style being shown on this final day seemed to be extremely heavy-handed. Irene’s amicus did not intervene, and perhaps this was a good thing, for we did see that Irene was able to rebut, one-by-one, every one of the charges levelled against her, however it must have been a great test for Irene. All we in the gallery could do was to inwardly send out our support to her or attempt to signal to her to take her time and remember to breathe!

At the very end, the prosecutor made the claim that even if Irene had filled the forms out in advance on November 15^th, she had a duty to get them all back and see they were not misused. Irene replied that she could only have done this by going to the women themselves and that, as she was no longer their lead maternity carer, this would have been a breach of their privacy and her orders to keep away from them. As well as being something impossible for Irene (or the many other midwives throughout the country who had also been forced to resign while in the middle of caring for their clients) to have carried out, is it right to add a new charge at the end of a criminal case to be used as backup if the five original charges did not stick? Again, the amicus showed good presence of mind by insisting that the judge recognized the impossibility of what the prosecutor was requiring and would not be guided by it in making her judgement.

As expected, the judge reserved her decision. A date for when this will be given will be announced on March 1^st.

So now it is all over. Irene prepared to drive to the Bay of Islands, and we all said a prayer that she would be all right after the gruelling treatment she had just gone through. The Counterspin team did a last interview. The mood was upbeat – we were certain we had seen the truth make its way through the darkness of lies and suspicion that the Midwifery Council and the Ministry of Health had tried to cast over an individual who must be one of New Zealand’s most caring, experienced and knowledgeable health professionals.

At the interview, Irene reached out to all other midwives in similar situations, encouraging them not to let themselves be affected by the attacks levelled at them:

"Hold on strong. I know what you are going through. I think there is a fear of standing up because you see how these people behave without a conscience, and they attack you and attack you and attack you until there's nothing left inside. This is going to change. ... You have to stand up in truth!"

All New Zealand has been attacked. The “invisible enemy” that Donald Trump frequently alluded to in 2020 was not covid – it was the planners of the pandemic, the wielders of a military bio-weapon, who were attacking all humanity and have committed genocide and mass murder. A warrior for truth, a warrior for peace, had been on trial when the guilty ones, pocketing at the same time their exorbitant salaries, had been speaking against her.

There is much more behind this trial that I have not attempted to write about. So much about our justice system is fraudulent so that innocent people like Irene can be set up in this way and often found guilty of crimes they have not committed.

The Ministry of Health, in collusion with the WHO and other international agencies, has committed crimes against the people of New Zealand, and these crimes are slowly coming to light. Bodies such as the NZ Medical Council and the Council of Midwives have gone along with them and intimidated their own members, so that only a few doctors, midwives and other health professionals have dared to voice any opposition to them. Irene is just one actor in the great drama that is now approaching its final scenes. She is one who has been doing what she can to shine light into the places of darkness.

May Irene’s last words to the party from the Midwifery Council prove to be prophetic. She said to them as they were leaving the court, “See you at the military tribunals!”

Military tribunals tend to be short, sharp and secret, but I would very much welcome the opportunity of being able to write a report on that!

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