Guns and Blood

May 2, 2026

By NZB3

I identify as having an advanced prefrontal cortex insofar as I think my pattern recognition skills are quite good. It also means that I ‘live’ in that cognitive space of looking at big picture, global, interpretations of the world. Naturally enough I tend to think this is also the best way to live and everyone else should be doing it too and what is wrong with the rest of you for missing all these damn connections? This is a little example of one of these.

The week started with the New Zealand Blood Service making an announcement and the weekend marked the start of duck hunting season. I see a connection, believe it or not. First let me lay out a the logic common to both and then I’ll get into more detail.

The main model of risk and safety we use is to have tiers of protection. We have a primary layer to prevent something bad happening but if it does then we go to a secondary, tertiary, etc. backup plan to “save” us from the worst. This formal approach to safety culture probably dates back to World War 2 but became mainstreamed by the Politically Correct 1990s and the expansion of things like the Accident Compensation Corporation, Worksafe, etc. as government people increasingly took over the roles of community people. Look no further to understand why ANZAC and Christmas parades etc. cannot be run because the traffic control and insurance and road cone budget is prohibitive.

“She’ll be right” is the old risk management plan being replaced here. However, the new model can be adopted by informal people too. Consider what we do to not die in a house fire. Tier 1 is a smoke alarm and self-rescue but if it fails we go to Tier 2 which is someone else raising the alarm and the fire department stopping the fire and saving you. What about health? Tier 1 is good nutrition but if you fail at that tier 2 is a doctor or tier 3 to take yourself to Emergency or tier 4 Emergency takes you to Emergency. If you run out of tiers then we move on to the grave and that’s called tear 1.

You get the logic of levels of safety so now let’s go to the ducks. Firearms advice, according to Alistair Boyce on the Platform yesterday, is to refrain from loading until you’re on site. Sure, you will still behave safely and assume all guns are loaded guns and never point a gun at another man and you’ll have the safety on. But, also, don’t even load it until it’s time. This is not to say that you’re bad at those second, third, forth etc. tiers of protection or that they are not enough. Rather, it’s an extra, primary, layer of protection when it comes to gun safety. You can take the risk of accidentally firing a gun down to nil by ensuring it isn’t loaded until go time. Very sound.

Now for the blood. The NZ Blood service has removed its primary tier of protection, they have announced…

Why would we do this thing and take away a tier of risk prevention? If prostitutes, Mad Cow people, HIV, monkeypox etc. infected folk don’t get their foot in the donations door that’s quite a bit like not having a loaded gun. Not to suggest that tier 2 of questioning the donor about their life or tier 3 of screening all blood for diseases (they do) are not good and reliable tiers that should catch the danger. We don’t want our children to be accidentally infected with some prostitute’s terminal disease despite the weird assurances of New Zealand Blood Service Chief Medical Officer Sarah Morley that..”We know that apart from people who are in very, very early stages of infection, our testing will always pick that up.” Ref. Newstalk ZB (2026.04.28-08.00)

Moreley has joined us from England and continued to say that only about 13% of gay, bisexual, and “other” donate blood but she expects to hit a new “target” of 40%. I wonder if they could hit an even higher target by deploying blood donation tents at the Big Gay Out or Queenstown Winter Pride Festival? Since tier 1 is being abandoned completely and more risky blood donors is the target why wouldn’t you?

Sarah Morley joined New Zealand Blood as Chief Medical Officer in 2019 “from her role as Associate Medical Director at NHS Blood and Transplant in England.” According to her bio on the BCG website. England, the home of the Infected Blood Scandal where tens of thousands of people were infected with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV as a result of receiving infected blood.  Large groups of paid donors were used, as many as 60,000 per batch, and included prisoners and drug addicts. It only required one infected donor to contaminate an entire batch, which would then infect all recipients. Ref. Wiki

This is not to suggest that Morley or her alternate, Fijian Dhana Grounder, were involved in that scandal. Rather, it’s that we are not learning from those mistakes of having tier 1 of protection. The people to blame for the scandals in the past are long gone by the time that justice catches up with them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sarah had vanished back home by the time any chickens come home to roost in New Zealand. Grounder looks like he could retire back to Fiji again or die of natural causes by the time any fingers get pointed.

NZ Blood spokesman Gavin Cho (another outsider at our helm) was asked NZ Herald’s Ryan Bridge if the risks had changed. Bridge was trying to find out if the policy change reflected a medical advancement or it it were a political pivot, I think. Cho had to be asked twice but deflected twice. The main motive he said wasn’t to get more donations. Rather, it was to keep up with international developments and to be “inclusive.” In other words, nothing to do with supply or safety! He revealed that the new tier 1 would be the questionnaire rather than the exclusion of the old at-risk category. Bridge did not ask very penetrating questions for some reason. Maybe because the Blood Service are an advertising client of Newstalk ZB where Bridge runs the morning show?

And that’s it. That’s the pattern I recognised. A very sensible rule we have had for years about the first tier of preventing harm has gone down the drain, or will do on May 4th. It’s a rule that’s good enough for private individuals to insist upon voluntarily with firearms but which the government with all our lives in its hands has given up for the sake of INCLUSIVITY.

There is an addendum. While all of this was going on the AIDs Foundation, aka Burnett Foundation, has also been touring the media with a hot take on these sexually transmitted diseases. They’re dovetailing with the Blood Service change and created this nifty graphic on their Facebook page. [left]

“A new campaign called “The 80s Calling” was launched today by Associate Health Minister Matt Doocey, with the aim of eliminating discrimination towards people living with HIV….“We have also funded the Burnett Foundation to launch a new wraparound counselling service, giving more people and their families access to mental health support, including those who may have just been diagnosed with HIV and their families.”” – The 80s called, they want their views back, Hon Matt Doocey, Beehive.co.nz

To explain quite what this meant the Burnett CEO, Liz Gibbs, was interviewed by Heather du Plessis-Allan on her ZB drive show. Ref. 23 Apr 2026 “With modern medication now, people can live long, healthy, happy lives with an HIV diagnosis. But unfortunately, there’s a lot of discrimination and lack of education, frankly, around that.” she said.

In other words, at the same time that protections against yet another infected blood scandal are being removed we are being told that live with HIV is long, healthy, and happy!? That may be true for Liz, Ryan, and their circle of infected friends. It wasn’t true for Chills front-man Martin Phillipps who suffered with hepatitis-C for years leading up to his sudden death in 2024. And…call me old fashioned but I don’t feel like inflicting this version of a “long, healthy, happy” life of “modern medication” on my children just so that Liz Gibbs’ mates don’t feel excluded.

Gibbs, yet another foreigner (English,) was asked about the HIV epidemic in Fiji. “We’re very, very worried about that. 9,000 people have now got HIV in Fiji that we know of. The really scary thing is they’re largely 15 to 25-year-olds, and it’s a significant increase across the Pacific.” Kind of makes you want to take a second look at Dhana Grounder seeing as he’s the Fijian working alongside Morley and Cho to inject their wisdom into our collective blood streams. Heather, like Ryan, didn’t do anything resembling a journalistic interrogation into what she was being told. It may be that this wasn’t so much journalism but advertising paid for by Matt Doocey’s people. It’s pretty hard to tell advertising from news these days and that is by intent.

So there you have it. A scandal waiting to happen and nobody talking about it. Worth blogging about since I think this bit of history needs to be marked since it will, one day, I’m sure, bite us hard.

This is a coordinated move on us between the government, NZ Blood Service, Burnett, and promoted by NZME (New Zealand Media and Entertainment.)

Anyone who pushes back can be charged with xenophobia for pointing out that all of these people in charge of our blood are outsiders. And, anyone who pushes back could be accused of promoting discrimination and stigma towards diseased people too. This, strange to say, is not a Politically Correct pattern to recognise. To state something so obvious, as I have attempted to do above, would take backbone that our media lacks. Even the one’s not paid to sell this dangerous nonsense.

Like    Comment     Share