I have seen about 20 people lining the SH4 highway, with placards claiming that "the vaccine kills" etc.
In New Zealand, the only person to die who had just had the vaccine was a woman who died of myocarditis, a rare heart condition that, very rarely, has been associated with the Pfizer vaccine.
In NSW, Australia, on September 17, a further 1284 cases and 12 more deaths were recorded. The Covid Delta virus is very infectious and it kills.
In most, if not all, cases overseas it is people with an underlying medical condition who die after the vaccine. Considering that the first group to be vaccinated were the elderly, this was to be expected.
No matter what conspiracy theory you want to read online, the most obvious fact still remains: whatever the vaccine does, the Covid virus is much, much, much worse.
I would trust our government, and our health service, before any mad, unlikely stories online of events overseas.
Just get the vaccine folks, please. The many people who have had it that I know of, including me, are just fine.
SARA DICKON (82 years old)
Whanganui
Discovery delights
I spent Māori Language Week examining the origins of a song WaiTai made popular a while ago, E Aha Ra Te Manu (What is this bird?). I discovered that the song's lyrics were modified from an old chant used in a ritual to make a timid young man still hanging out with his boyhood mates more attractive to young women.
This ritual was what I guess today's psychologists would call therapeutic role play. A tohunga sent the lad into the forest to ritually kill one of a flock of little insect-eating birds and then proclaim he was now a bush falcon.
The falcons that fly above our house here at Ohakune are independent, strong, capable and super-confident, and of course young men displaying this behaviour quickly become much more attractive to potential life partners.
Tohunga also used chants to assist those of unsound mind. Turou Whakataha helped a tohunga treat a patient whose head was boiling with anger (upoko-kuhua). He theatrically "ate" his patient's curses, then passed them down into the latrine pit, calming the patient enough to discover the source of their anger.
And the literary goldmine Pinepine Te Kura outlines how a tohunga trained his son from infancy to continue with the treatment of an entire community periodically weakened by "maketu". And also by iodine deficiency.
British colonists accused tohunga of practising makutu, or witchcraft, and fraudsters using karakia kikokiko were prosecuted. But it seems most tohunga competently treated the afflicted with the same therapies now used by Western practitioners. Indeed, tohunga were probably using these therapies thousands of years ago.
I'll never be able to speak Māori, but unravelling the gist of those moteatea and hakirara is a constant source of delight for me.
JOHN ARCHER
Ohakune
